Truth, Lies Or Something Inbetween? – Divided We Stand United We Fall

We live in a world of lies.

What can we do to protect ourselves from easily falling for other people’s lies?

The best advice I can offer on this is to assume that everyone is lying. Always.

It sounds a bit bleak, but we regularly lie to ourselves, so we shouldn’t be surprised that others are also regularly lying to us too.

Self-deception appears to be a popular subject for those interested in human psychology judging by the number of search results. Ever made a New Year’s resolution that you failed to keep and told yourself that some other change in your life meant you had to give it up? Or you put something off till later, until it was too late to do it and told yourself that it was the fault of your friend who invited you out? Or failed to meet someone as arranged and told yourself it wouldn’t have inconvenienced them too much? Or cheated on a partner and convinced yourself it wouldn’t have happened if they’d treated you better?

Cognitive dissonance is the driver behind thoughts like this. We know that we’ve done something that we don’t feel good about and so we need to find a reason that explains away our behaviour. If we don’t, then we’ll spend our time thinking about it and feeling guilty. Remember how one of the drivers for confirmation bias is wanting the feeling of certainty? If we don’t feel certain about what we know, we’ll find ourselves constantly worrying about it. The motivation for lying to ourselves is similar, it gives us peace of mind.

Whatever the reason though, if we’re so happy to lie to ourselves, we shouldn’t feel uncomfortable with assuming everyone else is lying to us too.

If we start from that angle, instead of accepting everything we’re told is true, we force ourselves to think about what we’re told and to assess how likely or otherwise it really is to be true.

So, what about me? Can you trust what I’ve been telling you?

Of course, you don’t know me. You should be just as suspicious of anything that I share with you.

I will try to assure you that I haven’t and won’t knowingly lie to you. Well, I might make the odd absurd claim as a joke, but that should be obvious. And I might make a point based on one source of information and then show that point to be dubious, such as when I shared a pie chart showing that the richest pay no tax, based on Donald Trump’s claims and then linked to evidence that suggested it to be incorrect.

Oh, and to make things a little less boring, I have and will continue to dress stories up to make them as interesting and amusing as possible, even when I know I’m bending reality. But, that’s just to stop either of us from nodding off, not to present a fundamental lie as a a fundamental truth.

You should also be aware that, like everyone, I have my own personal biases. And my own agenda.

I’m writing this book to try and provoke a specific response, so you should always assume I’m trying to guide your beliefs and thought processes in a certain direction as best as I can. Because I am. I’m trying to make you angry about living in a society where power is stacked against you.

All of that needn’t equate to lying though.

You recall from the beginning of the book that I said 1.6 billion people had lost democratic freedoms just within the lifespan of Generation Z? I linked to the source, as I’m trying to throughout the book, to make it easy to fact-check any claims I make. Did you check it out for yourself?

If you did, you know that 1.6 billion people actually lost their democratic rights since 2016. So why the change in phrasing to use a longer timeframe? Surely such a dramatic change in a short time period makes the point more forcefully.

My concern was that it makes the point too forcefully. There’s a renowned book on copywriting called Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. Though not the easiest or cheapest book to get hold of, it’s well worth a read, even if you’re not interested in writing, just to get a better idea of how to communicate with people in ways that are more likely to get you what you want.

The first time I read it, one of the biggest wow moments was the warning that sometimes a product does something so well, you can’t lead with it. Readers will think it’s patently untrue and move on without reading beyond that big headline. You have to set context and build plausibility first, and then ease them into learning about the stand-out feature.

So, could the loss of democratic freedoms by so many people in such a short time sound implausible? If so, once one claim seems implausible, you may be tuned in to feel that further claims seem less plausible.

Where a big change since 2016 sounds dramatic, the same change framed within the context of a generation seems more like a continuous and steady decline in freedoms. It feels easier to accept.

It’s the difference between your five-year-old falling from the top of the slider in the kids’ playground and sliding gently down the slide as intended. The endpoint is the same, but the emotional journey is very different.

In a similar spirit of openness, I earlier suggested that if the wealthiest 50% of Americans gave just 2.66941% of their wealth to the poorest 50%, the wealth of the poorest 50% would be doubled. Assuming I did my sums right, that’s true, but what does it really mean?

The poorest of the poor will have no wealth whatsoever. Double nothing is still nothing. Clearly, wealth refers to all the possessions that we have, such as our TV, fridge, car and house, if we’re fortunate to have such things. The poorest in our societies have the least things and so while suggesting that a small sacrifice by the richest half of society could have a big effect on the poorest, the reality is probably different for large numbers of them.

I’ve sidetracked, the point I wanted us to consider was that people don’t have to lie to try and influence the way we think.

I’m reading a book at the moment that’s a bit on the woo-woo side.¹ It’s presenting a positive and uplifting message, but puts forward concepts as fact that may or may not be.

Early on I tripped over the following sentence.

The pessimistic position of cynical skepticism stems from fear, while the more optimistic manner of accepting information arises from self-confidence.

Which would you rather be? Self-confident or fearful?

That sentence is a simple attempt to manipulate the reader. The author knows that he’s presenting ideas that many will be sceptical of. By stating that sceptical people are driven by fear, he encourages the reader to be accepting of the ideas being shared in the book, because that is the trait of self-confident people.

It’s subtle in terms of manipulation, but it is an attempt to manipulate. The motivation for it may come from a place of love, with the author wanting people to be open to the message he’s sharing, but that doesn’t change what it is.

Who Can You Trust?

Having suggested you assume everyone’s lying, it may seem odd to ask who can you trust², but surely we have to trust some people or we’ll go mad.

Who do you trust right now? I’m guessing family and friends, but who do you trust in terms of getting your news and information about the world?

How do you believe the world was created? Whether you believe it came out of the Big Bang almost 14 billion years ago or God created it during a busy six-day spell, perhaps somewhere about 6,000 years ago, how do you know what you believe is true?

Faith. Whether it’s faith in God or faith in science, we’re reliant on faith. I doubt even the most knowledgeable scientists understand every concept sufficiently to independently produce a unified history of the universe. Even they have to rely on faith in others and their ideas.

Have you looked at a map of the world recently? Picture it in your mind’s eye now or find one online. How many of those different countries have you visited? The ones you haven’t visited, how do you know they’re really there? And the ones you have visited, how do you know they match the size and shape the maps show?

You know about World War One, don’t you? Fought between 1914 and 1918, with more than 17 million people killed. How do we know it happened?

On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and fighting has been ongoing since then as I write this. I’ve not visited Ukraine during this time, have you? How do we know there’s really a war? How do we know Russia is an autocratic nation? How do we know Ukraine isn’t run by a neo-nazi regime?

Faith. For all of these things, we’re reliant on our faith in others to tell us the truth, remembering that’s not an absolute.

If you have religious or spiritual beliefs, your faith is blind. That’s just the deal we agree to. For news and information about the world around us that’s coming from people and organisations, blind faith in everyone isn’t a sound policy. We do need to be a bit more discerning.

We’re Our Own Worst Enemies

I know we’ve already focused on confirmation bias, but it’s important to remind ourselves that we have this weakness for information that aligns with what we already believe. If we just place blind faith in anyone or any media channel that says the things we want to believe, we’re setting ourselves up to become the playthings of the heffalumps.

If we can keep this realisation front and centre, we reduce the chances of acting as loudspeakers for questionable beliefs and outright lies.

It’s an easy trap to fall into for any of us, to repeat what is meant to be news because it sounds right to us when it’s someone else’s lie. Even politicians who should know better fall into this trap.

The Israeli government’s official X account tweeted a claim that the death of a Palestinian child was faked using a doll³, while a government spokesperson claimed Palestinians were using crisis actors to stage fake killings in the Gaza Strip⁴ (for balance, there have also been false claims about Israeli’s using crisis actors pretending to be victims of the Hamas 7 October attack⁵). In the US, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted a claim about funding for Ukraine being a corrupt money scheme and linked to a claim about President Zelensky using US military aid to buy a couple of luxury superyachts⁶, though the purchases have been shown to be false by various different fact-checkers.

When we see politicians falling for such things, it should be a strong warning to us about how easy it is to be fooled and used by an enemy, potentially to even work against what may be in our best interest.

One simple technique to try and understand what kind of bias we may have is to reverse a situation. Say a claim is made against a person or group, think about how you feel about the circumstance and then imagine the position of the accuser and accused were reversed. Do you think you’d still feel the same and that the same course of action should be pursued?

For example, it’s sadly common for people to defend the right of someone they support to say something under the banner of free speech, yet in a reversed situation, the same people will often try to shut down someone else’s right to free speech.

If you find yourself experiencing those kinds of mixed feelings, you may not be making objective decisions based on the evidence, but on your pre-existing personal feelings instead.

Viewing different sources of news and information is a good habit to get into. If you’re finding news sources that annoy you, that’s probably a good sign. You’re experiencing alternative points of view. The more you do it, the more comfortable you’ll feel doing it. You’ll also get a better understanding of other people. The people around us want the same general things as us. In terms of the societies we live in, most of the people around us want the same things for our societies, they may just believe in a different way to achieve what we want. Understanding other people’s points of view and seeing the other side of an argument makes it less likely you’ll be played by someone else.

As you find more sources of information and differing opinions, it opens up a technique I call the Gun To Head Question or GTH Question. Consider the situation where you find 10 different sources of information on a particular news story, with three of those sources reporting in a way that supports your existing beliefs and seven reporting in a way contrary to your beliefs.

We know that with our confirmation biases, we can rationalise the situation by giving greater weight and credence to the sources who align with our views, telling ourselves that the other sources aren’t reputable or trustworthy.

The GTH Question reduces this to a more simplistic numerical scenario. Rather than telling you about it, why don’t I show you instead?

The Gun To Head Question Simulator

I’ve built a simulator. Thought it might be fun.

I booted it up earlier today as it takes a while to load everything and set itself up to run. The game randomly selects one from about 1,000 possible inquisitors, so let’s see who it’s loaded for us today.

Oh…okay…I’d been hoping for it to select an inquisitor like Professor Henri Donnedieu de Vabres, my favourite of the Nuremberg Trial judges, or perhaps Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the USA, or maybe even Mahatma Gandhi, another of the famous personalities programmed into the simulator.

As it is, we’ve been assigned 1990s British children’s TV presenter Andi Peters.⁷ Look, I think we’re just going to have to press on with this, it takes the best part of an hour to reboot the simulator, so I’m going to press “continue”.

Oh my word, will you look at that, it’s dressed him in the Herr Flick costume too.⁸ This is not a combination I’ve seen before. Now let’s see the scenario the sim will be running for us. Aha, the Brexit scenario, always an interesting one and our subject today will be…will be…sorry, it’s hung up again…no it’s started again…oh no it’s hanging again…probably should have used something a little more recent than a Sinclair ZX Spectrum⁹…and it’s going again…so we’re to be treated to a virtual ex-British Prime Minister and avid Brexit supporter Boris Johnson.

Here goes, let’s press “play”.

The ex-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, awakens to discover himself tied by the wrists and ankles into a sparse chair. Brightly backlit, the silhouetted form of the Inquisitor limps methodically forward towards the bound man, the metal tip of his black cane tapping rhythmically on the concrete floor. Passing behind the seated figure, the Inquisitor removes a matte black handgun from his pocket and runs the cold metal of the barrel lightly from the back of the bound man’s neck, up his cheek to his right temple, before sharply cracking the weapon against that same temple.

A gleaming ruby runs down Johnson’s face as he cries out in pain, but the sound is drowned out by a loud quack, quack, quacking noise.

“Ah, but I am a monster, Edd,” says the Inquisitor coldly.

Oooops, my bad, let me press “pause” for a moment.

Sorry, I completely forgot to share the scenario notes with you before starting. Andi’s friend Edd the Duck is a talking duck that Andi talks to. Well, I say a talking duck, but the duck quacks and Andi understands what he says. Right, I know that sounds a bit crazy, but, it’s okay, Edd’s not a real duck, he’s a sock puppet duck that the…grown adult…Andi Peters…talks…to. Oh, that actually sounds more crazy…of course, yes of course, that’s exactly why I included Andi Peters in the sim as an inquisitor in the first place. I’ll be honest, I’d had a few drinkie-poos when I added him, but on the strength of what we’ve seen so far, I think it’s actually working out rather well, don’t you?

Let’s just press “play” again.

“And now Mr Johnson I’m going do something monstrous to you, ha, ha, ha, ha!”

Pause.

Crikey, that was a bit dark. If this book ever gets optioned for a movie, I’m looking forward to seeing the casting for Andi Peters. Who do you think? I’m thinking Idris Elba or Daniel Craig or, what’s that one from Dragons’ Den called…erm…Deborah Meaden, yeah her.

Play.

The Inquisitor walks around the chair and turns to face the bound seated figure. Suddenly Johnson’s head jerks sharply upwards, a thick wad of unkempt hair gripped harshly in The Inquisitor’s hand.

“We’re going to play a game Mr Johnson, you and me,” says The Inquisitor softly, his face so close to Johnson’s that spittle flecks the ex-Prime Minister’s ashen skin. “I’m going to ask you a question on a subject you know less about than you think and give you two answers to choose from. Pick the correct answer and you’re free to go, but pick the wrong one and you’ll be carried out of here feet first in a cardboard box from Lidl,” the muzzle of the gun pushes gently, but forcefully into Johnson’s temple for effect.

“Quackk, quacky quackk quack!!!”

The Inquisitor turns his head to the left, “umm, well yes, Edd, I did say that, but, for the record and the benefit of the game, I’m not a complete monster. You see, Mr Johnson,” The Inquisitor’s head swivelling back to the right, “I’m going to bring in 100 experts and ask them the question first. They will then stand next to the huge letter A or B painted on the walls, depending on which answer they believe to be correct. You may choose to be guided by them or not. So, any last requests before the game begins?”

Boris Johnson’s lips move weakly and the sound is little more than a gentle whisper of air. The Inquisitor moves his head forward so that Johnson’s lips almost brush his ear as they move softly again.

“Slow Bob? Who’s Slow Bob?”

Johnson appears agitated and his lips strain into movement again, more desperately than before.

“Oh, well, no you can forget about that…unless, Edd?”

“Quaaaaaack, quacky, qwack, quaaaaaack, quackle!!!!”

“No, really Edd, there’s no need for you to apologise, I don’t know what I was thinking, clearly you don’t have the lips for it, I should never have asked. It’s no good Johnson, you can definitely forget about that. Right, let’s get this game started.“

Johnson slumps even further into the chair, his right hand, despite the tight rope bonding the wrist, seemingly stretching to reach into his trousers pocket for something, but the attempt is futile.

Double doors positioned centrally in the wall 30 metres in front of Johnson’s chair swing open and a procession of pale-skinned, attractively-challenged men makes its way into the room.

“Behold our experts Mr Johnson. No doubt you’ll be keen to know the question that decides your fate. Gentlemen, thank you for attending today and sharing your extensive knowledge of women’s beach volleyball at the Olympics with Mr Johnson here. The question we need you to answer is, in the 2000 Sydney Olympics, a team from which country finished fourth? Was it answer A, Brazil, or answer B, Japan? Please, make your way to the large letter A on the wall to your right or the large letter B on the wall to your left. If you don’t know, please go and stand by the double doors you entered through.”

Most of the experts move quite quickly and deliberately, one way or the other. A few take a few moments to consider their answer before moving, while one pot-bellied man, with his t-shirt riding up at the front, stands motionless in the centre of the room, his eyes apparently shut and his head thrown back, almost as if convening with the gods in search of the answer. Spit that has dribbled down his chin drops down onto the collar of his Sid the Sexist¹⁰ t-shirt. Suddenly he springs back to life and almost sprints left to the letter B.

“So, Mr Johnson, does that look conclusive to you? By my counting, I make that seven experts who don’t know the answer, four who think answer A, Brazil, and 88 who think answer B, Japan. Let me repeat the question for you, in the 2000 Sydney Olympics, a team from which country finished fourth? Was it answer A, Brazil, or answer B, Japan? Now then, what is your answer?”

It must be the light in the room, but Boris Johnson appears even more grey than before. The trickle of blood from his temple has largely dried, but several beads of sweat are working their way down his face.

“Quack uuu quacking qaucker.”

“Come on, calm down Edd, but Mr Johnson, he does have a point, we’re all waiting for your answer.”

“E. A an. E. E.”

The Inquisitor looks confused. “I thought you went to a posh Tory boy school, Johnson, didn’t they even teach you the alphabet?”

“Qwack quackie.”

“Tee, hee hee, that’s a very good point, Edd, Slow Bob indeed.” The Inquisitor gently slides the matte black muzzle of the gun out of Johnson’s taut mouth.

“B, it’s answer B, please don’t kill me!”

“So you clearly know your women’s beach volleyball Olympics history, Mr Johnson.”

“Don’t be stupid, of course I don’t. 88 of them said answer B and only four thought answer A. You’d have to be a complete mentalist to say answer A.”

“Aha, very astute of you Mr Johnson, you are free to go.”

Boris Johnson’s mouth bursts into the broadest of grins and then Johnson bursts into a ball of flame and disappears. The Inquisitor and Edd the Duck turn to face the doors. A two-dimensional astronaut with a big gun is floating towards the space where Boris Johnson used to be…

Stop.

Sorry, that’s the Jetpac bug again. I should never have tried getting Ai to improve my code. Anyway, the good news is that the simulation was almost complete and showed you everything I wanted about the Gun To Head Question.

In the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK, Boris Johnson was arguably the most prominent person leading the call for Britons to vote to leave the EU.

About a month before the vote, Ipsos published the results of a survey based on responses from 639 economists.¹¹ 88% of those economists believed that Brexit would have a negative impact on the UK economy in the first five years, while just 4% predicted a positive impact. For fairness, over a longer period of 10 to 20 years following Brexit, the number of economists who expected a positive impact on the UK economy grew to 11%, though only 10% thought real household incomes would grow over that time as a result.

That’s why I said the GTH simulator was running the Brexit scenario, we were just using the 4% and 88% figures to illustrate a common problem. When we strongly believe something, we can completely ignore clear and obvious signals that should make us doubt our position. The effect of confirmation bias is an issue in this and the Dunning-Kruger effect¹² probably also comes into play.

The Dunning-Kruger effect states that people who have a limited understanding of something overestimate their abilities with regard to that thing. So politicians with a limited understanding of economics believe they’re better suited to make economic decisions than trained professional economists.

Of course, the downside of Brexit for many Brexit supporting politicians will have been relatively minor. People such as Rishi Sunak who, with his wife, has wealth of over half a billion squids¹³, David Davis who can reportedly earn more than £2,000 per hour¹⁴, Jacob Rees-Mogg with, it’s believed, well over £100 million in 2019¹⁵ and Michael Gove who could have personal wealth close to £4 million¹⁶. Even Boris Johnson, who may at times have more chaotic personal wealth likely recognised the value that could come from serving as Prime Minister of the UK, as demonstrated by ex-Labour PM Tony Blair who is reported to have amassed a fortune measured in tens of millions of squids since leaving office¹⁷, and perhaps felt he could risk a bit of hit from Brexit, if it helped his chances of becoming PM. Apparently, he was right, earning some £5 million in the first six months after leaving the office of UK Prime Minister.¹⁸

Do you doubt that if they faced the GTH Question scenario, any of those five Brexit supporters above would have chosen the 4% answer over the 88% answer?

Of course not, but because they felt there was little real jeopardy for them, they were happy to encourage the British people to behave like turkeys voting for Christmas or Thanksgiving.

Anyway, that’s getting off the point which is for us to try and make decisions less based on emotion.

Before running the simulator, I briefly asked you to consider a situation where you had found 10 sources of information, three of which align with your existing beliefs and seven that counter your beliefs.

If you put those numbers into the GTH Question, you’ll have a group of 30 people on one side and another group almost two and a half times as large on the other side. It’s not as clear-cut as the groups of four and 88 in the simulation above, but it’s still overwhelmingly weighted towards one answer. Assuming you were facing the same question about which country finished fourth in the women’s beach volleyball at the 2000 Olympics, unless you’re really a fan of the sport, is there any possible way you won’t choose the answer chosen by the 70 people? Remember, the gun is pressed against your temple or possibly pushed into your mouth.

If the larger group is more likely right about some random question that we don’t really care about, why wouldn’t we expect them to be right with a question we do care about?

Perhaps because confirmation bias has affected our beliefs about the answer and we’re not assessing based on new information. Maybe the Dunning-Kruger effect means that we believe we understand much more about the question and answer than we really do.

We might also be affected by choice-supportive bias¹⁹, which means that because we made our decision earlier, we’ve had time to overplay the positives of our position and ignore any negatives while doing the opposite to the opposing position. It’s a bias that means that, regardless of what new information we discover, we’ll pay much more attention to things that support our original decision than those that may suggest we were wrong.

And on top of that, with social media algorithms designed to show us similar content to what we’ve seen and liked before, we see more and more people also seeming to share ideas and opinions related to our viewpoint leading to us being affected by the bandwagon effect.²⁰ This is where we adopt behaviours and beliefs just because we see lots of other people doing so.

With all of us subject to so many psychological foibles, it’s no wonder we’re naturally inclined to believe lies and disbelieve truth.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect Illustrated

Let me try to illustrate this.

I’m standing in a flat field looking as far as I can. The horizon is about 3 miles or 5 kilometres away. There are fields all the way to the horizon and the sky is blue with the sun shining brightly.

The world is green and it is blue and it is yellow.

I can see everything and I know everythiooooooohhhhh…what’s that…that white thing up there…sorry, bear with me one mo’, hey Google, what’s that white thing up there in the sky…no, I didn’t want an alarm set, the white…no, I didn’t ask for a Spotify playlist and definitely not White Noise 10 hours, stop it, I just want to know about the white thing…ah, thank you, so it’s a cloud.

Right then, the world is green and it is blue and it is yellow and it is white.

I can see everything and I know everything.

I turn around and…woah!…there’s a, let’s call it a hill, and on top there are some…trees, perhaps, with brown…er…trunks. Brown? Mmmm. I climb the hill and look to the horizon again, but it’s further away now.

There are so many things. What should I call them all? Oh, there are towns, a city, lakes, cars, lorries, trains, a plane and look, over there, a field full of flangemaggots all going moo.

Is this everything? Do I know everything?

I didn’t mention that parked by the trees is, for the lack of a better name, a hot air balloon (don’t worry, I’ll come up with a better name later). I climb into the titfloss beside the pilot and she flies us high up into the sky.

Wow!

There are even more things to marvel at from this elevated viewpoint. Forests, mountains, beaches, ships, islands, seas and oceans are just some of the names that I give these things. Some things are so far away I strain to make out what they are.

Suddenly, with no warning, the pilot thrusts her enormous pair of boobies into my face. The moment is miraculous. All those things that were so far away now appear so close as if they are in the titfloss with us. I take her boobies away from my eyes and they’re far, far away again.

“Wow, your boobies are magic,” I say to the pilot.

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” she replies.

(Note to self, ask Google what a girl is. Maybe make it an image search. Oh, and safe search off, not sure why, just got the oddest of feelings about this.)

Noticing the pilot appears thirsty I realise an opportunity to reciprocate (ooh, that might be my favourite new word yet) her generosity.

I reach down to grasp my wang and thrust it towards her. She smiles broadly before placing it to her lips and chugging greedily until, her thirst seemingly sated, she screws the cap back onto the plastic receptacle, lest any of the remaining water should spill, and passes the wang back to me.

Again I turn to look out upon the world and realise that even with her remarkable boobies pressed to my eyes, I can’t see beyond the haze of the horizon.

What more is there beyond the haze and how much do I really know?

Suddenly a beam of brilliant light envelops me and I materialise in the hangar of a vast spaceship floating above the earth’s atmosphere. In one direction I can see the whole of the planet earth and in the others, I can only marvel at the infinite immensity of the universe that surrounds us.

How much can I see?

Can I see everything or is the universe so vast, I can barely see anything?

I know nothing.

When I was a bumpkin standing in my field chewing a stalk of grass, there were very few questions for me to ask and so I believed I had all the answers.

The higher I climbed, the bigger the world became and with that, I had more questions and perhaps not all the answers. By the time I was looking down on the earth and out at the universe, it had become clear that I didn’t even know what all the questions were, let alone the answers.

That’s the Dunning-Kruger effect illustrated.

The people who just accept the answers given to them by others without thinking about the questions themselves are the bumpkins in the field. They live with complete certainty and utter confidence in what they believe because they’re too scared to think deeply for themselves in case they don’t like the answer. They asked one question and the first answer they got was good enough.

Other factors like confirmation bias and the bandwagon effect just make it easier for such people to live comfortably in that position of ignorance.

Whatever you think of ex-US President Donald Trump, he’s clearly enjoyed great success through a career spanning decades. In Time To Get Tough he wrote “Smart people learn things, so they change their minds. Only stupid people never change their minds.”

Being guided by that, I guess the various biases that make it difficult for us to question our own earlier decision-making effectively make us stupid.

Do you want to live your life being stupid? Only stupid people never change their minds. Or to put the question another way, do you want to be a bumpkin in a field or a free spirit soaring in the heavens?

What About Other People’s Biases?

Oh, what a good question, you’re not stupid at all. That wasn’t too patronising was it?

It is a good question though, as well as staying aware of the effect of our own biases, we also need to try and make sensible assessments of the biases of those sharing news and opinions.

Research shows that about half of Americans get at least some of their news from social media sites.²¹ That opens up and democratises the sharing of news, which on one hand seems a great advance while on the other hand, it seems a great backward step.

Before the internet made it easy for anyone to share a message, mass communication was largely limited to those with the wealth to buy media channels, like newspapers, radio stations and TV stations. That presents a great privilege that is limited to very few people who enjoy massive wealth and power.

So seeing the ability to share information and news handed to just about anyone ought to be a good thing, shouldn’t it?

Simplistically, yes, but now anyone is free to transmit a message that could be strongly biased. But unlike traditional media channels, these people don’t have the same regulatory framework around them. Traditional media in democratic countries is generally expected to act within laws to ensure the power they possess isn’t abused. It’s not foolproof, but if traditional media channels were abusing their powers, wouldn’t they be being sued left, right and centre?

As it is, legal action against media companies is relatively rare. In 2023, Fox News paid almost $800 million to Dominion Voting Systems rather than face trial, after the latter claimed the news network had defamed it.²² That case stands out because it’s so unusual.

Considering the huge volume of stories the media shares, legal action against them is rare. That probably shouldn’t be a surprise though.

We’re going to focus on the idea of using common sense to make quick assessments of truthfulness very soon, but let’s get into it briefly now.

People don’t choose to become journalists for the money. Try searching for the best-paid jobs or the best careers to become rich and you are going to find lists of many highly trained professional roles, but you won’t see the role of journalist come up in any of them. Some career choices are a calling, the kind of thing that someone does as much because it’s who they are than they want to make a living. For many, becoming a journalist is one of those kind of career choices.

Without a doubt, some of those who become journalists become corrupt and dishonest, however, that doesn’t make every journalist corrupt and dishonest. Yet it’s common for many journalists and media channels to be targeted by claims of dishonesty and sharing fake news. That’s simply because those who are corrupt and dishonest fear free and honest journalists. Oh, and as we’ve established, they hate free speech except when they’re speaking.

Research the fall of any democratic society into an autocratic society and you will discover examples of corrupt leaders who assume autocratic power using claims of corruption against their opponents, both political and in the media, to imprison those opponents. Do you remember the My Little Autocrat’s Playbook from early on? Accusing rivals and opponents of corruption was one of the methods in that list, wasn’t it?

Trying to convince us that the media can’t be trusted is a typical move of the heffalumps. If we don’t believe the media, the media can’t hurt the heffalumps.

That doesn’t mean that we should trust all of the media equally. We’ve already seen that Fox News in the USA had to pay an eye-watering amount of money after broadcasting false statements. As rare as those kinds of incidents are, just as we all have our own biases, the various media channels also harbour biases, some more so than others.

One simple rule to follow is to expect public service broadcasters to be more neutral in terms of bias, at least in true democratic societies. The BBC in the UK and PBS in the USA are two examples of media companies that are at least in part funded by the taxpayers and are designed to be free of any external influence. If you genuinely want as close to unbiased news as possible, public service broadcasters are almost certainly the best sources of neutral-ish news.

I say neutral-ish because the news they broadcast is created by people and we know people are biased. Considering that journalists generally don’t enter the profession seeking to make their fortune, arguably it’s only natural that they’re more likely to lean to the left when left to operate without a firm defined agenda from those above them. While that’s not a perfect situation, in societies where almost all privately owned media is right-leaning, it does still provide an essential counterpoint.

Both the BBC and PBS have faced allegations of bias, and often by the politicians who can ultimately exercise control over them. This should be no surprise. It’s just a repeat of trying to convince people these channels can’t be trusted. With public broadcasters, politicians have an extra tool to play with, highlighting the fact that taxpayers’ money goes towards these broadcasters and trying to undermine the support for these broadcasters among those who fund them and benefit from the neutrality.

We’re seeing this kind of reaction as I write this with regard to NPR in the US following the resignation of their journalist Uri Berliner who had published a piece critical of NPR’s bias. The broadcaster has been seen as having a liberal bias for just about forever, but despite that, in 2011 their audience self-described themselves as 26% conservative, 23% middle of the road and 37% liberal (I assume the other 14% expressed no political leaning).²³ In Berliner’s 2024 article, he claimed those figures had changed to 11% conservative, 21% middle of the road and 67% liberal in 2023.²⁴ Arguably, NPR’s actual reporting isn’t the main source of the bias, but the bias appears in the editorial choices that affect the stories they cover. So they may completely ignore some stories and focus disproportionately on others.

Of course, privately owned media tends to drag the neutral-to-left bias way across to the right. Much private media is owned by hugely wealthy individuals who ensure a more right-leaning bias runs through the reporting. What’s the point in owning a newspaper or TV channel if it attacks the wealthy and advocates for the general population? The one reason for buying media businesses is to use them to convince the poor that things that would make their lives better are actually dreadful ideas that would make their lives much worse.

The demand by those on the right for public funding to be removed from organisations that don’t meet the demands of neutrality isn’t unreasonable. Such services are meant to serve all members of society, not just those whose political beliefs align in a specific way.

However, if the American politicians making such calls are really interested in the truth being reported, shouldn’t they be using public funding as leverage to move NPR back to a neutral position? Or does the prospect of being held accountable by a truly neutral media channel worry them too much to consider that?

Autocracies don’t tolerate free media, because they know that whoever controls the media controls the truth. Of course, politicians in democracies don’t enjoy that direct control of the media, so the best they can usually manage is to try and convince the people that specific media channels shouldn’t be trusted.

Power-up With Fact Checkers

While sniffing out bias in different sites is an important skill to develop and will become easier the more you do it, you’re not alone.

Firstly you can look for sites that concentrate on revealing the general bias of publishers, such as Allsides²⁵ and Media Bias/ Fact Check²⁶. They use different methods to assess the existence of bias, both of which may be subject to bias too, so looking at the opinions of both to see if they largely agree may be helpful. For example, as of 24 March, 2024, Allsides rate The Epoch Times as “Lean Right” and MBFC rates them as “Right” which shows a broad-ish agreement between them.

I picked The Epoch Times as an example there so I can sidetrack briefly to illustrate how the media can tell the truth, while not quite telling the truth. Sometime after 23:13 18 August, 2023, the About Us page²⁷ on their site was updated to a new version²⁸. The new version, that is still current as I write this 24 March 2024, has a new section with the heading “Why #1 Trusted Media” which quotes an Allsides survey from August 2020 that rated The Epoch Times as “Center”. That survey appears to have been unpublished now, probably because it was replaced by a more recent survey from May 2022 that rated The Epoch Times as “Lean Right”, though visually the scale had them closer to the “Right” than “Center”

Doesn’t it seem odd to you that when editing a page on their site in August 2023 to explain why they can be trusted, The Epoch Times ignored a survey from 2022 and instead used data from an older survey from 2020?

Wouldn’t a trustworthy source use the most recent information available? Surely, the more recent survey would be more relevant and accurate, wouldn’t it? So, why do you think they chose to use the older survey?

Anyway, let’s move on from that little bit of sidetracking.

You can also fact-check specific stories. Go to your favourite search engine and search for “news fact-checking sites” or similar and you’ll be presented with results for lists of fact-checking sites, articles on how to verify news stories and links direct to many of the biggest fact-checking sites. Just browsing some of the fact-checking sites can be fascinating as you see the various stories shared online and how they may have developed from a thread of truth into something quite fantastical.

You can also search for fact-checking articles on specific stories. Just adapt a search like “COVID vaccines myocarditis fact check” to whatever story you’re interested in to look for relevant fact-checking articles.

Obviously, you need to be aware that bias can also slip into sites that claim to fact-check. This may be less of an issue with the larger better-known sites²⁹, but it may be the case when searching for fact-checking articles on specific stories which may bring up results from lesser-known sites. Keep it in mind and always ensure that sites are linking to supporting evidence to back their claims about the truth or otherwise of a story.