This thesis attempts to more fully understand the factors that contribute to the prevalence of misinformation and counterfactual beliefs in the digital age, and the ability and limits of traditional journalism to correct them.
It is self-evident that many widely accepted beliefs today are demonstrably untrue, along with widespread skepticism about things that are demonstrably true. The persistence of far-fetched ideas can be surprisingly enduring and stubbornly resistant to even a frontal assault employing undisputed facts and iron-clad logic.
By example:
Shortly after joining NPR as a newscaster for All Things Considered in 2011, I received a letter in the mail from a listener who enclosed what he said was a sticker for my cubicle at NPR. The sticker, blue with white letters, said simply, “Show Me the Plane Hitting the Pentagon.”
It is self-evident that many widely accepted beliefs today are demonstrably untrue, along with widespread skepticism about things that are demonstrably true. The persistence of far-fetched ideas can be surprisingly enduring and stubbornly resistant to even a frontal assault employing undisputed facts and iron-clad logic.
By example:
Shortly after joining NPR as a newscaster for All Things Considered in 2011, I received a letter in the mail from a listener who enclosed what he said was a sticker for my cubicle at NPR. The sticker, blue with white letters, said simply, “Show Me the Plane Hitting the Pentagon.”
Figure 1 - Bumper sticker mailed to author
The listener was a doubter, one of many who don’t believe a
plane crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, and in support of his
disbelief, he quoted my own words to me from a report I gave on CNN that day,
saying he thought they were a “fair reflection” of my “true experience.”
The brief excerpt he cited from a longer extemporaneous
report delivered live on CNN late in the day was this: “From my close-up inspection, there’s no evidence of a plane crashing
anywhere near the Pentagon…”
He said some not very nice things about my journalistic
abilities and lack of moral courage, and he accused me of not having the guts
to tell “the real story” of what happened.
This was 10 years after the event. He wrote, “Believe me when I say, I am only
one of literally millions of people who are onto it,” (the coverup). The writer
is just one of dozens of self-described “9/11 truthers” with whom I’ve had some
kind of personal interaction over the years, who remain convinced the version
of events reported by the media is a lie and that the September 11 attacks
were, in effect, an “inside job.”
It is true if you do an Internet search for “Jamie
McIntyre” and “9/11” a video clip of me uttering those exact words, “there’s no evidence of a plane crashing
anywhere near the Pentagon,” will come up as the top result. And to my
chagrin, that snippet, which was taken wildly out of context, has over the
years been deliberately misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misreported to
advance a false narrative of the events of September 11, as well as to raise
specious questions about the widely-accepted official account.
In my role as a reporter at CNN, I did a series of stories
attempting to bring more facts to the story and placing my words from September
11 in their proper context. I posted pictures of the plane wreckage.[1] I profiled people who were
debunking 9/11 myths. I even engaged some of the skeptics directly, talking to
them by phone, explaining how my words had been distorted. But to my surprise,
in all the years since September 11, I have yet to convince a single doubter of
the falseness of the various alternative narratives. I could not find any
evidence that any mind was changed by my efforts.
It would seem that correcting the record on something as
straightforward as to whether a commercial airliner with 64 people on board,
which no one disputes took off from Washington’s Dulles Airport, ended its
flight in a fireball at the Pentagon would be a relatively uncomplicated
task. After all there are radar tracks,
eyewitness reports, calls from passengers on the plane, wreckage at the site,
human remains, and no plausible alternative explanation for what happened to
the plane.
While polls indicate a majority of Americans accept what
would appear to be the obvious truth of the account in the U.S. government
official 9/11 Commission Report, the fact that a sizable minority still believean alternative narrative raises questions about whether facts can win in
today’s digital marketplace, where all points of view can seem equally valid. [2]
My small part in this social phenomenon, in which
intelligent and often sincerely motivated people perpetuate a clearly
preposterous alternate theory of what happened, and then have it accepted by
tens of thousands, if not millions of people, prompted my interest in the power
of facts, and more specifically authoritative fact-based journalism to inform
public beliefs. As Thomas Patterson observes in his 2013 book, Informing the News,
It is a
short step from misinformation to mischief… It is nearly impossible to have
sensible public deliberation when large numbers of people are out of touch with
reality. Without agreement on the facts, arguments have no foundation on which
to build. Recent debates on everything from foreign policy to the federal
budget have fractured or sputtered because of a factual deficit.[3]
This thesis focuses on a single well-documented event, the
September 11, 2001, attack on the Pentagon, because it illustrates both ends of
the spectrum in the search for truth.
On the one hand, an exhaustive investigation by a
bipartisan panel of disinterested parties established conclusively what the
evidence supports, regarding the September 11 attacks. Yet all the facts,
testimony and extensive documentation did nothing to resolve the doubts of
skeptics and conspiracy theorists who found the mountain of evidence
unpersuasive.[4]
This raises the question in my mind: how is it that the trail of such clear and
convincing evidence can lead thinking people to such different destinations?
The ramifications of this persistence of misinformation are
profound, not just for putting to rest a single conspiracy theory, which has
been debunked by everyone from CNN to the editors of Popular Mechanics, but also for larger and more important issues of
our day, such as climate change and vaccine safety. [5] The same faulty logic,
muddled thinking, and hidden agendas that are used to undermine belief in the
government account of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon can be found in attacks
on many other questions which have largely been resolved by science.
There is, of course, always room for doubt, and healthy
skepticism is an important part of critical thinking, something scientist
Dennis R. Trumble calls “normal scientific uncertainty.”[6] But in his book, The Way of Science, he also argues that
normal uncertainty is often twisted and exploited to create false doubt about
the “legitimacy of real scientific knowledge.”
Although
science makes no claim to knowledge that is absolute, the scientific process
has proven to be far and away the most open, direct, and dependable way there
is to tell the truth from fiction. And there has never been a time when making
that distinction has been more important. Now more than ever we need to
recognize that scientific literacy and critical thinking are not just tools for
professional scientists: they are basic life skills, as vital to our personal
and intellectual growth as reading, writing, and arithmetic.
In this thesis I will resist the temptation of some to
dismiss those with unconventional or counterfactual beliefs as “true believers”
or “dyed-in-the-wool fanatics” who can’t change their minds and won’t change
the subject. In my personal dealings with 9/11 skeptics I have found that not
to be the case. Most are highly intelligent, well-informed, and passionate
debaters. They often see themselves as genuine “truth-seekers,” who believe
they are being lied to by their government, big business, and the news media.
It is important to keep in mind that rejection of the
current scientific consensus or mistrust of the government are not, in and of
themselves, irrational traits, nor necessarily any indication of giving in to
conspiratorial thinking. Scientific consensus does change, and often
dramatically and unexpectedly. For instance, it is now believed that dietary
fat does not lead to obesity, contrary to what we were told in the 1980s and
1990s.[7] And governments do in fact
lie, as in the now infamous 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, the “cassis belli” of
the Vietnam war.
On August 5, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson told the nation
in a televised address that “United States ships on the high seas” had been the
targets of an unprovoked attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats.[8] History would later show
that was a lie, and not just an untruth, but a knowing falsehood.[9]
In the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2002, many things the
U.S. government stated as fact turned out not to be accurate. Investigative
journalist Charles Lewis was part of a team of reporters and researchers
working for the Center for Public Integrity.
The
researchers documented what they judged to be at least 935 false statements
made by either President George W. Bush or seven top officials of his
administration. Hence the title of his
2014 book, 935 Lies.[10]
Lewis, a self-described “professional truth seeker,” shares
some of the sensibilities and profound mistrust of government of the so-called
conspiracy theorists:
Politicians,
captains of industry and their zealous aides too often resemble circus barkers,
shilling for attention and advantage with little regard for accuracy or
veracity, using the press and the news media, not to enlighten but to bamboozle
the public in pursuit of votes, profits and power. When necessary they even
employ the wiles of deception to conceal, disguise or justify unseemly and
sometimes outright criminal behavior.
If a well-respected journalist such as Lewis has such a low
opinion of the “facts” that come from the government’s official versions of
events, who can blame the average citizen for being predisposed to disbelieve
their leaders, along with the media that often parrot those leaders’
self-serving deceptions?
For journalists and the public at large, the question
becomes: when does a healthy skepticism cross the line into an unwholesome
cynicism that creates an impregnable barrier which no facts can penetrate?
In 1919, in what is considered by many to be one of the
greatest opinions in American law, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in dissent: "the ultimate good desired is better reached by free
trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get
itself accepted in the competition of the market." [11]
This notion that all opinions are welcome, and that in the
marketplace of free expression the most valid will rise to acceptance, is an
important underpinning to the democratic system. Good government requires an
informed and enlightened populace, and one might well argue that significant
belief in false narratives undermines that bedrock principle.
In his book, On
Rumors, Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein maintains that for some rumors
the marketplace simply does not work as an antidote, or is at best an
incomplete corrective. “Far from being the best test of truth,” he writes, “the
marketplace can ensure that many people accept falsehoods, or that they take
mere fragments of lives, or small events, as representative of some alarming
whole. The problem is serious and pervasive, and with the growing influence of
the Internet and new kinds of surveillance, it seems to be increasing.”[12]
The reasons rational people may believe irrational,
illogical, or unproven narratives are many and varied, and involve
psychological phenomena beyond the scope of a single paper. So for this thesis,
I will examine a single persistent alternate narrative involving the September
11, 2001, terrorist attack on the Pentagon, and examine how the false narrative
was constructed, how it survives sophisticated and reasoned attempts at
debunking, and what that suggests for the future of fact-based journalism.
Plan of Thesis
In my introduction, I have outlined how I first became intrigued
by this thesis topic and why I decided on a semi-autobiographical approach. I
was in the Pentagon on September 11, and I experienced firsthand how
unknowingly and unwittingly my words, taken out of context, became a small cog
in an international conspiracy-theory generating machine. It was this direct
experience that set me on a quest to better understand how what I experienced
influenced others in ways I would never have imagined.
In my second chapter, I explore how the myth of an “inside
job” at the Pentagon started and how it grew over time, like a snowball
gathering speed and mass as it rolls downhill. I demonstrate how my
extemporaneous and seemingly innocuous choice of words in my description of the
crash scene at the Pentagon became part of a “zombie” theory that would defy
all attempts to drive a stake through it. The “untruth” lives on today, more
than a decade after the events.
In Chapter 3, I look at what attempts were made to correct
the record, including my own efforts as a CNN correspondent to do stories
debunking the conspiracy theories and to bring facts to bear on nonsensical and
illogical beliefs. I also examine how a much more comprehensive and exhaustive
attempt at debunking by the editors of Popular Mechanics has met a similar
unsatisfactory result.
Chapter 4 begins to unravel the “why.” Why do people
believe counterfactual narratives, such as the myths surrounding the Pentagon
attack, long after they have been thoroughly and definitively debunked? I
review the literature and scientific research into how and why we fool
ourselves into believing fantastic narratives unsupported by facts. The
surprising findings indicate we are not the logical rational creatures we think
we are.
Sometimes we fool ourselves. At times we are fooled by others, sometimes
deliberately, sometimes because others have fooled themselves and take us along
for the ride. In Chapter 5, I examine the literature on how messages are
crafted in ways that trick our brains into thinking they are plausible, the
tactics and techniques of agitprop and propaganda, and how they add to the
overall confusion about what is true and what is not. I use the research to better understand the
science behind why intelligent people can hold illogical beliefs, such as the
idea that a plane took off September 11 and vanished into thin air at the same
time a missile from nowhere hit the Pentagon.
In Chapter 6, I present and evaluate three different
strategies for countering and correcting misinformation in the digital age. The
first is improved journalism and journalism training that is aimed at producing
a product that better informs the public. The second proposed strategy is
tougher laws that would in theory provide a “chilling effect” against
deliberate deception and mischief. And third is the rise of independent
fact-checkers, who attempt to arbitrate disputes on what is accurate, and what
is misleading.
In my concluding Chapter 7, I take all the information I
have gathered about the lifespan of misinformation, the limits of corrective
efforts, the psychology of human beings, and the empiricism of the scientific
method, and I try to draw a larger conclusion about what, if anything, can be
done to bring beliefs back in line with reality. The answer, as one might suspect, is that
there is no quick fix, no magic bullet that will transform the members of
society into high-level critical thinkers.
But I conclude that the answer does lie more with educating the
consumers of news and stressing media literacy, rather than trying to correct
everyone who is wrong about something important on the Internet.
[1] Jamie McIntyre, “The Immortal 9/11 Conspiracy,” Line of Departure, September 11, 2010. http://lineofdeparturearchive.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-immortal-911-conspiracy-by-jamie.html
[2] Thomas Hargrove and Guido
H. Stemple. “Was 9/11 an ‘inside job’?” Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, August 2, 2006.
The poll conducted by Ohio University found 36
percent percent of national survey of 1,010 respondents said it is "very
likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either
participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or took
no action to stop them. Twelve percent suspected the Pentagon was struck by a
military cruise missile rather than by an airliner captured by terrorists. http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Was-9-11-an-inside-job-1210643.php
[3] Thomas Patterson, Informing
the News, The Need For Knowledge-Based Journalism (New York: Vintage, 2013),
4-5.
[4] The 9/11 Commission Report,
Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United
States, Official Government Edition, 2003.
[5] David Dunbar and Brad Reagan, Debunking
9/11 Myths, Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts (New York:
Hearst, 2006).
[6] Dennis R. Trumble, The Way
of Science, Finding Truth and Meaning in a Scientific Worldview (New York:
Prometheus, 2013), 14.
[7] Bryan Walsh, “Ending the War on Fat,” Time Magazine, June 12, 2014.
[8] Lyndon Johnson - Report on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, August 4,
1964, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Video Courtesy
The LBJ Presidential Library. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx8-ffiYyzA
[9] Charles Lewis, 935 Lies, The
Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity (New York:
Perseus, 2014), 7.
[10] Lewis, 935 Lies, xiii.
[11] Oliver Wendell Holmes, Abrams v. United States Dissenting Opinion, November 10, 1919, 3. http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0250_0616_ZD.html
[12] Cass Sunstein, On Rumors:
How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009), 10.
