Spencer Critchley

journalism

How Kellyanne Conway Won Her Debate With CNN’s Brian Stelter — Despite Being Wrong About Everything

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[Also published at Huffington Post.] White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter had a widely anticipated debate Sunday about the fairness of media coverage of the Trump administration. On every point that came up, Stelter exposed Conway as, at best, misleading.

And yet to some viewers, she was the clear winner.

Tweet by David Martosko: "Watching @KellyAnnPolls absolutely clobber @BrianStelter this morning. Brutal. He's absolutely tied in knots."

How? Stelter and Conway were playing entirely different games.

For Conway, the audience was President Trump and the 36 percent of Americans who still trust him. Speaking past Stelter and connecting with them, she followed the rules of a game defined back in the 60s by the media consultants of the 1968 Nixon for President campaign.

One of them was the eventual founder of Fox News, Roger Ailes. Here’s Ailes in 1970, explaining why Nixon was seen to have lost his 1960 TV debate with John F. Kennedy despite many people believing he had won on the merits:

I think that the lighting was bad. It was experimental at best and sloppily done. His makeup was bad. I think he was tired–and this may have shown in his reaction and response.

I think that before the debates, John Kennedy spent the entire day briefing himself and relaxing, concentrating on the TV encounter.

Mr. Nixon did not do that. He walked in and handled it as if it were any other telecast.

Mr. Nixon, in a sense, stuck to the old school of debating, looking at Mr. Kennedy. But Mr. Kennedy looked at the camera, because he was essentially talking not to his opponent but to the people at home, and he was able to establish a kind of communication between himself and the home viewer. [Emphasis added.]

Ailes, along with other media and advertising experts, coached Nixon to be far more effective on TV for his winning 1968 campaign, and during his time in the White House.

The rules they defined still apply, as you can see by analyzing the video of the Stelter-Conway interview. Let’s start with the splash frame from CNN.com:

Kelly Ann Conway on CNN

Conway looks happy, relaxed, and confident, is well lit by studio lighting, and is wearing red, a power color.

Now let’s look at her in split screen with Stelter:

Brian Stelter & Kelly Ann Conway on CNN

Oh oh. Just seconds in, and Stelter’s losing already.

How do we know? Let’s count the ways.

  1. Kelly is being shot straight on, so she can make direct eye contact through the camera with the viewer. Meanwhile Stelter is being shot from slightly above, so he has to look up. This unavoidably signals submissiveness, no matter what he’s saying. Our brains can’t help but make the unconscious connection: small, less powerful people look up at bigger, more powerful people.
  2. Stelter isn’t as well lit. Compared to Conway, he looks washed out. She, meanwhile, is being sculpted by highlights and eyelights.
  3. He’s wearing more muted colors, dominated by grey.
  4. He appears to be outside, in some random grassy environment (he was in Tucson, on the first day of a family vacation, according to his Twitter feed.) It feels like he’s both literally and symbolically on the outside, while she’s on the inside, in the impressive environment of a CNN studio.
  5. As you play the video, you’ll hear that his sound is weaker as well — and occasional bird tweets don’t help.

And so it goes throughout the interview. As Stelter tries to pin Conway down on one misdirection after another, she just moves blithely on to the next. And each of his sallies feels, I’m sorry to say, “low energy.” At pains to preserve the standards of civil discourse, he repeatedly reassures her of his respect, while she turns her responses into digs at him and CNN.

One example among many:

Stelter: “The scandals are about the president’s lies. About voter fraud, about wire-tapping, his repeated lies about those issues. That’s the scandal.”

Conway: “He doesn’t think he’s lying about those issues.”

It’s OK because he doesn’t think he’s lying? On the page, Conway’s response is ridiculous. But on TV, she looks and sounds unruffled and in control.

Stelter, on the other hand, comes across as alternately tentative, frustrated, and confused:

Brian Stelter & Kelly Ann Conway on CNN

On TV, impressions are what matter much more than words — as Conway’s boss could tell you, you win by looking like you’re winning.

CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl has often told the story of how she learned this lesson from a Reagan administration official back in 1984. Here’s how she related it to Bill Moyers in a 1989 interview:

I did a piece that was-where I was quite negative, to be honest with you, about Reagan. And yet the pictures were terrific, and I thought they’d be mad at me, but they weren’t. They loved it. And the official outright said to me, “They didn’t hear you. Didn’t hear what you said. They only saw those pictures.” And what he really meant was it’s the visual impact that overrides the verbal.

And that’s what happened, yet again, here.

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

Should Real News Be a Utility, Like Water and Electricity?

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(Also published at Huffington Post.) Like people in towns across America, I’m watching my local newspapers die.

Every few months, it seems, they lay off more staff, while announcing a new digital initiative that’s somehow supposed to make up for the fact that they just can’t afford to report the news any more.

No one wants to pay for it.

After all, look at all the “content” we can get for free, much of which looks like news.

The trouble is, though, so much of it isn’t. Real news can’t be created by digital magic. It requires the time-consuming work of humans — trained ones — digging into what’s going on, weighing competing versions of the truth, and giving the rest of us their best version.

It’s never perfect, and sometimes it’s very far short of that. But it’s so much better than any alternative. Democracy literally depends on it, as Thomas Jefferson said:

The way to prevent [errors] of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter…

Do not be too severe upon the people’s errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I and Congress and assemblies, judges, and governors, shall all become wolves.

“What are you going to do about it?” Thomas Nast cartoon showing Tammany Hall as a tiger consuming democracy.
“What are you going to do about it?” Thomas Nast cartoon showing Tammany Hall as a tiger consuming democracy.

But in our modern, digital world, news doesn’t pay, and so, especially at the local level, it’s going away.

That could be seen as good news for people like me, whose job it is to try to get stories into the media. With fewer reporters in the way, that’s getting easier all the time. More and more papers will run a well-written press release unedited.

But I hate it. I don’t want an easier job, if it comes at the expense of a functioning democracy.

To save democracy, we must save news. We can start with local news, which is what matters most to most people (nationally, we have some government funding of public broadcasting, but it’s unlikely we’ll see that expand any time soon).

I have an idea: why not make local news a utility? Charge a small user fee to all the people in a city or county who benefit from more honest institutions – and that’s everybody, of course. The money collected would fund an independent news utility, charged with doing what healthy newspapers always did: holding the powerful accountable.

If this only funded one such organization per locality, that wouldn’t be as good as what we used to have: cities often had several daily papers. But it would be a lot better than what we’re heading towards in city after city — no newspaper worthy of the name.

What about TV news? That business is struggling too, but it’s still better off than newspapers are. And as TV has traditionally done with newspapers, it could leverage the original reporting done by the news utility.

We can’t do without clean water or reliable electricity. Maybe it’s finally time to recognize that the same is true of accurate information.

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.

Who Says Trump Is Smart?

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Donald Trump photo by Anythingyouwant, via Wikimedia CommonsDonald Trump’s ideas are widely recognized as not just hateful, but idiotic.

And yet the conventional wisdom in most of the media is that, all the same, “he’s a smart guy” — after all, look how successful he is. Even his liberal critics, including the very smart Rachel Maddow, give him credit: Trump may have no principles, but he obviously has brains.

A related line of thought holds that as a smart guy, he must know that what he’s saying is wrong in every way, so he can’t actually believe it, and must be saying it for purely political reasons.

But where is the evidence that he actually is intelligent? If he is, he also must be one of our most brilliant actors, because he’s completely convincing as a lout.

I suspect the reason so many journalists assume he’s only pretending to be stupid is that few of them know much about business — including how to judge business success.

Some examples:

1. Many journalists seem to think that making a lot of money is evidence of high intelligence. But anyone who’s worked in the corporate world can tell you different. Some senior executives are really smart, but many are more or less average. As research has shown, drive and social skills often count more than brains do.

You may have heard the old saying about college: It’s a place where former A students teach B students to work for C students.

2. Few journalists seem to understand how Trump makes his money. They accept his self-presentation as a genius builder. But for a long time it’s looked as if what Trump really does is just license his brand (for now).

He does have a talent for being famous, and that’s worth money. If you want to build something, he can make a lot of money by charging you to put his name on it. But that’s the same kind of “genius” that any celebrity shows when they put their name on perfume or sneakers.

3. There’s little reason to assume that Trump actually has nearly as much money as he claims. We have only his word for it — the word of one of the world’s most notorious fabricators. And as he himself has said, his net worth varies depending on how he feels.

Since a lot of his net worth seems to amount to brand equity, that actually, kind of, sort of, makes sense. I can tell you that the Critchley brand is worth not $10 billion — that’s Trump change — but $20 billion. Since I won’t take a penny less for it, I can claim it’s true.

In fact, I think I will. Would you like to loan me a half-billion or so? I have $20 billion in collateral.

4. Speaking of borrowing money, Trump has had to be bailed out repeatedly, with four corporate bankruptcies to his name. If you want to see someone who’s a genius at making money, take a look at the remarkably non-loutish Warren Buffett. As S.V. Dáte has pointed out, Buffett has used his investing acumen to beat the market about 22 times over during the time since Trump inherited a pile of money from his father. Trump, on the other hand, might have done better if he had put his windfall in an index fund and left it alone.

As I’ve watched Trump get cut all kinds of slack for saying the stupidest things imaginable, I’ve wondered if he just comes across as very different in person. Maybe those who have met him know something I don’t.

But Mark Bowden makes me think, “Nah.” For a profile he wrote for Playboy some years back, Bowden spent quite a bit of time with Trump. His impression, as described in the latest Vanity Fair, sure rings true:

Apart from the comical ego, the errors, and the self-serving bluster, what you get from Trump are commonplace ideas pronounced as received wisdom. Begin registering all Muslims in America? Round up the families of suspected terrorists? Ban all Muslims from entering the country? Carpet-bomb ISIS-held territories in Iraq (killing the 98-plus percent of civilians who are, in effect, being held hostage there by the terror group and turning a war against a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims into a global religious crusade)? Using nuclear weapons? The ideas that pop into his head are the same ones that occur to any teenager angry about terror attacks. They appeal to anyone who can’t be bothered to think them through–can’t be bothered to ask not just the moral questions but the all-important practical one: Will doing this makes things better or worse? [My emphasis.]

Maybe we should take the advice of Maya Angelou: “When people show you who they are, believe them.”