Teachings from a Monck

Adrian Monck, the head of the journalism and publishing program at City University in London, has recently been blogging some wonderful things.  In particular, he's taken a couple of pieces of writing about topics that are seemingly unrelated to journalism and showed how they in fact do apply. Now I propose to take those same items and make them apply specifically to accuracy. It's a fun game.
Monck's most recent post quotes from the "conclusion to the report on the disaster which destroyed the space shuttle Challenger in 1986." There's one line in particular that I love:

NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks
support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens
can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.

Substitute in "the press" for "NASA" and it works just as well. In my upcoming book, I write about the need for the press to be frank and honest about its level of accuracy, and also more honest about correcting and publicizing its errors.
The other post of Monck's that caught my eye had him quoting from a report in The Washington Post about some recent scientific research. From the Post:

...the mind's bias does affect many people, especially
those who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who
are only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time
and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts...
The research also highlights the disturbing reality
that once an idea has been implanted in people's minds, it can be
difficult to dislodge. Denials inherently require repeating the bad
information, which may be one reason they can paradoxically reinforce
it.

This is interesting in terms of corrections. I support the idea that a correction should make clear what the initial error was, but is repeating the error a bad idea? I imagine this research doesn't exactly apply to a correction, but the point is interesting. Overall, this passage and the one below show just how hard it can be for the press to do its job of informing the public. Put aside the challenges of newsgathering and verification and there is still an inherent challenge in overcoming the biases hard wired into people's minds. Our brains play some funny tricks on us. More:

Indeed, repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things that
are repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the
brain's subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are
true.
Many easily remembered things, in fact, such as one's
birthday or a pet's name, are indeed true. But someone trying to
manipulate public opinion can take advantage of this aspect of brain
functioning. In politics and elsewhere, this means that whoever makes
the first assertion about something has a large advantage over everyone
who denies it later.
Furthermore, a new experiment by Kimberlee
Weaver at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and others shows that hearing
the same thing over and over again from one source can have the same
effect as hearing that thing from many different people -- the brain
gets tricked into thinking it has heard a piece of information from
multiple, independent sources, even when it has not. Weaver's study was
published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Fascinating stuff. But here's the key conclusion:

...People are not good at keeping track of
which information came from credible sources and which came from less
trustworthy ones, or even remembering that some information came from
the same untrustworthy source over and over again. Even if a person
recognizes which sources are credible and which are not, repeated
assertions and denials can have the effect of making the information
more accessible in memory and thereby making it feel true, said Schwarz.

September 18, 2007 | Filed Under Colleagues' articles, Random Goodness 

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