Consuming a Balanced Plate of Information

Doctors, parents, and many others tell us from an early age to eat a balanced diet because our bodies need many different nutrients to function. Similarly, we need a balanced diet of information if we want to engage in healthy and informed discourse. This isn’t another article about the dangers of alternative facts; it’s about the subtler threat of handpicked facts. Eating only kale is just as bad for our health as eating a Big Mac between each meal. Likewise, an opinion based on the incomplete truth can be just as harmful as one based on outright falsities.

[pullquote]An opinion based on the incomplete truth can be just as harmful as one based on falsities.[/pullquote]

Media can mislead us by choosing which facts it highlights or omits. Consider this example: a recent Breitbart headline stated that “Just Seven Percent of Economists Say NAFTA Exit Would Trigger a Recession”. This statistic comes from a Wall Street Journal survey of 60 leading economists from several different sectors, so it’s likely credible. The headline is the type of headline that most people will read without reading the actual article; it gives a statistic in big letters but has no hook to interest someone in reading about that statistic. That setup is likely intentional; Breitbart generally supports Trump, and that headline gives readers a reliable fact that supports the view that Trump’s policies are good. An intelligent person who only reads this headline would be reasonable to think exiting NAFTA is immediately beneficial for the US economy. But opening the article reveals that “eighty-two percent of the economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal believe that withdrawal would result in slow economic growth.” Both the seven percent and the eighty-two percent are factual statistics, and the article presents both. However, someone would have to either read beyond the headline or read a headline about the survey from a news source other than Breitbart if they wanted to know both statistics.

Let’s say hypothetical persons A, B, and C sit down together. Person A read the full article, person B only read the headline, and person C read a fake study on Reddit claiming that 93% of economists say exiting NAFTA is good for the economy. B’s fact-based opinion on NAFTA is probably quite like C’s, which is based on false information. Both of their opinions are so different from A’s that it is unlikely that a conversation the three of them have about NAFTA will be constructive.

Breitbart is far from the only culprit. Consider media coverage of the acquittal of white former St Louis policeman Jason Stockley, who was accused of first-degree murder for fatally shooting Anthony Lamar Smith, a 24-year-old black man. The prosecution’s case rested on the claim that Stockley killing Smith was premeditated and not justified in self-defense. They argued that Smith was unarmed when Stockley shot him, and that the gun found in Smith’s car was planted by Stockley. They cited a video recording of Stockley saying he was “going to kill this m**********r, don’t you know it” during the car chase immediately preceding the shooting to indicate that Stockley’s actions were premeditated.

The Washington Post and New York Times’s main articles covering the case presented these facts: the video of Stockley was reliable, the gun found in Smith’s car had only Stockley’s DNA on it, and the dashcam footage immediately after the shooting shows Stockley removing Smith’s body from his car, returning to his police cruiser to retrieve some unidentifiable object from a duffel bag, and going back into Smith’s car. A reasonable person could conclude from this set of facts that anyone who is not some combination of uninformed, prejudiced, or irrational would see Stockley’s acquittal as evidence of a bigoted justice system that cynically protects racist police officers.

But these two newspapers both left out one fact in their stories that was prominent in Fox News’s coverage: forensic experts testified that the absence of anyone else’s detectable DNA on an object doesn’t mean someone else didn’t touch it. This testimony on its own creates reasonable doubt that Smith planted the gun; no court can convict anyone of first-degree murder if there is reasonable doubt. This one fact does not mean Stockley is innocent or that the larger justice system is not flawed; it merely reveals that this ruling is not necessarily a good example of those flaws. The omission of one small fact reverses the opinion that many reasonable people would have about the ruling.

[pullquote]It’s not always fun to read news that expresses opinions that we fundamentally disagree with, but it’s crucial to do so if we want to have informed conversations.[/pullquote]

Eating a balanced diet isn’t always convenient or tasty; it’s easy to be lazy and eat ramen twice a day. Social media is designed to make things easy; it curates a newsfeed for us that can quickly become quite one-sided if we don’t intentionally add varied news sources. It’s not always fun to read news that expresses opinions that we fundamentally disagree with, but it’s crucial to do so if we want to have informed conversations.

Jon Niewijk ‘21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at jniewijk@wustl.edu.