You were not born yesterday. Be skeptical as editor and reader

In a time when widespread disinformation appears to be overtaking widespread misinformation, you would do well to read and edit cautiously and skeptically. Here are some guidelines.

AREAS REQUIRING CAUTION ABOUT ACCURACY

Names: Persons and places, formal titles, job descriptions.

Numbers: Percentages, averages, rates, ratios, polling data.

Chronology: Comprehensible sequence of events, reader’s orientation in place and time. 

Sources: Credibility, bias, independent confirmation. 

Superlatives: First, only, biggest, oldest. 

Photographs: Genuine or altered. 

Links: Veracity of other sites. 

Inconsistencies: Not only in factual details, but also in vocabulary, syntax, or tone. 

Legal issues: Assertions of illegal or illicit actions. Evidence?

Headlines: Accurate? Oversimplified? Slanted?

SELF-EXAMINATION

Confirmation bias: Reading selectively to focus on data confirming what we already think. 

Backfire effect: Strong reaction to challenges to deeply held beliefs or opinions, with the effect of reinforcing them. 

Biased assimilation: Interpreting new information to make it fit existing beliefs.

Motivated reasoning: Finding persuasive what already fits existing beliefs and reserving criticism for contradictory details and evidence.  

Group polarization: Tendency in discussion to be pulled toward the people expressing the strongest views. 

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE QUESTIONS

What is the source/evidence? Reliable? Independently confirmed?

What is the history of the persons and entities involved?

Who else is saying this?

What need does it fit?

What is the motivation?

Does it meet our standards? 

How do we add value?

DANGER AREAS

Story is too good. Factual details and quotes are perfect, fitting all expectations. 

Publishing in haste. Shortcutting the questioning to get the story out ahead of everyone else. 

Writer is a star. Privileged employee exempted from strong questioning and challenges.

Everyone is on board.  Consensus can be hard to challenge.  

Bad behavior in public? Summon a mob

 If you have been on social media the past few days, you know the story. Video shows a woman confronting a father and son at a baseball game and insisting on taking a ball from the son. Since then her image has been widely circulated, with calls that she be identified, fired from her job, and disgraced into perpetuity. 

I offer no further details; I am not interested in the story itself but in what the spread of the story shows us about ourselves. 

I can't say with authority that bad behavior in public has become more common, but I am sure that the prevalence of cellphones and video surveillance has made accounts of bad behavior in public increasingly common. 

And spreading without perspective. A woman bullying a kid and parent into giving up a baseball at a ballpark gets the same widespread indignant comment as someone shouting racial abuse at Black or Latino persons and trying to get them arrested or deported, or threatening physical violence. Perhaps lack of confidence in government and institutions prompts people to go on these vigilante jags, and a public that seems increasingly angry also appears to be increasingly eager to find subjects on which to vent that anger--with a lack of any oversight or norms leaving one wondering whether justice is actually served. 

Then there is the Karen thing. The woman at the ballpark has been repeatedly called a Karen, which has become a widespread pejorative term for a middle-class woman, usually white, who is caught in public displaying behavior that is entitled, demanding, and obnoxious. As these Karen reports multiply online, it is hard not to see that to the class issue has been added a tincture of something very much like misogyny. 

People who circulate these reports of bad behavior might consider whether the bad behavior is limited to the subjects.