WHO ARE YOUR SOURCES?

The Epistemology of Journalism in the Social Media Age

Who are your sources for that? Ever since All the President’s Men sourcing, the editorial process of verifying facts in journalism, has become a part of the cultural landscape, almost a trope. The reporter knows a fact — H. R. Haldemann controls a secret slush fund used to pay for dirty tricks against the Democrats — but the paper can’t publish because the fact needs to be confirmed by the source, two sources even, of this information.

Another favorite moment in that film is Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee shouting at Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein.

Goddamnit when is somebody going to go one the record in this story?

Standards have slipped since commodore Ben Bradlee strode the quarterdeck of the Washington Post newsroom (He really did, I worked as a copy aide there 1981-83 and he was a sight to behold on his walkabouts). Actually, at the Post standards have slipped even further since Marty Baron stepped down as editor in early 2021.

And not just at the Post. The New York Times has been doing shoddy work particularly in its political coverage from its Washington Bureau since Trump first became the Republican candidate in 2016 and at an accelerated rate since Joseph Kahn became editor in 2022.

These two institutions’ odd framing of coverage with their over-reliance on polls and data combined with an unwillingness to see the asymmetric nature of the contest which lead to a “both sides” are equal idea of journalistic impartiality was copied by the established television networks and my old employer, NPR.

Many Democratic supporters turned away from these journalistic institutions to Twitter and other social media for news and analysis of political events. That’s where people at the Times and Post were going for story ideas, might as well cut out the middle-men.

We curated our own news feeds with “reliable sources” but in doing so moved away from the difficult but necessary process of vetting these nuggets of information — where did they come from, were they impartial facts or spin? Part of the crushing sense of disappointment in the actual result on November 5th is that our “sources” had us thinking Kamala would win and they were clearly wrong.

We’re smart people, we respect the facts in ways the other side doesn’t, right? Didn’t we have the facts? How much did you have your view of the election shaped by shared info from trusted social media sources?

Speaking for myself, here’s what I learned in the weeks before the election. The Harris ground game was aces, Trump’s was in disarray. The kids were registering and voting in record numbers. The trend of women angry over Trump’s misogyny and the overturning of Roe v. Wade remained the motivation for huge swathes of female voters. I saw reported as fact disarray and finger pointing in the Trump camp. This “fact” was offered as proof the campaign’s internal polling told them they were in big trouble.

I discounted the tweets from “influencers” because they are not impartial sources of information. You could tell who the influencers were by the amount they tweeted. It had to be a full time job paid for by the Democratic Party. I discounted tweets talking about Trump’s mental state or incontinence or his marriage. That’s gossip.

But many people who I respect: academics, historians and reporter colleagues who were culled in the great journalism retrenchment that accompanied the news business’s decline in the age of social media were providing links that created a picture of momentum behind Harris. My assumption was that a person with a tenured chair at an elite university would not put their professional rep on the line without getting their facts from trustworthy sources.

In thinking that Kamala Harris was likely to win I relied on social media sources over my own street level reporting. In June, I wrote this from Nogales, Arizona:

The road is more expensive than it has ever been. Note to Biden team: don’t go by the statistics. Inflation is a beast and it’s damned expensive out here.

At no time did the Biden or Harris teams get to grips with the fact that many Americans were still feeling inflation’s bite well into the autumn.

Then I recorded this interview with Eugene Edge, head of the NAACP in Americus, Georgia, less than a week before polling day. It was a clear a statement of the sentiments of a significant number of Black men:

Harris got fewer votes from Black men than Joe Biden. This wasn’t critical to her defeat but it was a harbinger of it. A harbinger I ignored because the information I gleaned from Twitter, Threads and Bluesky confirmed my own biases and also hopes. To misquote Freud:

A tweet is a wish fulfillment

How do you use Twitter or any of the similar social media platforms so many have decamped to since Elon Musk bought Twittter and renamed it X?

Twitter and me

I joined Twitter when my second book was published in 2009. The Simon and Schuster publicity department told its’ authors self-promotion on the platform was the key to book sales.

In building my very small following I turned my feed into a kind of newswire. Colleagues in Iraq, mostly Arab by this time as US reporters had been pulled out, kept me up to date on happenings in Baghdad and Mosul and Erbil. Old colleagues and new voices from every place I had ever reported from — Northern Ireland, Bosnia, the US — got added to my list of follows.

I was always ahead of the breaking news at legacy media sites like the Times with my personalized newswire.

Two things were a problem though: even in 2009 Twitter discourse was, well, coarse. And for all the implied invitation to conversation on the platform it was really not welcome. Any comment disagreeing with a tweet, no matter how politely expressed, was often responded to with “How dare you?” snark.

Partially this was because rudeness for some reason helped you gain followers. Partially because the tweets themselves are so brief that they cannot convey the epistemic core of an idea.

This is not new. Soundbite discourse took root in broadcast journalism during the 1970s and has carried on ever since. UC San Diego sociology professor Daniel Hallin notes in 1968, :

From Daniel Hallin’s essay Soundbite Democracy

Then came the founding of CNN in 1980. The primacy of the instant became the most important feature in broadcasting, the only nationwide platform for disseminating news in the pre-internet age.

Reporting — the gathering of facts, organizing them into a coherent story which tells readers/listeners/viewers about an event — takes time. Figuring out how to shoehorn the information a reporter has gathered into narrative shape requires a dialogue between editor and correspondent. There are always things left out. At best we are summarizers and simplifiers of the news.

CNN, by merely opening a camera on an event and having a reporter talk to a studio host, eviscerated that process into meaninglessness.

Twitter took these ideas of brevity and the instantaneous to the level of absurdity. Far too much of what happens in the world cannot be reduced to the length of a tweet, or a thread of them.

At its best, twitter can be like having an AP teletype machine on your desk with a reporter sending in “takes” from an event, filing copy one or two sentences at a time. Too often though tweets are unsubstantiated generalizations.

On Twitter and its imitators jargon abounds. Jargon is in-crowd usage. Too many people verify the information in a tweet by looking at how it is phrased. What acronym short hand does it use. Is that person someone whose usage of language I share? Then I trust them. IYKYK.

But jargon separates people. Common usage links them. For example: throughout Trump’s rise and his refusal to acknowledge his 2020 defeat, “authoritarian” became the term of art to describe him. I never understood why. Fascist is as fascist does but there was a reluctance to use this term. Professor Heather Cox Richardson notes in her Nov. 8 Letter from an American substack newsletter

“Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’” 

For Richardson this is not an example of jargon as euphemism it is a demonstration of Trump voters’ ignorance. She continues:

In a social media post, [Salon’s Amanda] Marcotte wrote: “A lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. More so than in the past.” That jumped out to me because there was, indeed, an earlier period in our history when voters were “pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”

Those words could equally apply to those of us who supported Harris. We are all pickled in misinformation too often expressed with rage.

Richardson’s newsletter is required daily reading but she herself is also a jargoniste. In the same edition of the newsletter she goes on to talk about how in the 1850s wealthy plantation owners kept their less affluent fellow Southerners in ignorance, interrupting postal deliveries to stop abolitionist pamphlets and Northern newspapers reaching the region because:

Elite enslavers had reason to be concerned about the survival of their system of human enslavement.

“Enslavers” is a bit of jargon coined recently to replace “slave-owners”. I don’t understand why the term needed to be replaced. Wasn’t calling a person who owned slaves a “slave-owner” clear enough? “Human enslavement?” Is there another kind? Acknowledging that slaves were human beings is what led to slavery’s abolition.

Clear, direct communication is the way to create new political connections. What is authoritarian? Is human enslavement different than slavery? This jargon separates Americans at a moment in history when we are already dangerously divided.

Anyway, to go back to the question in the title of this edition of FRDH. Because the institutional media has fallen down on its job — and because we are in an era where mis/disinforming the public is a major political strategy of those who are about to govern us — we are all Woodward and Bernstein now, ferreting out news and wanting to share it with others. But without the stern oversight of Ben Bradlee (and his top lieutenants Harry Rosenfeld and Howard Simons).

Before you share news via social media make sure of your sources and your sources’ sources. Weigh the information against your own experience. I certainly will.

And never forget the words of the old Russian proverb, even if you hate to quote Ronald Reagan

доверяй, но проверяй … Trust but Verify

I started this substack in response to the Hamas attack on Israel, Oct 7th 2023. I expanded it to include American politics during the 2024 presidential campaign. I will continue to widen the newsletter’s range as we enter this new era: the age of the unbridled Id. I need your help to do it.

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For more on the origins of journalism’s decline visit the It’s a Hack’s Life section of History of a Calamity, my other substack (because writing one substack is just not enough)

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE PRIMACY OF THE INSTANT