Liberalism - Confirmation Bias

Since last summer I’ve been taking on a number of studies on journalism and modern media.  For the last three decades I’ve worked with some tremendous representatives of the media – journalists, broadcasters (radio and television), producers, photographers, corporate media executives and community newspaper activists.  And the locales have been fascinating: Africa, Guatemala, Bangladesh, devastating fires (from a 30-year fire career), the London Food Bank, and, of course, politics.  My respect for the media runs deep and long – just as it has for politics.And so I feel a sense of empathy for the struggles the Canadian media are enduring in these past few years.  I’ve come to understand that, while the media has changed exponentially over a decade, it is actually citizens themselves, voters included, who have changed even more dramatically.Experts tell us that our brains are particularly biased in ways that lead us to see the world in terms of opposites – good and bad, Liberal or Conservative, individual or social, nature or nurture.  And they say the greatest of all is “us” versus “them.”  So it’s natural, even understandable, but in a modern democracy, a troubling portend.  That beautiful writer F. Scott Fitzgerald thought that the test of a first-rate intelligence was the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still function without prejudice.  That seems laudable to me, and forms part of my reasoning for non-partisanship.Psychologists call it “confirmation bias” – a term referring to how we arrive at opinions so quickly so that we don’t have to hold two ideas in our heads for any length of time.  I believe that this particular habit represents the greatest challenge to media and politics today – not money, or votes, or corporatism.We are also told by these same experts that when our minds get overwhelmed with information, instead of tuning out, we get stimulated by portions of what we are hearing, watching, or listening to, to the exclusion of the rest.  In a time when our news came in the form of a morning paper or through the evening news with a trusted anchor, we could chew on it, accept its source, and talk about it with some coherence at the workplace the next day.  Today that can’t be done.  Such much information is heading our way, often through numerous venues at once, that psychologists tell us we get stimulated in the emotional side of our brain as opposed to the rational portion.I think this is what happened to the modern citizen, and politicians and media representatives are buying it, as opposed to fighting for more a more objective public space.  Putting it together: if we all have an affinity for “us” versus “them,” but don’t have time to hold that at bay through reasoned reflection and debate, then we’re in for tough times because Canada is such a diverse country that natural prejudice unchecked will lead to a dysfunctional citizenry and electorate.This takes us back to why citizens find false absolutes so terribly seductive.  You don’t have to work on it.  The search for true debate and understanding conflicts with our need for certainty and to be right.  When the information coming my way seeks to stimulate that emotional portion of my mind through endless images, sounds, and often bias, and I don’t have the time to sort through it all, I revert back to “us” versus “them.”Canada once held this divisive urge in check by the building of strong and tolerant institutions, a responsible media, the need for education, and the kind of federalism that invited each region to deal with the other respectfully.  That is now breaking down.  We now distrust government, media, corporations, religious institutions, cultural organizations, to a degree unlike anything previous.  And there are now some among us who see this as an opportunity to push conflagrations to a new level, because, for the present at least, there is economic or political advantage to it.  To do so they most often resort to absolutism and propaganda.  The availability of the new digital media only makes it more lucrative and less accountable for them.This is the new world today’s more traditional media encounters and has to reach – all this in a massively competitive market.  Attention is now the prize, not detached, objective information for citizens to judge things by.  And yet providing society with such tools was why liberal democracy provided protections for the Fourth Estate in the first place.  It is charged with assisting citizens to acquire the tools to help them to grasp the point of view of another, to follow an argument, to expand the boundaries of understanding and debate.  This might sound somewhat hokey and dated – kind of like democracy itself – and yet they are guidelines that are still to be applied today.  The key to all that is progressive in society is not the media or the politicians.  It is citizens that form the base of the democratic order, and if they are slipping into an “us” versus “them” state, then there is some solid work that has to be done.  We can start by telling the truths that have to be said and by countering those who would seek to pit us against one another.