There are a lot of truths out there. Just choose one that suits you.
By WES ALLISON
Published October 29, 2004
[Times photos: Bob Croslin]
For information without context, there’s no place like Times Square, where lights, words and images inundate the mind in a frenzied pitch, an example of the Information Age.
Jimmy Napoli, who leads historic tours of New York, says he gleans his news from various sources, then weighs it against what he believes to be true.
Is fear tearing us apart? Are we a less optimistic nation than we were three years ago? Has information overload crippled our democracy? Can youthful idealism survive this age of cynicism? In a series of four essays, we explore how our nation has changed between the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and this year’s presidential election. Part one Fear: One thing uniting the country is unease, but even that has a dividing line: Should we fear terror or the means to quell it?
Part two Information: There are a lot of truths out there. Just choose one that suits you.
Part three Optimism: Are we a less optimistic nation than we were three years ago?
Part four Idealism: Can youthful idealism survive this age of cynicism?
NEW YORK - We start our journey at America's other ground zero, at the noisy convergence of entertainment, news and commerce, where the streets are awash in words and images beamed down from electronic billboards, hung high on the sides of the towering buildings.
Cardinals romp over Dodgers, 10 Iraqis killed by bomb northwest of Baghdad, Howard Stern moving to satellite radio.
Sunny today, high of 60.
There is no context, only information. No knowledge, only facts. The challenge for the person standing there, or passing through, or just searching for the perfect pastrami on rye, is to decide what, if anything, to make of it all, and what to absorb or discard.
This is the challenge facing Chris Lilley at this moment. He stands at a corner in the heart of Times Square, across W 42nd Street from Conde Nast publishing and the ESPN Zone, across Broadway from the Dow Jones news crawler.
Fighter jets soaring across a giant TV screen suggest you join the Air Force. A big giraffe wants you to visit Toys "R" Us. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration wants you to see an exhibit on drugs and terrorism at its museum at Broadway and Seventh.
Lilley is 27, a college graduate who studied communications. He wears a Yankees cap and beat-up jeans and his job today is to hand out pumpkin-orange fliers inviting passers-by to the Comedy Central studios, just down the street, for the taping of a talk show hosted by satirist Colin Quinn. It is free.
Two young women accept a flier, but most people just pass, stone-faced. They are choosing to discard.
"It depends what they're looking for," Lilley says. "If they're looking for a free show, they might stop and pay attention. Since there's so much information, it's almost like people develop a selective hearing. There's just so much information, they just tune it out."
It's a theme these days, just tuning it out. As the nation stands on the verge of a bitter presidential election, after three years of blood and war that started with the fall of the twin towers a short cab ride from here, one of the most puzzling ironies about life in modern America is that we should be more informed than ever.
Futurists had predicted that unfettered access to the world of ideas brought by the golden age of information would prove immeasurably valuable to our democracy.
Yet there are few indications that it actually has.
Cheney and Edwards move to battleground state of Florida. Sadr signs cease-fire with Iraqi interim government. Turkey begins talks on entering EU.
What if we've mistaken information for knowledge? What if the advent of the Information Age has given people not only a better opportunity to spread truth, but misinformation?
What if the Information Age has been bad for democracy?
* * *
In the book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler wrote that the Information Age would be a boon to "direct democracy," because it "would strike a devastating blow against special interest groups."
Toffler, who foresaw our high-tech, service-based economy, said the new wave of information would allow citizens to do their own research, draw their own conclusions and keep closer tabs on their government. Lawmakers would hear directly from citizens. The dimming filters of traditional media would be lifted, and give way to light.
For many thinkers, it was a given that the Information Age would free us from the traditional gatekeepers, folks like Dan Rather and institutions like the New York Times.
And after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, polls showed that Americans developed a renewed interest in news and public affairs, an interest not seen since Watergate.
Yet 42 percent of Americans still believe deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found this month. That's despite statements by President Bush and countless reports that he wasn't.
Thirty-two percent still think Hussein actually planned the attacks, the poll found. Among supporters of Bush, the misinformation gap is even deeper: 72 percent believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or a program to build them, according to a new University of Maryland poll.
The poll also found 75 percent of Bush backers believe Hussein substantively helped al-Qaida, and 55 percent incorrectly think the 9/11 Commission came to the same conclusion.
That is misinformation on a grand scale about the most important events of our time.
It is hard to explain this.
Tom Patterson, a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government who studies the press, suggests it's not only easier these days to opt into the public affairs. It's also easier to opt out.
Well into the 1970s, as the Information Age was emerging, Americans had relatively little choice about where they got their information. Aside from local newspapers, consensus about what was important largely sprung from the evening news on the Big Three networks.
All three - CBS, ABC and NBC - aired the news weeknights at 6:30 p.m.
"You had a public that was sort of on the same page as to what the day's top events were," he said. "And the audiences were pretty large, because Americans have this TV addiction, so they watched - even if they weren't particularly interested in the news."
Since nothing else was on, 85 percent of Americans tuned in. Now it's less than 40 percent. Newspaper readership has been dropping, too.
Even Bush is unabashed about his disdain of the mainstream media. He has bragged about not reading the papers, except for the sports pages, because he doesn't like the "filters."
"The best way to get the news is from objective sources," Bush said last October, after expressing frustration with what he considered overly dour reports from Iraq. "And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."
* * *
Jimmy Napoli wears his long black hair pulled back into a ponytail, the way many Colonists did.
After work he sips a Samuel Adams lager at an Irish pub just beyond the lights of Times Square, where he reminds us that when American democracy was new, information was precious but far from pure.
Newspapers were often just tools for warring political factions. Thomas Jefferson used the Republican National Gazette to savage Alexander Hamilton; the Federalist Gazette of the United States savaged Jefferson for Hamilton.
By 1800, attacks by the Republican Aurora were wearing thin on President John Adams, prompting his wife, Abigail, to complain about "abuse, deception and falsehood" in the press.
Sound familiar?
Napoli, 40, lives in Hell's Kitchen and gives guided tours on one of the red double-decker buses careening through Times Square, $40 a ticket. He is thin, with capricious sideburns and tattoos of a bat on his back and a bat skeleton on his chest.
Now, along with sightseeing trips, Napoli leads a four-hour tour on Revolutionary-era history in New York. He knows his stuff, and he finds some disturbing parallels between the news today, and the news back then.
He discounts the Fox News Channel as too conservative, the New York Times as too liberal, and most network news as just too dippy. But he gets most of his news from the Times and Fox, and chuckles at the contradiction.
"It's terrible, I know," he said. Fox is entertaining, and "I go with the New York Times because at least I figure the Times will have more information, so there's a better chance of learning something."
When making decisions, he weighs what he reads and hears against what he believes might be true.
"But I also talk to people about it, and try to get other opinions. I may not be looking at things the right way, so I try to talk to friends and family and get other perspectives, too," Napoli said.
Not only must he decide what to listen to, but evaluating its quality is increasingly tricky, particularly with the Internet; 200 years ago, at least, Americans knew whose truth they were getting.
"It doesn't matter if information is everywhere if it's not good information," he said. "Otherwise, it's just as bad as the Aurora."
* * *
During the Republican National Convention in New York in August, many of the GOP delegates wandering Manhattan sported blue buttons declaring, "I don't believe the New York Times."
Meanwhile, Fox News played endlessly in the Republicans' meeting rooms, lounges - even the hotel elevators.
But to many of those who took to the streets to protest the Republicans, Fox was a mouthpiece for the administration. One afternoon, hundreds gathered outside Fox headquarters, just off Times Square, chanting "Shut the Fox up!" and waving signs like "Faux News."
The faux-Fox schism extended far beyond Times Square: Nationally, Nielsen Media Research found an estimated 3.9-million viewers watched the opening night of the Republican convention on Fox, nearly double the combined audience of its two main competitors, CNN and MSNBC.
The figures were essentially reversed for the Democratic convention in July, with CNN leading Fox on opening night.
Also covering the Republican National Convention was the Daily Show with Jon Stewart - an increasingly popular blend of fact and hyperbole, a sort of Doonesbury of the airwaves.
A survey this summer by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at the University of Pennsylvania, found that viewers of the Daily Show were far more likely to know the answers to questions about public policy and the presidential candidates than viewers of other leading late-night talk shows.
It's not clear whether they bring their knowledge to the Daily Show, or are gaining their knowledge from it. Still, millions of viewers see him as a source of information.
"You know what's really frightening?" Fox personality Bill O'Reilly asked Stewart. "You actually have an influence on this presidential election. That is scary, but it's true."
While some experts predict the emergence of a partisan media, similar to Europe's, polls at least confirm the political polarization of audiences: 35 percent of Republicans regularly watch the Fox News Channel, far more than any other network, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found.
Democrats, meanwhile, are far more likely to watch CNN.
And while conservatives are almost twice as likely to believe Fox as National Public Radio, liberals were twice as likely to believe NPR as Fox.
For conservatives, especially, distrusting the news is increasingly equated with patriotism. A popular T-shirt at Bush rallies is "Impeach the Media."
Or consider the presidential debate in Arizona, when Kerry tried to rebut Bush's claim that his health care plan was a giant government boondoggle.
Kerry, clearly exasperated, tried to address each point, citing news reports as proof.
The president turned to the camera and grinned. "In all due respect, I'm not so sure it's credible to quote leading news organizations about - oh, never mind."
* * *
Dr. Hilary Kornblith, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, contends the shift speaks to a desire deep within us - the yearning to hear what we already believe.
Kornblith, who specializes in bringing cognitive sciences like psychology to bear on philosophical theories about human nature, cited a well-known - and controversial - experiment conducted 25 years ago:
Researchers at Stanford University broke volunteers into two groups. One group believed the death penalty deters crime, and the other didn't. They then gave both groups a bunch of competing research on the matter.
The effect was ... zilch. After reviewing the data, members of each group were more convinced than ever that their views were right.
It seems they had discarded the data that challenged their belief, and instead absorbed the data that supported it. Participants also thought the studies backing their beliefs were most credible.
"When the populace is highly polarized on some issue, then the subtle evaluation of the data is not one (you're) likely to see," Kornblith said. The premise holds true whenever people gather and analyze information, especially about emotional topics.
Sound familiar?
Kornblith suggests that's why this election has so split the country: Thanks to the Information Age, it's easier than ever to validate your own view, and easier than ever to prove the other guy is an idiot.
But there's another side.
Dr. Jon A. Krosnick, a social psychologist who also teaches at Stanford, said other studies show just the opposite: Faced with information that challenges their views, people actually become more moderate.
"The truth is," he said, "we are not that stupid."
Instead, we're driven less by viewpoint and more by interests. Fox - like NPR or MTV News - most likely has done a better job covering the issues and angles its audience is most interested in, he said.
In a paper published last month, Jesse M. Shapiro, a Harvard economist, and Matthew Gentzkow of the University of Chicago business school offer another intriguing theory: In an effort to be perceived as fair and balanced, the media will tilt their news toward the views of their audience.
"Even if the firm believes that the truth contradicts these beliefs, it will be reluctant to report contradictory evidence because consumers may infer that the firm has inaccurate information," Gentzkow and Shapiro wrote.
Simply put, the media fear that telling the truth will damage their credibility.
* * *
In Times Square, stacks of the New York Daily News and the New York Post are disappearing from a newsstand as Chris Lilley offers his pumpkin-orange Colin Quinn fliers to passers-by. He reads the News, and those little circulars distributed free on the subway. If he needs to know something now, or has a particular question, he figures he can always Google it on the Internet. He doesn't bother with the Times, whose offices are four blocks away.
"The New York Times is going to give you all the details, which is fine if you want all the details," he says. "I don't need all that information. I just need the snippets."
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A few people accept Lilley's flier, but most hardly glance up. They stare ahead, eyes on some distant point, uninterested. He wonders how many people who do grab one actually read it. At least he has given them the option.
"Some people just take the fliers," he says. "I don't know if they're just being nice, or they just want to see what's going on, but I'd say most of the fliers just end up in the trash."
* * *
Times researcher Carolyn Edds contributed to this report. Wes Allison can be reached at allison@sptimes.com or 202 463-0577.
