The thing about peo­ple, is that we are ter­ri­bly sus­cep­ti­ble to a thing called confirmation bias. When we have an idea or opin­ion, even just a hunch, and we look for evi­dence to either con­firm or deny that notion, we have a ten­dency to pre­fer evi­dence which sup­ports our hypoth­e­sis than evi­dence which refutes it. This is why, for exam­ple, peo­ple can believe in such zany con­spir­acy theories. Gen­er­al­ly, if you start with a hypoth­e­sis and look for evi­dence prov­ing its truth, you will find it, no mat­ter the hypothesis.¹ This is also why, I think, dif­fer­ent peo­ple given the same infor­ma­tion through the same news­me­dia, will arrive at wildly dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions.

Here’s my theory: It’s com­mon knowl­edge that the news gets things wrong. Head­lines are fre­quently mis­lead­ing, facts are missed, peo­ple are mis­quot­ed, etc. This is a fact of life and some of it is due to hon­est mis­takes by news­peo­ple but often it’s due to par­ti­san pol­i­tics or agen­das get­ting in the way of facts. The worst is in pol­i­tics when two news orga­ni­za­tions can take the same story and spin com­pletely dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tives. Most peo­ple take this in stride and know to be skep­ti­cal of the most out­landish things they hear about in the news, espe­cially from less reli­able sources. The prob­lem is, how do peo­ple know what is out­landish or likely to be true, with­out a source of facts as the baseline? Fact check­ers can invest the time to fol­low infor­ma­tion to its source and deter­mine facts, but most peo­ple don’t have the time to fact check every news arti­cle or polit­i­cal sto­ry. Instead, we fact check sto­ries which seem false to us, and the arti­cle which seems false to us are those with which we already dis­agree. This is the con­fir­ma­tion bias at full effect.

The prob­lem is then, by con­sum­ing news, peo­ple will absorb sto­ries they agree with, and dis­pute sto­ries that chal­lenge them, and thereby con­tin­u­ally be rein­forced in their point of view. This is a prob­lem. If no mat­ter how much news we watch, all it will ever do is con­firm our already held beliefs, what are we actu­ally learn­ing? Are we com­ing to a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the world and refin­ing our belief sys­tems with new infor­ma­tion? Evi­dently not. Watch­ing news will only make the big­oted more big­ot­ed, the dis­af­fected more dis­af­fect­ed, the reli­gious more reli­gious, the sec­u­lar more sec­u­lar, and all the var­i­ous camps that Amer­i­cans fall under will only frac­ture fur­ther apart from each other.² When we watch news sto­ries that we agree with, it’s proof that we are right, but when we watch news sto­ries that we dis­agree with, it’s proof of media bias.³ It seems to me that no mat­ter what we do, we’re all stuck as igno­rant trolls yelling at each other for imag­ined here­sies.

But here’s a thought, what if we abstained from news alto­geth­er. The vast major­ity of what peo­ple learn in the news is not rel­e­vant to our day to day lives and what is rel­e­vant we can learn through more word of mouth or more imme­di­ate sources. So, what if, for the sake of not acci­den­tally rein­forc­ing one’s own bias­es, we avoid anec­do­tal treat­ments of top­ics such as the news? If you want a bet­ter under­stand­ing of an issue, read first hand sources, and in depth books. If you need to keep up with mar­ket trends, read finan­cial sum­maries. If you need to learn about the world, trav­el, or read a book. Would doing this save us from poi­so­nous biases and allow peo­ple to dis­cuss issues from a more neu­tral point of view? Of course it would, because I’ve seen a lot of exam­ples where it seemed to hap­pen and I’ve suc­cess­fully debunked any coun­terex­am­ples.

1. This is partly why scientific experiments generally need to be ‘falsifiable’ to be considered reliable. ↩
2. Making this problem worse is the increasing trend of newsources to explicitly cater to specific points of view, doing the work of filtering contradictory information for the viewers convenience. ↩
3. Funny that everyone believes in a media bias these days, but just can’t agree which way it’s biased! ↩