Article and photos by Marcus Siu
America is in a crisis of trust and truth. Bad information has become as prevalent, persuasive, and persistent as good information, creating a chain reaction of harm. Recent examples include, vaccines, elections, and fake news. It makes any health crisis more deadly. It slows down response time on climate change. It undermines democracy. What can we do?
The Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder was created to address this issue.
“It’s one of the most important issues of our time and it’s “information disorder”. How do we know that the information that we’re getting the information that we’re acting on… Is it real? Who wrote it? Is it based in fact? It’s a challenge that all of us face everyday“, Hugh Thompson asks his audience.
Award-winning journalist, Katie Couric, best known as the longtime cohost of NBC’s Today show for fifteen years and as the first solo female anchor of a major network (CBS) evening news program. Also on hand were the other two co-chairs from the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder, Cybersecurity expert, Chris Krebs and Civil Rights Activist, Rashad Robinson. They took the stage at the Hugh Thompson Show at the 2022 RSA Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
COURIC’S CO-CHAIRS
Chris Kreps, was the founding director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that was established on November 2018 that former President Trump signed into law.
However, on November 12, 2020, CISA issued a press release asserting, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” On the same day, Director Krebs indicated that he expected to be dismissed from his post by the Trump administration.
Five days later, Krebs was subsequently fired by President Trump via tweet for his comments regarding the security of the election. He was fired because he didn’t help support Trump’s “Big Lie”.
“I walked into the house and somebody texts me and says hey you need to check out Twitter” Krebs recalled, “You just got fired and lo and behold I pull up Twitter at 7:07 PM November 17th 2020…and I’m sitting there in the kitchen…turn to my wife again: “I just got fired by a tweet”.”
Several months later, the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder approached him to join their team in April 2021.
Rashad Robinson, President of Color of Change, a leading racial justice organization with more than seven million members also joined Krebs. His organization was founded in the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Who can ever forget the images of black people on their roofs begging for the government to do something and left to die?
When asked why he was interested in joining the Commission, he said, “I jumped at the chance and up and away to make sure that the work that we could do could be part of a greater whole and something that could hopefully be useful at sort of advancing a way forward.”
“Every single day we are working to build power for black Americans”, Robinson remarked. “It’s a fight that black Americans have had to have in this country since being born here the truth about our very humanity”.
Along with this trio of co-chairs, the Commission was composed of a diverse group from across the political spectrum, representing academia, government, philanthropy, and civil society. Over the course of six months, commissioners held internal discussions and heard from experts, community leaders, academics, researchers, tech industry representatives, and lawmakers to understand and explore the multidimensional attributes of information disorder.
WHAT IS INFORMATION DISORDER?
“As we were doing the the initial research, one of the kind of foundational documents is a report by professor Claire Wardle from 2016-17 and she defines information disorder as a framework”, Krebs explains.
“Information disorder at its core is three problems: disinformation, which is false information that is spread for malicious purposes; misinformation which is false information spread for inadvertantly without bad intention and malinformation which is real information spread for harm”.
“Then within all of that there are a set of factors that are driving this seeming implosion. It’s like the increase of national news and the TV and the ability to share low quality information. The erosion of local media, the erosion of trust in science and evidence and expertise, computational amplification…”
THE CHANGING MEDIA LANDSCAPE ACCORDING TO KATIE COURIC
“I hate when people say they grew up watching me”…”you know how old that makes me feel?”, Couric joked after Thompson’s awkward date-stamp introduction.
Thompson showed an amusing video clip from the Today show archives when Couric and cohost Bryant Gumbel attempted to explain to their TV viewers to what the internet was and what the “@” meant in an e-mail address. Gumbel incorrectly thought the “@” stood for “about”.
“When I got into the business back in 1979, it was a much more limited landscape; there were three major networks, people would watch Walter Cronkite back in the day, but my generation it was Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, and Tom Brokaw”, Couric reminisced.
“There were major newspapers, there were many local newspapers. 2200 local newspapers have folded since 2005…there was a very limited pool of information…”
“I think the iPhone didn’t come out till I believe 2007 or 2008, so when you think about that and that I think is when everything really exploded because suddenly you had everything you could possibly want in the palm of your hand”.
FACT CHECK
“When I was doing interviews at the Today show or even CBS, they would be very deeply researched. Often times if I was doing an interview on the Today show, I would over prepare by calling someone from the RAND Corporation or calling someone from a Think tank or Brookings to get some background. I was also mindful that when I got some information I would consider…is that person biased or is that somebody who looks at the economy like Paul Krugman? Or is it somebody who looks at it from a different perspective and kind of weighing all of that. It was much much easier I think to find credible sources and to research because there wasn’t this plethora, this velocity of information.” Couric continued.
“I sort of had the feeling those were the good old days and they really weren’t. They were in some ways because there was not so much disinformation, malinformation…but their voices that were controlling the media were white men and so there was no representation of marginalized communities. Women were just integrating broadcast news”.
“I think that people need to be critical consumers. They need to consider the source. They need to be as discriminating about the content they’re they’re reading, as they are about…what they would feed their kids….the problem is it puts a lot of onus on the consumer but we need to teach media literacy and schools.”
FAKE NEWS
“I remember seeing a well known actress posted something and it looked like the American Medical Association. It was some bogus claim and or some claim… and I was like… is that right? Who was saying?, Couric questioned. “I googled the organization and it was this anti abortion…super extremely conservative organization that wasn’t even a medical organization.”
“But when you think about deep fakes you know you can make Nancy Pelosi look drunk when she wasn’t or have somebody something coming out of Barack Obama’s mouth that he never said. It is really really hard for consumers. We need to start educating even at at in elementary schools about being of an uneducated consumer and understanding the source for this material is not accurate.”
A RIGGED ELECTION IN 2024?
“Half of the GOP candidates that are running embraces are perpetuating “The Big Lie” that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected as president of the United States. It’s not hurting them in the polls and so I’m very concerned about what is happening and some of the things that are happening at the state level in terms of legislative changes. They’re actually gonna result in a rigged election in 2024 giving election officials way too much power.”, Couric remarked.
“I guess the some of the positive things are that we have elevated this; Barack Obama gave a lengthy speech at Stanford about this, incited our research and I think he’s shine a light on it.”
CABLE NEWS – TALK RADIO ON TV?
“I think that cable news operations are starting to realize that perhaps they went too far. CNN has gotten rid of the “breaking news” banner because it was never “breaking news”, but they said it was “breaking news”. They are starting to have different points of view represented.
“I think what happened in cable is commentators took over and it became Talk radio on TV… and that’s fine as long as people know this is commentary, but I think people miss having…reporting of the facts and letting them kind of come to a conclusion with careful analysis instead of diatribes”, Couric commented.
“At 5:00 o’clock today, 8:00 o’clock tonight, and 8:00 o’clock eastern, the January 6th hearings are gonna be airing on prime time television on every network except for Fox News because they don’t want their viewers to see it. I mean if that doesn’t show you how screwed up our country is right now, I don’t know what does.”
Apparently Fox News did air the next hearings, but with very low ratings with an average of 727,000 viewers. That compares to the 3.09 million who watched the hearings on MSNBC and the 2.21 million tuned in to CNN. Fox cut away from the hearing at 5 p.m. to show its popular panel program, “The Five,” and fans immediately rewarded them: viewership shot up to 2.76 million people, Nielsen said.
RECOMMENDATIONS?
The Commission’s Final Report is the culmination of that in-depth investigation. Offering a viable framework for action, it makes 15 recommendations for how government, private industry, and civil society can help to increase transparency and understanding, build trust, and reduce harms.
“I think we came out with with a a really solid group of recommendations across increasing trust and increasing transparency and reducing harms”, Krebs explained, “and it’s great to see that some of the recommendations have been picked up… they’re you know we’re not going to fix this problem tomorrow”.
“It was an amazing report and you know one of the things that struck me right away were the folks that were involved in this Commission it was incredibly diverse and eclectic…you had people from every aspect including a Prince. Correctly Prince Harry”.
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