Amazingly, it seems, that as adults we’re being re-introduced into the notion that lying, misleading or misinforming should come with consequences. Craig Silverman recently shared his experiences at the CUNY event that was focused on the fact-checking movement. In one of Craig’s final points he had this thought:

That said, the concept of exacting a cost for lying is appealing, and perhaps a good way to increase the impact of fact checking. One researcher at the event said “there is research that suggests people abandon behaviors and beliefs when there is a very large social cost associated with them.

It’s as if once we become adults, we regress in our understanding of the need to be truthful and accurate, or that it’s somehow unacceptable to say “I don’t know” for fear of appearing uninformed. Perhaps it’s in our human nature to need a consequence to remind us that speaking about matters with which we know little to nothing about, in a manner that leads others to believe we know everything about what we are saying, is dishonest at its core.

In a later piece, Silverman refers to AP moving their fact-checking efforts beyond just politics (really, fact-checking was just focused on politics?) and mentions that the AP didn’t begin fact checking political ads until 1992. The immediate question that comes to mind is “what was anyone doing before this?” But the more disturbing consequence of this (if indeed true and accurate) is that means we’ve had less than 2 decades worth of fact-checking in our news, information and journalism. This is not to say that corroboration is meaningless, but until we grapple with the problem of holding people accountable to the veracity of their statements, we won’t see improvements in the general accuracy of our discourse.

Politifact’s recent award for 2011’s “Lie of the Year” has resulted in a backlash that really should have been easy to see coming. When you put the spotlight on a specific assertion or claim, you are teeing up the response from those who might disagree. Cries of bias, agenda, tilts and leans are the guarantee when the focus is on the “fact”. Until the public shifts their attention to the vetting process, understanding it and directing their accolades/criticisms to those who execute reliably in the process, we will never get away from the race to discredit. We will never realize a net positive result that allows us to move forward on policy, debate and even scientific discovery.

Shining the light on a peer reviewed vetting process can help us understand that it’s not the origination of content that matters, but rather the ability for others to independently verify claims and assertions that make the content valuable. Creating an award like Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” creates an environment where the entire fact-checking process is undermined as we recently witnessed with Krugman’s declaration that Politifact is dead.

If we are willing to shift the focus to the fact-checking process, and reward the reliability and savvy of those who engage in the activity on everyone’s behalf, we move away from the very nature of agenda and bias and move towards the universal desire to understand fact from fiction, to engage in a dialogue where it’s not about being right or wrong, but working together to uncover the truth so that we can debate productively, not in circles.

We all make mistakes. No one is perfect, nor should we expect anyone to be. This includes the mainstream media. As much as they produce, it’s not wonder that they are such an easy target for mistakes and errors. Producing content for a ravenous audience that expects a constant churn in content in near real-time is a task that is only thanked in most cases by advertising dollars. Vetting takes time and the obvious dilemma is running with something that is likely to be accurate and be first or take the extra time to vet the accuracy and miss out on the ability to make any meaningful money via impression or click metrics.

What isn’t excusable is an absolute lack in acknowledging errors or having a serious policy to correct them. Journalism’s ethical principles shouldn’t end once a story is published. Injecting misinformation into reporting, op-eds or blogs is no less the responsibility of the author of the piece as a mistake made by cited source. In fact, it’s arguable that such an error is of greater consequence. A chance to catch the error has been lost and perpetuating the mistake only lends to its perceived validity.

The websites of The Economist, Foreign Policy, the Singapore Straits-Times, The Times of India, World Politics Review, The Moscow Times, Voice of America and Foreign Affairs have neither visible corrections pages nor prominent corrections policies, to list a few – Justin Martin, Behind the News

The lack of serious policies for error correction is nothing short of appalling. The incentive to rectify mistakes is left to the court of public opinion, a court whose jury has proven to have a very short term memory. The only true incentive with any lasting power, are the financial ones. But therein lies the problem we all know too well. Financial decisions create a bias that is hard to ignore, even if we wanted to. The incentives are the root of the problem. What we need is an incentive that shifts who is financially rewarded for vetting information.

A pat on the back is not much competition to billions of dollars in revenues.

When reading about the reckless assumptions on the tragedy in Norway covered in this post by Craig Silverman for CJR’s “Behind the News”, it seems prudent that the influential class would decry the lack of professionalism and demand forms of apology from Jeffrey Goldberg. But what does scolding and ethical posturing accomplish for the audience? Are we guaranteed something like this won’t happen again? Of course not. So what, then, is the end result? Correcting mistakes, while important, doesn’t exactly put the genie back the in bottle.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on -Winston Churchill

What is the appropriate recourse for correcting a mistake? Does anyone really go back to every article they’ve read to check for updates, apologies or editor’s corrections? Not likely. But often times, people will go to the trouble of leaving a comment that either points out the mistake, or attempts to provide correct information. Why not reward those who correct mistakes and penalize the ones who make them? Keep score long enough and we can begin to improve the signal-to-misinformation ratio by rewarding those who continue to provide consistent, valuable information that is high in veracity.

Until the platform from which one may influence the story or conversation is put at risk, there’s really little incentive to change.

Credibility is surprisingly a popular topic among the Twitterrati. From consistent laments to rants, a vast majority come across as passionate individuals searching for answers. This begs the question: Is Twitter a credible source of information regarding credibility?

By Jay Rogers

Kirsten A. Johnson researched the effect of Twitter posts on students’ perception of instructor credibility. She assigned 120 undergraduates from Elizabethtown College to one of three groups: a group that viewed social tweets, one that viewed scholarly tweets, and one that viewed a combination of social and scholarly tweets.

“The results showed that the students who saw only the social tweets of the instructor rated that instructor as more credible than the group that saw only the scholarly tweets. Interestingly, there was no differences found between the group that saw the combination social-scholarly tweets and the other two groups.”

Johnson argues because Twitter provides an option for teachers to take the conversation beyond the classroom, thus enhancing the personal interaction between the teacher and student and allowing them to develop a deeper trust with each other. Think of it as a way to prolong those one on one conversations that are stilted and limited during class periods

However in this case, one could argue that the strengthened relationship through Twitter, not the platform itself, was what caused the difference between the perceived trustworthiness of the different teachers. The students already had a preconceived notion of the ‘Tweeter’, their teachers whom they interact and learn from in daily life. Hence the social nature of Twitter only served to enrich that personal connection, not establish it.

The Yahoo! Research team and the University of Chile carried out a joint research project on information credibility on Twitter.They focused on the possible ‘credibility’ signals given off by Twitter ‘trending topics’ and utilized human assessments on the credibility of various samples of Twitter postings.

In an experiment, the headline of a news item was presented to the participants in several different ways: a traditional news website, a blog, and a post on Twitter.

“Users rated the same news headline significantly less credible when presented on Twitter.”

This distrust may be attributed to the fact that perceptions of credibility online is strongly related to style-related attributes and the ties of an individual’s social network.

Misinformation is also more likely to go viral and undiscovered more quickly through Twitter. On November 2010, someone hacked the Twitter account of the presidential advisor for disaster management for Indonesia. The hacker then proceeded to post false tsunami warnings, right after a tsunami caused the death of more than 100 Indonesian citizens.

Trusting the information you receive on Twitter is really a leap of faith. Misinformation arrives to us out of maliciousness or good intention but as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg said ‘ The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.”

How credible is Twitter as a source of information about credibility? Until something changes, digest the information received on Twitter at your own risk.

In keeping a close eye on the fact-checking movement as possible inputs or signals in our effort to determine author credibilities, and indirectly content veracity, it is transactions like this one between Glenn Beck and Politifact that begs the question: Why hasn’t anyone realized the need to keep a running tally when it comes to who’s right and who’s wrong? Certainly even someone with an above average well of patience would eventually grow wary of contributors continuous effort to prove authors, news agencies and organizations who disagree with them wrong ad nauseum. If winning the argument stands alone as the net return for the effort put forth to dismantle the opposing point of view, is it really worth it in the end? Does winning the argument advance a movement, legislation, policy or merely satisfy one’s selfish need to be vindicated?

To discredit or mar an individual who’s opinions differ from our own should at the very least serve some sort of greater societal purpose. Who’s generally more reliably accurate on this topic? Which agency is more thorough in the vetting process? Even Politifact, serving as the fact checking agent in the above example, can be wrong. Who takes responsibility for informing all who have previously consumed the misinformation of the mistake? Is posting the correction and an apology enough, or should we expect more?

We should.

There is no reason to expect that as we consume new information that the accuracy and consistency of that information couldn’t be monitored on our behalf such that changes, alterations or new revelations are brought to us rather than waiting for us to find them. The vetting of information will always be at odds with getting information real-time. This doesn’t meant that we can’t improve the process, keeping tallies of who’s been historically more reliable as a means to differentiate information in real-time, while making necessary adjustments to keep the scoreboard as accurate as humanly possible.

I recently became aware of a workshop on credibility called WICOW, or the Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web. There’s a lot of good research that’s being done here and it’s encouraging to see that its being included in the International World Wide Web Conference too. There is a consistent theme however, that I find troubling in the accepted papers and other research related to their efforts. It is the idea that information and information sources both have credibility.

I find this to be a limiting view of the problem as it suggests that incredible sources are incapable of producing quality information, which just isn’t the case. Once information has been made public, that information can prove to be useful to a great many, regardless of the credibility of the source. There are plenty of instances where modern day sources of experts and academics can be wrong; even when given time for review and editing, e.g., even the Encyclopedia Britannica has its inaccuracies.

There needs to be a decoupling from the notion of credibility of information and its sources. Information must be measured on the accuracy it proves to hold through various vetting processes, while sources should be measured on the aggregation of the accuracy of the information they produce. This way I may one day find information that is highly accurate, regardless of the credibility of the source. As the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Verification in reverse is defined as the politicized unmaking of solid fact.

This term was introduced to me by Jay Rosen a couple of weeks ago while listening to the August 30th podcast of “Rebooting the News”. The term made me a little angry at first – I don’t like politics and the thought of being intentionally mislead for political gain will always boil the blood. I am aware that people will try to mislead the public for some type of gain but have always taken comfort in assuming that solid facts would be proved as such in the long-run. The longer people have to understand the truth about a story, the more that truth would become increasingly known. This is why I was shocked to hear the “Obama Muslim Myth” survey results from the Pew Research Center in August. The survey found that nearly one-in-five (18 %) of Americans now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. The fact that the American public has become increasingly inaccurate over an ~ 18 month period where the truth about Obama’s religion (Christianity) has been available to the public is alarming and a clear indication that our current tools and methods for determining accurate information are insufficient. One might expect a false statement to spread for a short period of time but the tools available to us (internet, television, newspapers, etc) should help us to correct these false statements in the long-run, not proliferate them.

The implication for this story is that we are worse off than when we started. Imagine this extended to other areas in our lives and accurate information that we based decisions and actions off of were false. Imagine a world where truths are slowly pushed aside to make room for misleading information leaving all of us worse off as a result. We need to be able to prevent evolving fiction, the unraveling of facts over time (a term coined by HowTru’s founder Toma Bedolla), from happening in the future in order to live in a society where citizens are informed with accurate information that can enhance their lives.

If the current tools are not working for the public in a beneficial way, it is up to the public to come up with a solution. The HowTru community will hopefully play a small part in enabling people to quickly and effectively correct inaccuracies like the “Obama Muslim Myth” making verification in reverse and evolving fiction less relevant terms in the future.

About two months ago, Jay Rosen wrote a blog piece about his give-and-take with the mainstream media via Twitter where he was making an attempt to propose fact checking initiatives by the major networks competing in the Sunday Morning market. The gist of the piece is a recount of Rosen’s attempts to contact different parties associated with the production of NBC’s Meet the Press in an effort to instigate fact-checking efforts by the network for the claims made by the guests on the show. The exchange, or at least Rosen’s decision to consolidate and publicize it, made the rounds within the blog-o-sphere and even onto the Colbert Report.

While David Gregory’s statements about vetting claims or statements made by guests of the show being the responsibility of the audience are disconcerting, the industry’s indication to their total lack of fact-checking is appalling. ABC immediately partnered with Politifact.com as a fact-checking effort to claims made on This Week. While the gesture is both appropriate and warranted, one has to ask the question: Do news programs, especially those of the major networks, really have to be prodded to follow up and fact check the content they publish? What purpose are these mainstream news agencies serving if not to use the access with which they are capable as the investigative journalistic facet of the press?

When these hosts sit across the table in an interview with vice presidents, members of Congress and experts from around the world, shouldn’t they drill down on the purported expertise of these people? The general public is likely to never get the opportunity to sit at the table with these “newsmakers” to ask questions, which is why so many people tune into these programs:

…“Meet the Press” remains the top-rated Sunday show, averaging 3.074 million viewers weekly in the fourth quarter of 2009…“This Week” and “Face the Nation” may take the top spot in either total viewers or the age 25-54 demographic. Both shows are not far behind: In the fourth quarter, they finished with 2.740 million and 2.618 million viewers, respectively. “Fox News Sunday” brought in 1.184 million viewers. – Politifact.com

If the MSM presumes millions of people are watching these programs so that they can spend their time fact-checking the claims made by guests, then what is their value add? How are they any different than a political ad campaign? The audience looks to these programs to provide a sense of perspective, relevance and veracity of the claims that are made on the show, or in previous statements made by guests. Why else do people gravitate towards networks that provide the perspective that most closely aligns with their world views? Hosts should be so well versed on the material that will be covered so that they can immediately counter or call-out any outlandish claim, statistic or debate tactic used by the guest…not in the “gotcha” style of questioning, but in the investigative journalism manner that we all look to these agencies to handle as the professionals in the field. What else are they being paid for? As Stephen Colbert alludes to, maybe we should just set our expectations a little lower and recognize that in the end, we’re on our own:

David Gregory has rejected this hare-brained scheme, saying “people can fact-check ‘Meet the Press’ every week on their own terms.” Thank you, David! It is not a Sunday host’s job to make sure his guests aren’t lying, any more than it’s a party host’s job to make sure the food isn’t poisoned. (applause..) …The host is there to tell his guests when it is their turn to talk. That is why NBC is currently grooming Gregory’s replacement: a chess timer.

Two of the largest cable news providers, Fox and CNN, have laid claim to the title of “most trustworthy” this year. Both reference recent polls to back up these claims (Fox / CNN) but how does the media or news agencies like them establish or develop trust and how do they define it? More importantly, how do we (the audience) define it?

The polls that Fox and CNN reference are wrought with obvious flaws. First, start with the numbers. Both polls included slightly more than 1,000 respondents. Compare this to the total combined cable news viewership of the 3 largest cable news providers (CNN + Fox + MSNBC): ~ 4,570,600 viewers. So the sample sizes of each poll are slightly more than 0.02% of the entire potential viewing audience (the polls direct people to make the distinction between “most trustworthy” or “do you trust ‘News Brand X’; yes or no”). In the case of the 60 minute/Vanity Fair poll the third significant player, MSNBC, wasn’t even an explicit option. This is like asking 10 people in your row at a packed NFL football game what beer they’re drinking and declaring your row’s most consumed beer to be the favorite of all NFL fans.

Second, it’s human nature to lean towards news that conforms with one’s own beliefs or views about their city, country and world. This is reflected in the polls mentioned above with Republicans heavily favoring Fox News and Democrats leaning considerably more towards CNN (and MSNBC in the Public Policy Polling survey).

“A generation ago you would have expected Americans to place their trust in the most neutral and unbiased conveyors of news,” Dean Debnam, president of Public Policy Polling, said in a press release. “But the media landscape has really changed and now they’re turning more toward the outlets that tell them what they want to hear.”

Perhaps this is the modern interpretation of the statement: most trustworthy. NYT Columnist Frank Rich alluded to as much in his latest article stating,

“most trustworthy” is [now] a relative term that is gradually losing its meaning as well as its commercial value.”

News agencies that continue to wrap factual reporting in subjective commentary that slant towards specific groups erodes the collective confidence of the audience in the abilities of the industry as a whole. Rich further states,

“[the] choice between news with distorted “facts,” Fox style, and the news-free “news” that can subsume its rivals is a lose-lose proposition, especially for a country at war.”

Without some meaningful metric with which to measure a news agency’s overall credibility, or to hold them accountable to (veracity of content), there’s no indication that the current slide into subjective news that the likes of Fox and MSNBC are pioneering will abate anytime soon. Trust should be based on accuracy, not conformity. A possible first step in the right direction is Veracious Entropy’s first project, HowTru? (recently covered in the ReadWriteWeb). Don’t forget to join!