Spencer Critchley

Communication

Here’s the Scam That Makes Conservatives Believe the Mainstream Media Is Lying

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[Also published at Huffington Post.] 

Recently a Facebook friend shared this outrage-inducing headline: BREAKING: Massive Illegal Immigrant Welfare Fraud Discovered.

My first reaction was, “Obviously fake news.” The source was something called WorldNewsPolitics.com, a website with no masthead, no physical address, and a name that doesn’t quite make sense.

But I took the trouble to check the story out, and I discovered that in fact it was more insidious than fake news: it’s an extremely misleading report of something that actually happened.

It’s a scam, built on just the barest amount of accuracy needed to survive a quick click-through. The goal is to fool the unwary into believing “This is truth the mainstream media is trying to keep from me.”

Here’s how it works, step by step.

  1. If you go to the “Immigrant Welfare Fraud” story, you’ll find it begins with this:

The Washington Free Beacon is reporting a breaking story that will have every American taxpayer furious. The Social Security Administration conducted a routine audit and discovered it paid $1 billion in benefits to individuals who did not have a Social Security Number (SSN).

Sounds outrageous, right? Why haven’t you heard of this in the mainstream media — are they trying to hide it? If you do a web search, what do you know? You get pages and pages of results — but only on right-wing sites.

Here’s an excerpt from what I found on Google:

Welfare fraud Google results
Google search results

Proof! Only the right-wing media tells you the truth, while the lying MSM covers it up!

Except…

  1. As you can see from the WordNewsPolitics story’s first few words, it’s actually a rewrite of an item from the Washington Free Beacon, a slightly more respectable publication — for example, you can find out who the Beacon’s editors and writers are. If you go to the Beacon’s story, you’ll discover that it’s a little less inflammatory, though still dramatic:

Feds Paid $1 Billion in Social Security Benefits to Individuals Without a SSN

Based on the Beacon’s headline, we don’t know, despite what WorldNewsPolitics asserts, that these individuals were illegal immigrants, and we don’t know they committed welfare fraud. We’re only told that the federal government paid social security benefits to some people who didn’t have social security numbers. And in fact if we read the story, we find that we don’t even know that. All we know is that the numbers weren’t on file.

  1. From the Beacon story, we can click a link to the original source of the information: the Social Security Administration itself, which recently released an audit of its own practices. That audit found that not $1 billion but about $853 million (which the Beacon rounds up to $1 billion) was paid out to people “who do not have a social security number in the Social Security Administration’s payment records.” And it was paid out not all at once but over a period of 12 years, between 2004 and 2016.
  2. Still, $853 million sounds like a lot of money. But how much is it in context?

Well, I did the math, using figures from ssa.gov for the years in question (see below*). Hundreds of billions of dollars in social security benefits are paid out every year. If $853 million of them may have been misdirected — and that is not clear, since all we know is that the SSNs weren’t on file — it would amount to an error rate of less than 1/100 of one percent.

Of course it would be better to have no errors at all. But given how unlikely it is that any massive system will ever have an error rate of zero, 1/100 of one percent doesn’t seem quite so bad.

5. Now let’s ask ourselves how we know about all this. Is it the result of hard-hitting investigative work by the right-wing media?

No, we know because the government audited itself and transparently reported the results. This is what we want to see the government doing — searching for waste and trying to eliminate it.

We’re a long way from “Massive Illegal Immigrant Welfare Fraud,” aren’t we?

6. But wait, there’s more. Misleading stories like this one appear daily, and spread almost instantaneously, with very similar versions showing up all over the right wing media.

That’s no accident. There’s a system in place for making it happen, like sending marching orders to a waiting army.

To see how that works, let’s look in detail at the link to the Washington Free Beacon story that we found in the WorldNewsPolitics story:

http://freebeacon.com/issues/feds-paid-1-billion-social-security-benefits-individuals-without-ssn/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=f181a5137d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_02_21&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-f181a5137d-46179017

In particular, notice the part of the url beginning with this:

?utm_source=Freedom+Mail

This is what’s known as a campaign tag. It and other tags that follow it tell us that the source of this link was an email campaign from “Freedom Mail.” I’m guessing that refers to this conservative email list, identified in 2010 by Ben Smith of Politico:

…a secret (which strikes me as misguided, but harmless) list of center-right foreign policy writers and thinkers called Freedom Mail.

Whether or not this actually is the same Freedom Mail as the one behind the “illegal immigrant welfare fraud” campaign, the mechanism is the same across multiple interest groups and their email lists. Operatives comb the news each day for stories they can exaggerate, distort, and blast out to eager media outlets who are more interested in ideology than truth.

The supposed immigrant crime wave in Sweden? Congressional town hall protesters supposedly being paid?

Products of the same system.

It’s the system that gives right-wing media consumers much of their “news” every day. It explains why their angry social media posts and forum comments tend to contain the same talking points, and why those comments are so badly misinformed.

Illustration showing how false news spreads
Illustration by the author

This is not to say there’s no one on the left pushing stories, many of which are also biased, though all such activity on the left is dwarfed by what’s happening on the right.

But legitimate journalists won’t report anything just because it shows up in an email from an advocacy group. The mainstream media checks facts — that’s what “mainstream” means.

The trouble is there’s a whole industry of right-wing media outlets, ranging from biased to outright fake, who are quite happy to give the fact-checking a pass.

And now you know why right-wingers keep seeing stories in right-wing media that they don’t find in the mainstream media.

It isn’t because the MSM is trying hide the truth.

It’s because those stories are crap.

And the people who believe them? They’re being played for suckers.

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* Using figures from the Social Security Administration’s annual Fast Facts reports:

Total payments, 2004 – 2016: $9,100,155,400,000

Possibly misdirected payments: $853,000,000

Possibly misdirected payments, percentage: .0094%

7 Tips for Telling Real News from Fake

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I’ve been hearing a lot lately from people who feel overwhelmed by all the drastically different news narratives fighting for their attention — especially, of course, the ones about Donald Trump.

Photo of people in a waiting room reading various news sources.
Photo: iStock

Real news? Fake news? How do you tell the difference?

Here’s a seven-point checklist of the most essential things to know.

1. Be skeptical. There’s an old saying in journalism: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Reporters are supposed to look hard at what they think they know, and so should their audience. Reputable news outlets “show their work,” so you can see how they came to their conclusions. Are the sources solid? Does the logic makes sense? (More on this below.)

2. If the story is sensational, be more skeptical. Amazing things are amazing for a reason: they don’t happen very often. There are a lot more amazing stories in the world — because they make money — than there are amazing things that actually happened. This is why serious news sources tend to be less exciting to read than tabloids are. Memorize or bookmark these fact-checking sites:

3. If the story reinforces what you already believe, be more skeptical. We all suffer from confirmation bias, the tendency to accept information that supports our beliefs, and ignore or reject information that doesn’t. If you want accurate information instead of just flattery, you’re going to have to fight your own confirmation bias. And please, don’t fall into the trap of assuming that all news you don’t like is “fake.” (More on this below, too.)

4. Check the sources. The sources of a story are like the foundation of a building: if they’re not solid, the whole thing is likely to collapse. Sources should be objective and as close to the original information as possible. So, for example, a respected, independent scientific research organization is more credible than a partisan think tank, and still more credible than a random person with an opinion.

There should be more than one source, unless the story is an interview or there is something exceptional about what this source has to say. Here’s part of the Reuters guidelines on sources, which are typical of those used by all credible news outlets:

You must source every statement in every story unless it is an established fact or is information clearly in the public domain, such as court documents or in instances when the reporter, photographer or camera operator was on the scene.

Adherence to this standard is the reason credible reporters don’t just assert things, like “Unemployment is down.” Instead, they’ll write “Unemployment has fallen to 4.7 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

Beware of attempts to fool you with sources that look credible, but aren’t. These include organizations that appear to be government agencies, respected research institutions, or major news organizations, but aren’t. Look them up. While even the best sources can make mistakes, there’s usually a good reason for a good reputation.

5. Check the logic. Not only should the facts of the story be solid, so should the way they’re connected. Let’s say you hear that a person wearing sneakers has robbed a bank. Does this mean all sneaker-wearers are probably bank robbers? Of course not.

If a scientific study found that many bank robbers do wear sneakers, then we’d at least know there’s a correlation of some kind. But we still wouldn’t know that wearing sneakers means someone is likely to be a crook. It could just be that robbers like to be able to run fast. All of this would need to be checked out.

It may be easy to see the problem with jumping to conclusions about sneaker wearers, but this kind of illogic is common in less-than-credible news outlets, and often goes unchallenged by consumers. For example, because some immigrants commit crimes, many people conclude that immigrants are more dangerous, and some news outlets encourage that belief. But the logic doesn’t follow, and when we check the facts, we find that first generation immigrants commit less crime than native-born Americans do.

Now, here’s a test. Do you yourself believe that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes? Then please be aware that your own confirmation bias makes you more likely to accept what I just said, on faith. Please check — using credible, objective sources, not just the ones who always tell you what you want to hear — to see for yourself.

And the same if you still believe immigrants are more likely to be criminals: be aware that your confirmation bias makes you more likely to reject what I’m saying. Check for yourself — again, using credible, objective sources, not just the ones who always tell you what you want to hear.

6. Understand what you’re looking at. The difference between reliable and unreliable isn’t always black and white. There are different kinds of content that meet, or fail to meet, different kinds of standards:

Hard news. This is just the facts. For example: “A home on 13th St. suffered extensive damage last night after a 30-foot elm tree was blown over by 60 mph winds.”

Opinion. This may be an editorial, an op-ed (in newspapers, this is opinion that appears on the page opposite the editorial page), or a blog post. It’s not a problem if it’s biased — that’s what opinion means. Many good newspapers have a clear bias on their editorial pages, but give straight reporting on their news pages. Reputable opinion writers will base their arguments on verifiable facts, because opinion isn’t an excuse to make things up. You should feel confident that you can agree or disagree without worrying about being misled.

Feature story. This is softer, interpretive coverage of a story or people, exploring meaning and emotion. For example: “Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something.” That’s the opening sentence of one of the most famous feature stories of all, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” by Gay Talese. Although a feature story is subjective, all facts it cites should be objectively true (unless it’s clear the writer is playing with the boundaries between fact and fiction, the way Hunter S. Thompson did, for example).

Biased, but still valid, news. Since reporters are humans, it’s impossible for any of them to be 100 percent bias free — even our story about the tree hitting the house showed more concern for the house than for the tree. But some outlets report hard news from a biased perspective. As long as they’re careful with facts and logic, such outlets can be worth consulting — especially if they challenge your own biases.

News that’s so biased it’s misleading. To support their in-house bias, some outlets twist facts and logic so much that they do more harm than good. This describes some other tabloids.

Fake news. Fake news is just made up from thin air.

7. Understand “Who benefits?” This is a technique, known by its Latin translation of cui bono, used by investigators. They find suspects by identifying who benefits from the crime.

It can help you decide whether news is real or fake.

Is the mainstream media fake news, the way we hear so often lately? No, and the charge is irresponsible, because it undermines the legitimacy of the free press, which is a foundation of democracy. What “mainstream” means is commitment to traditional standards of accuracy. Each mainstream outlet has strict ethical standards (for example, these) and will quickly discipline or fire reporters who violate them.

By far, most mainstream journalists, whatever their shortcomings, want to meet those standards. They got into the business in the first place because they wanted to discover the truth.

Even if you find that hard to believe (in my experience, it’s true), consider this: whatever their shortcomings may be, mainstream media companies benefit by getting the facts right, not wrong. Objectivity in journalism grew out of the business opportunity of selling content to all kinds of readers, conservative and liberal, many of whom make important decisions based on the accuracy of what they get from the mainstream news, and wouldn’t be happy to learn it was fake. Meanwhile, advertisers in mainstream media are there because they want to reach a large audience. They have no interest in seeing some of that audience turned off by partisan coverage.

Some less reputable media companies, though, make money a different way: by selling not facts, but sensation. They’re aiming to catch the attention of gullible people who are swayed by emotion, and they tend to attract advertisers who like that kind of customer.

Remember tip 2: If the story is sensational, be more skeptical.

So if you hear someone claim the mainstream media is fake, ask yourself, ”Who benefits from making me believe that?”

Answer: people who want to get away with stuff.

So who can you trust?

I won’t try to list all the credible news outlets, but here are a few of the most widely trusted: the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, and Reuters. None is perfect, of course — remember: humans — but all are excellent. They originate much of the news you hear each day and they have enough skilled reporters to cover a wide range of topics in depth.

How do you know I’m steering you straight? You can now check for yourself — and I hope you will.

I’ll leave you with a thought from Thomas Jefferson, who, despite his own problems with the press, was one of its greatest champions:

No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions. (Letter to Judge John Tyler Washington, June 28, 1804.)

This post was updated Oct.3, 2024: shortened list of factchecking sites, added more suggested news sources.

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Photo: iStock

Skip the Gut Check, Democrats: The Problem Is Hiding in Plain Sight

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(Also published at Huffington Post.) Following a shock loss to what looked like the worst presidential candidate in history, many Democrats are agonizing over what policies they need to change in order to win back voters.

They needn’t bother: policy has almost nothing to do with it. Democrats can go left, right, more populist, less populist, or stay put.

Because for policies to make a difference, voters have to know what they are. And in every election, Republicans begin with a big gimme: millions of people are voting for and against things that don’t exist.

We’ve heard a lot over the years about the right-wing media bubble, and, more recently, the plague of fake news in social media feeds.

But for some reason, most analysts — and many Democratic politicians — seem to assume all this misinformation magically disappears in the voting booth. Most of the post-election debate seems to be about substantive factors that supposedly explain why otherwise reasonable people voted for Trump, like economic anxiety, fear of terrorism, or resentment of elitism. It’s like we have a rational investors theory of voter behavior.

But missing from the discussion is the big bloc of voters who were simply making a mistake, based on bad facts.

Consider just some of the reasons some people cite for rejecting the Obama legacy that Hillary Clinton ran on: “soaring deficits,” “job-killing economic policies,” “uncontrolled borders,” and “rising crime.”

None of these things is real.

Graph showing dramatic decline of violent crime since 1992.

  1. “Soaring deficits.” Actually, the deficit under President Obama has plummeted in every fiscal year except the most recent one. But in 2013, according to Pew, only 12 percent of Republicans knew the truth, and only 29 percent of Democrats – misinformation is leaky. The debt has in fact gone up, but that’s inevitable all the while you’re reducing deficits until you get them to zero, like Bill Clinton did.
  2. “Job-killing economic policies.” In fact, Obama holds the record for uninterrupted job growth, with more than 15 million jobs created to date, and has cut unemployment in half from its 2010 peak. But a 2015 Bloomberg survey found that 53 percent of Republicans believe unemployment has gotten worse. No doubt many are also unaware that corporate profits have set new records, the S&P 500 is up more than two and a half times, and inflation has been less than half the post World War II average, among other good economic news.
  3. ”Uncontrolled borders.” The truth is that illegal immigration has declined under Obama, while border enforcement, including deportations of criminals, has greatly increased. Meanwhile the data show that first generation immigrants, including ones here illegally from Mexico, commit less crime than native born Americans. But Pew found that 50 percent of Trump supporters believe undocumented immigrants are a serious crime threat that calls for more border security.
  4. “Rising crime.” In the real world, violent crime has been falling steadily since 1992. It’s now at the lowest level since 1970. But 79 percent of Republicans (65 percent of Democrats) think it’s rising, according to Gallup.

There are lots of other examples, like the fantasies that Obama is a foreign-born Muslim, climate change is a Chinese hoax, or Hillary deliberately let our people die in Benghazi.

Millions of Americans have been convinced of such things. In other words, millions of Americans are casting misguided votes.

If ballots were being altered, that would be a big story. In effect, they are.

As Obama told Bill Maher recently, “If I watched Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me either.”

What to do? Obama provides a clue here too.

Because despite facing the same reality handicap, he won twice.

That means he was able to connect with some voters who otherwise would have voted against him based on faulty information (it goes without saying that some who did so were well-informed and just honestly disagreed with him).

How? By out-communicating the opposition.

People believe falsehoods because they feel true – Trump gets away with all his whoppers because they sound (and probably are) so authentically unfiltered.

What makes Obama a great communicator is that he can make the truth feel true: he connects the head and the gut.

And that’s the gut check Democrats need.

How to Win Every Argument You Ever Have: Be Willing to Lose

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Bust of Socrates
A bust of Socrates at the University of Western Australia, Crawley (Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons)

As we mark the first post-Trump Thanksgiving, the best advice about arguments might be to try not to have them, at least for today.

But knowing they’re probably inevitable, now seems like a good time to share the ultimate secret to winning them. In fact, with this secret, I can promise you that you’ll win every single argument you ever have, from here on out.

Are you ready? Here it is:

Be willing to lose, and you never will.

Surprise! Winning is not actually the point of an argument. The point, although it can be hard to guess from our Facebook feeds, is to advance knowledge. And if your goal is more knowledge – and why wouldn’t it be? – you’ll never lose.

Because even if you lose, you win.

On the other hand, if you never lose, you never learn.

And how could that be a real victory? “Hurray! I’ve never learned a thing! In me, knowledge remains stalled forever!”

If you want to be a great arguer, emulate one of the greatest, Socrates: focus on questions, not answers. The answers will take care of themselves.

Now maybe you think I’m just asking you to be impossibly virtuous. So let me divulge that this practice also has a sneaky side benefit: if you can be genuinely open to new facts, if you can – and this is crucial – change your opinion in the face of those new facts (stay with me now), you’re likely to become more well-informed.

And the more well-informed you become, the more reality is going to be on your side.

And that’s the best ally you could have.

Because reality – even in the age of Trump – has a way of winning in the end.

Branding Bannon: How to Protest a White Nationalist in the White House

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(Also published at Huffington Post.) Democrats in Washington have registered strong objections to Donald Trump’s choice of Steve Bannon as his senior White House adviser.

Will their protests make any difference? So far, it looks like no: as the minority in both houses, Democrats have little leverage, and media attention is already fading.

But here’s something that might work, and it borrows a page from Trump’s own playbook: brand Bannon.

Democrats, and everyone who cares about equality, should give him a new name: White Nationalist Steve Bannon.

And pledge never to refer to him as anything else.

This idea is of course similar to Trump’s “Crooked Hillary” — but with an important difference: it’s not an unsupported slur, it’s a simple statement of fact.

Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart News has become a hub for the bigots of the white nationalist alt-right, running stories such as this one:

Headline and image of confederate flag from Breitbart news story praising the Confederacy
A Breitbart News story repeated the racist lie that the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery.

Some people who know Bannon — sorry, I mean White Nationalist Steve Bannon — claim that he personally is not a bigot (though his ex-wife, among others, disagrees).

I might say that’s a distinction without a difference — but what White Nationalist Steve Bannon does is actually worse than just being a garden variety bigot. Most bigots are ignorant. White Nationalist Steve Bannon, an alum of Harvard, Goldman Sachs, and the U.S. Navy officer corps, knows exactly what he’s doing.

Imagine what he could do in the White House.

The great thing about always and only saying “White Nationalist Steve Bannon” is that it’s a protest that would meet him every time he appears anywhere, and need never end.

Unless, let’s hope, his term in government ends, hopefully before it starts.