The fine line between news and 'truthiness'

By Michael X. Delli Carpini

In the 2005 premiere of The Colbert Report, its host coined the word truthiness, which the American Dialect Society (which chose it as its "Word of the Year") defined as "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true." The irony is that a hallmark of "fake news" shows such as The Colbert Report, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has been exposing truthiness in the "real news."

This irony was on view in the coinciding of two significant departures: Stewart stepping down as host of The Daily Show, and NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams' six-month suspension for misrepresenting events surrounding a 2003 helicopter trip in Iraq, the latter being as textbook an example of "truthiness" as one could imagine. While media of all forms have been filled with well-deserved praise for Stewart's transformation of both satire and news, the once highly respected Williams has been rightly pilloried for damaging public trust in an industry with precious little trust to spare. But the two stories are connected by more than ironic timing and carry significance that goes well beyond the individual media celebrities involved.

The important role played by The Daily Show only works when it's part of a larger information ecosystem. People learn about the world from numerous places: professional journalists; opinionated talk shows and blogs; entertainment genres, including but not limited to "fake news"; hybrid sources that combine news, opinion, and entertainment (e.g., the Huffington Post); even fellow citizens (through everything from independent media staffed by "citizen journalists" to e-mails, texts, Facebook posts, and tweets received from friends and coworkers).

Individually, each of these sources has shortcomings. News organizations get things wrong, miss important stories, and are subject to personal, political, and market-driven biases. Talk shows often ignore facts or logic in service of their ideologies. Entertainment media lack the professional codes or public scrutiny to be accountable and can play loose with facts. Citizen journalists lack the time, skills, and resources to substitute for professionals. Yet collectively, this information ecosystem has much to recommend it, with each element playing a complementary role that helps mitigate the problematic tendencies of the others, creating a whole that is - potentially at least - better than the simple sum of its parts.

As with any ecosystem, the various components of our information environment are dependent on each other to thrive individually and collectively. The Daily Show only "works" if there are professional news organizations to draw from and critique, and viewers who get the joke. At the same time, journalists (including Brian Williams) often appear on the show to dig deeper into issues while promoting themselves and their organizations. The results, when this relationship is in balance, are encouraging.

Research shows that many citizens turn to The Daily Show and its offspring for information about the day's events, often as part of a more varied news diet. Regular viewers are more informed about politics than consumers of traditional news programs like NBC Nightly News. And at least some of this knowledge results directly from viewing "fake news"; a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication found that viewers of The Colbert Report's 2012 satirical segments on money and politics (in the form of PACs) were more informed about the important, complicated issue of campaign financing than were viewers of any of the many other news sources examined.

But ecosystems can fall out of balance, moving from symbiotic relationships to parasitic ones, and there are ominous signs in this regard.

Newspaper readership and television news viewing have declined precipitously over the past two decades, creating a vicious cycle of reduced advertising revenue, shrinking newsroom staffs, and newspaper and news bureau closures. According to a recent Gallup poll, public trust in the news media is at its lowest point (40 percent) in the past two decades. And those who continue to follow the news increasingly choose outlets whose ideological leanings comport with their own.

In such an environment, there are fewer counterbalances to the "truthiness" of the partisan press, allowing it to colonize larger swaths of the information ecosystem. New information and communication technologies may be the answer, but market and regulatory issues make the future of online news uncertain. In turn, the responsibility to keep the media and public officials honest increasingly falls on the shoulders of a handful of "fake news" outlets that are only partly and imperfectly designed to play this ombudsman role. And even when they do so, we are arguably at a tipping point where the result is public cynicism about both news media and politics.

In this context, the stakes involved in the departures of Stewart and Williams are much higher than what they mean for The Daily Show and NBC Nightly News.