Opinion journalism keeps the lights on. But at what cost? | Alice Dreger | Big Think

It's important for us to know what's real in the world, and if we're going to be making decisions about our own lives or about healthcare policy, environmental policy, what to eat, what to do in terms of medications, we need to know what reality is – that way we're not constantly smacking ourselves up against it.

It is true, certainly in politics, that it can be very difficult to get people to agree on basic facts, but I think it is possible in some circumstances to basically turn to scholars and experts in fields and ask them to try to help adjudicate what is real and what is false.

And increasingly, because of the polarization within politics, there are more and more think tanks that are on both the right and the left that are actually very serious about facts because they're worried about this kind of denigration into a situation where everybody just believes what they want to believe.

I think we're about to see a big corrective. I mean, the fact that you're even asking these questions suggests to me that we're seeing a corrective where people are interested in trying to get closer to reality.

And I actually see that on the right as well, within scholarship that is right of center, within foundations that are right of center. There certainly are some on both extremes that are interested just in yelling their idea, whether or not it's real; there are various people who come to mind, but there's more and more interest in trying to do the corrective and trying to understand what's serious and real.

We see this, for example, with conservatives becoming very concerned around climate change. We see this, I think, on the left with regard to people who have historically said patients should have full autonomy beginning to think about, well, what does that mean when patients have false knowledge?

When, for example, they think the measles vaccine is very dangerous when science suggests that it is not very dangerous? When they think that doing placenta treatments on their skin is somehow important and safe and scientific when it's really not.

So I think that corrective is helping. How do we as individuals understand what is true? It is really hard. There is so much noise and there are so many things that look convincing that are not convincing.

That's a relatively new thing in history to have the level at which people are able to produce things that look real and high level, high quality, high scholarly levels that are not real is kind of terrifying. So there are fake journals that look real, there are fake news stories, as we know, that appear to be real, and it becomes increasingly difficult to understand what is real.

For the average person, it's very hard to know what to trust, but there are some trusted places like, for example, Wikipedia, Snopes, various places that do fact-checking. There are various newspapers that do fact-checking as well; factcheck.org, for example, is another place.

But then in order for those places to survive, it's really clear that people have to financially support them so that people can do that work, and it's hard to convince people to support nonpartisan fact-checking work because people have been taught to favor, with their clicks and their dollars and their like buttons, to favor opinion that they agree with.

It's very rare for people comparatively to forward actual articles compared to forwarding opinion pieces. So what we see is that the kinds of things that come under your nose because your friends are sharing it or your colleagues are sharing it is much more often opinion than facts.

We don't have the idea that we should stick a like on something that's just factual, forward it to a friend if it's simply factual. We want the opinion analysis of it that agrees with our opinion of what the facts mean, and that's the thing we forward.

And I don't know how to solve that problem other than to say if people with money don't start supporting fact-checking systems, then fact-checking systems will become increasingly rarer.

So the newspaper I run in East Lansing does political fact-checking. When the mailers com...