(gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Utah Insight" is made possible by viewers like you, thank you.

- [Liz] Coming up next on "Utah Insight," we have more streams of information today than ever, so how do you make sure your stream of information is accurate?

- You know, misinformation typically talks in absolutes.

There is no always, there's no never in medical science.

- [Liz] With wars raging and a global pandemic, lives are at stake.

- And this is a time in our lives where we could've really disseminated information.

But in many respects it backfired on us.

- Learn how you can increase your media literacy and the best way to stop the spread of misinformation.

(gentle music) Welcome to "Utah Insight," I'm your host, Liz Adeola.

I've been around long enough to see the use of these replaced by the use of these.

Today, we can get more information faster.

But like the old "Monkey's Paw" tale or Jay-Z's "More Money, More Problems," more access to information has proven to beget get more issues.

Just check out this 2018 Pew Research survey that says that, "False rumors were 70% more likely to be retweeted, and reached the first 1,500 people six times faster than the truth.

And once misinformation and disinformation is spread, it is harder to debunk."

So on this episode, we're gonna talk about prebunking and other ways to combat false information.

And we have a great panel joining this discussion today.

I wanna introduce Marcie Young Cancio, who is an assistant professor of journalism and digital media at Salt Lake Community College.

Matthew LaPlante, an associate professor of journalism at Utah State University.

And also, Glen Mills, who is an anchor and reporter with ABC News.

Thank you all for being here.

Thank you so much for being here today.

I wanna start off the conversation talking about breaking news.

Glen, you deal with this a lot.

When big breaking news stories happen, like the shooting in Texas that we recently had, it seems to come with misinformation and rumors that spread so fast online.

What do you believe is behind that?

- Well, first off, I wanna commend you for finding an encyclopedia to start the show off.

That's impressive.

But I think there's just an innate desire within people to know what's happening.

What's happening, when it's happening now.

The news cycle today is seven days a week, 365 days a year, and people want information now.

So I think that desire leads to a lot of it.

And then, of course, the way things have evolved, the platforms that have come up over the years have also lended toward the ability to just go out and start saying stuff, whether that's the reality of what's happening on the ground or not.

But I think there's just a curiosity.

People wanna know what's happening.

And, of course, when you see a big issue and shooting, like we saw in Uvalde, people really wanna get to the bottom of that and figure out what's going on.

- Yeah, and it seems to spread so quickly.

People retweet, people share, thinking that they know the information.

And people can also get upset when their thoughts about what's true and what's factually correct is challenged by other people.

Matthew, what have you seen about this issue?

- Well, what Glen just said is people want to know quickly, but the other thing that's really inherent in all of us is we're all storytellers, we wanna tell quickly too.

All of us wanna be first.

There's this sort of thought about journalists that we wanna be first.

We wanna scoop the competition, we wanna be first.

That's absolutely true.

But that's not because it's something inherent journalism, that's something that's inherent to humans.

And what we have today is the capacity for everyone to be first, regardless of if they have the good information, the bad information, information that they know is not factual or information that they think is factual, but they're mistaken about, because we're all fallible too.

So we're all storytellers, and we're all storytellers with the capacity to tell these stories at a moment's notice, and we're all fallible.

That's a dangerous combination.

- Marcie, how did you control that when you were in that setting in a newsroom working in digital media and dealing with online news stories?

What was your, I guess, how would you deal with making sure that your team was getting the facts correctly and getting it out there quickly?

- Well, our teams would, in digital, I led digital teams, as you said, and our team would be the team within the newsroom.

So they were often working with reporters out in the field who were out there verifying information.

And so our team, because there is kind of a herd mentality when you have really, really big events, like the shooting in Texas, where every news organization from across the country, and many times, across the world, are descending on this town, and so everyone is getting their information from the same press conference.

They're going out to the community and talking to people.

We would also verify within the newsroom too.

So as information comes in quickly, we would try to install levels of protection to make sure that as this information's coming in quick and fast, and everyone is trying to rush to be first, trying to get it out quickly, that we're building in protections to make sure that we are verifying beyond just what's happening from the field to protect that, because there are no built-in times to fact-check and verify.

Like in the old day, I'm a former newspaper person, you would have an entire day before it would go to press.

And then, it wouldn't run until the next morning, so there were time to check it.

We don't have that luxury in this world, because of the expectation that information will be delivered immediately and fast.

- If I could just add to that though, it's still critical for journalists to make sure they are verifying and sending out information that is true and accurate.

And that's a difference I think from something you brought up, Matt, in this day where everyone's a journalist, everyone has their cell phone.

There's a code of conduct that journalists live by.

It's ingrained in us through our training through college, through the early days in the business, and as we continue to progress.

That's not the case for someone who just happens to be in the right place, at the right time, with their cell phone.

They don't necessarily have that same code or that same view of journalism.

And that's what we see today is people are just willing to throw anything out there, regardless of whether they get it verified and fact-checked or not.

- I like to have a societal-growth mindset on this.

I like to say, like, "That's not the case yet."

We're still in the early days of the social media revolution, right?

We haven't instilled, at a community level, these sorts of standards and those have to evolve over time.

And I think one of the roles that we can play as traditional journalists is to help people develop that as a community ethos that, "I'm going to check before I share.

I'm not going to let speed get in the way of factuality.

I'm going to make sure that before I share information, that I have done my due diligence and that it's ethical in many ways."

And does that mean that everybody has to adopt the Society of Professional Journalists' code of ethics?

No, it doesn't, right?

There's going to be a societal code of ethics that develops, and we're going to have to develop that organically.

It's going to take time, but we're still in the relatively early days of this era where everybody's a journalist.

- And without that, we have this situation where we don't know what's real and what's not coming out of certain situations.

And that was certainly the case with this shooting in Texas.

You know, we learn new information daily as it comes out.

But as it's happening, there's this sense that you don't really know what's true and what's not coming out of these scenes.

- Yeah, especially when the gatekeepers of information, like the police and authorities, have to switch up and change the information that they're giving to journalists to report.

And then, people say, "Well, yesterday you said it was this many, and today you're saying it's this many."

Or, "Yesterday, you said the security officer was inside the school."

And now we're finding out that they weren't on the grounds at the time that the shooter was there until later.

And so it's all of this that people get confused about, and then, they say, "This is why we can't trust the media and we can't trust news."

And then on top of that, with the people with their cell phones or people going online and creating their own blogs, it also seems like the public is getting confused as to what's trustworthy and what's just someone off the street reporting or writing an opinion piece.

Marcie, what do you say to your students to help them figure out the difference between those.

- Well, I mean, I did wanna make one quick comment about what Glen and Matt just said.

I think a lot of people don't understand or don't realize that, Matt referenced the Society of Professional Journalists' code of ethics, I think a lot of folks don't realize that journalists abide by a set of guidelines and of ethical rules that we follow.

Glen noted too, like, of course, he's going out and he is doing the best reporting.

He's checking for accuracy, for factualness, for truthfulness, paying attention to those red flags.

And journalists have a code, much like doctors take can oath.

We take an oath that doesn't necessarily have that same level, but journalists are following a very strict ethical code.

It's not like we go out and just report, and then see where it lands.

And I think that is a perception that as we've had this shifting conversation around trust in media, that a lot of folks don't understand that that ethical set of guidelines that journalists do follow to make sure that their reporting is sound, and solid, and good.

But the question about my students is I ask them to just all put on their critical thinking hat.

I teach, in addition to journalism courses, I teach media and society, which is focused largely in media literacy and knowing how to parse out good information from bad information, knowing the differences between misinformation and disinformation and fake news.

I think we use those words interchangeably, but they don't all mean the same thing.

If it doesn't smell right, there's probably something wrong about it.

Pay attention to that.

- [Liz] Yeah.

- I would just add one other thing.

When I was growing up as a kid, we had four major networks.

Since that time we've blown up into all these networks, cable networks, multiple online organizations, everyone with their cell phones.

So really the sources of information has really exploded in the last 20 to 30 years.

And one thing that's come of that is we've seen the line really blurred between news, editorial, and punditry.

And I think a lot of times people may be confused between what is what?

So a lot of times I'll hear people say, "Well, that mainstream media," when they're referring to a clear pundit with an agenda and a bias.

So there's a lot of confusion between what is media and what isn't in today's world also.

- Yeah.

- And I see this in my class all the time.

And I'd also like to add another layer of sponsored content.

You talked about this is now another layer that confuses people in terms of what's factual.

And whether people are being paid to produce that content or not throws in another wrench of what's credible.

But all the time I see in my classes, when you talk about the media, and the media is everything, right?

That's billboards, it's Spotify, it's Audible, it's movies.

But when we say the word-- - It's your personal Twitter account.

- It's everything.

It is everything that is publicly communicated.

But when they say the media, oftentimes people mean the news media.

And when they say news media, they often mean these 24/7 cable networks where pundits are responsible for carrying those 24/7 hour programming.

And that's dangerous when we think of people screaming and yelling at each other on these highly divisive talk shows, versus the type of reporting that's being done at the ground level, at the sight of a mass shooting, for example.

- To their defense, I do have to say sometimes it does mix when there's a breaking news story and they bring in reporters on the ground.

And you have these people who usually are doing the commentaries also helping to cover the news when there's a breaking news situation.

I wanna bring up one of the possible solutions that politicians have toyed with, changing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that states that, "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

So, basically, they can wipe their hands of litigation.

If any kind of a suit tries to pop up, these social media platforms are not legally bound to what users have posted on there.

Should they be legally bound to this?

What are your thoughts on that?

- Oh, we're looking at me.

I mean, this is a tricky thing, right?

You know, are you responsible for that source of gossip if it ends up being true, if you have shared it.

And I think we're going to have more and more complicated conversations like this as we think about what regulation needs to look like, and how we have oversight over our media channels, especially kind of wild west organizations still, like Twitter, for example.

I think there's probably value in that, but I think that with anything that comes with strict restrictions on that also comes some risk.

Not a decisive answer by any means, but I think it's complicated.

And I think that every conversation that we have in this growing media landscape is a complicated conversation.

That's why we're here right now.

- It is a conversation that needs to be had though, and is finally being had.

At the time that President Trump criticized Section 230, there was an immediate backlash of Democrats and Progressives in this country.

And a lot of people have pulled back from that now.

And not to say that the reasons why President Trump wanted changes in 230 were valid or invalid for that matter, but this has increasingly become not a partisan issue, which is good news, right?

Both sides are looking at 230 and going, "Does this make sense for the media landscape that we live in now?"

Everybody agrees it doesn't.

So now we have a starting place at least to decide and to have these conversations and negotiations about what kind of regulations we really do need to protect the public, to protect publishers, and to make sure that the media that we're consuming is as reliable as possible.

- And then, it also becomes a question of, who's the judge of that?

And then, people might lose trust over who it is that's fact-checking what they're seeing, and what their agenda is, or what their bias might be.

So it is, as Marcie said, it's very complicated, but we know there's a problem.

We know that this is a platform where misinformation can be rampant and conspiracy theories can spread without question.

So there's definitely an issue.

And perhaps, Matt, it comes back to something you alluded to earlier, and that is personal responsibility.

You know, learning what each one of us can do as users, although, a lot of people probably have no interest in doing that, but learning what we can do as users to be more responsible and trying to cut that off as much as we can.

- Yeah, and you brought up the issue of trust.

Another issue at hand, the percentage of adults who say they have a lot or some trust in the information that they received has declined steadily since 2016.

This information, also coming from the Pew Research Center, shows that trust in all three national news, local news, and also social media, has declined year after year.

And it's even more drastic when you look at the data based on political affiliations.

So the question is, what do you think of these numbers taking a dive?

And is there anything that we can do, Glen?

- Well, I think there's a clear X-factor when you look at 2016, and that's when President Trump was running on the notion of fake news.

And he really made that part of his campaign and he made the media an enemy to him and those that supported him.

I remember being in Washington, DC, covering his inauguration.

And just having people come up to me and saying, "President Trump one, media zero."

And they had no idea who I was, where I came from, what my work was all about.

And they just automatically saw that I was with an ABC affiliate and assumed that I was working against the president at the time.

So it doesn't surprise me to see that number tied in with 2016, because that's when a lot of the fight really became public.

- Yeah, and in 2020, researchers with the Cornell Alliance for Science study analyzed 38 million articles about COVID-19 published at the beginning of the pandemic.

They found 1.1 million of those articles contained misinformation.

Our RaeAnn Christensen takes us to a local hospital to better understand the toll misinformation had on medical workers.

- [Kyle] We have an inordinate amount of phone calls that we're receiving every day from the community wanting to know, "Is your ICU really full?"

- [RaeAnn] November, 2020, Kyle Hansen, the CEO of Utah Valley Hospital, updates the Provo City Council.

- We have individuals trying to sneak into the hospital to visualize and videotape this themselves.

The public's perception of what's happening here has been difficult with misinformation.

- [RaeAnn] This is one of the many incidents during COVID-19, when Intermountain Healthcare physicians say civility broke down, and they questioned if we would make it through a global pandemic.

- When we look at our ICUs, we're still at max capacity.

- [RaeAnn] Dr. Eddie Stenehjem is an infectious diseases physician for Intermountain.

- You're talking about caregivers that are managing a disease that they've never seen before.

They're scared in terms of, are they gonna get sick?

The patients are scared.

- [Nurse] You got food, okay?

- Okay.

- Here they are in the hospital.

They're early in this pandemic, not sure what's gonna happen.

And then, you put on top of that, an angry public trying to essentially come into your unit and see for themselves.

Yeah, it added some stress.

- [RaeAnn] Combating conspiracy theories.

- We've got a lot to talk about today with the emergence of Omicron.

- [RaeAnn] Something Dr. Brandon Webb, who also specializes in infectious diseases for Intermountain, says was frustrating and discouraging.

- To see loud voices being able to very quickly circumvent what we'd been working to accomplish.

- [RaeAnn] These physicians say they were ready for the pandemic, it's something they've trained for their whole careers.

But what they weren't ready for was being a source of information for everyone all the time.

This weighed heavily into the healthcare worker burnout.

- Some instances you had family members second-guessing what you were saying.

Or you had close friends who would rather believe a podcast, versus your expert opinion.

- The constant bombardment with questions and the sense of needing to combat misinformation with good information.

- [RaeAnn] Why did all this bad information spread so quickly?

- This was the first time where the public had access to scientific literature.

Understanding the scientific literature is incredibly challenging.

And this is something that we have studied over years in our careers.

- And in a lot of ways, they're looking through a keyhole.

There's still a really important place for medical professionals, and scientific journalists, and others, to interpret the information and the volume overload of that information in ways that's digestible, and accessible, and accurate.

- It is not something that most people can grasp in a small tweet or in a Facebook post, or even a clinical broadcast.

- [RaeAnn] We hope there's not, but if there is a next time.

- I think we need to have media outlets and people talking about solid scientific information on the same level as some of those that have large platforms that talk about misinformation and disinformation.

We need to make sure that we can amplify our voices.

The voices that are grounded in caring for people and communities, just as much as those that counter it.

- [RaeAnn] For "Utah Insight," I'm RaeAnn Christensen.

- While talking to the Toronto Star's "This Matters" podcast, Helen Lee Bouygues, who is the president of Reboot Foundation, urges people to take a social media detox.

She says, "Our surveys have shown that regardless of age, income, race, or partisanship, so political leanings, the more social media usage, the less capability people had in actually identifying fake news."

She says, "To become better and smarter news consumers online, people should avoid relying on a single source of information, resist clicking on initial links, familiarize yourself with common fake news tactics, and recognize material designed to persuade."

And a lot of people do not understand the fake news tactics.

Those things where people say, "You won't see this on the news.

You won't see your local news covering this."

- My favorite thing is when they say, "You won't see this on the local news," and then there's a picture of Glen there doing a stand-up.

Which is often, often, right?

Like if you see that thing, "You won't see this on the local news," like immediately, immediately go to the local news.

It's almost always there.

- Yeah.

- It's almost always there.

- And if it's not, there's a reason.

- Yeah, they're working on it.

- Exactly, and also another tactic that people don't really understand or comprehend is that some of the information is not even being submitted by humans.

Sometimes it's bots on Twitter and online.

So there's a whole slew of things that people have to combat in order to become better and smarter news consumers.

Marcie, do you have any tips for people?

- Oh, I have all the tips.

This is a major focal point of what I teach in my classes.

Particularly, that media and society class, we do a fake news, kind of like speed dating round, where we replicate with printouts of half real stories, half fake stories.

And they have to very quickly read the headline and scan it, and then share the story, and then decide what's true and what's not by deploying a lot of those tips that came from The Reboot Foundation.

And then, I also have my students, it's an extra credit, but I highly encourage people to do it, they give up their phone for 24 hours.

They don't turn it on and they just give it up.

And despite some grumbling, everyone who's done it has a really good experience.

I'll do it with them, because it's good for me to unplug sometimes too and realize that I don't actually need to be attached constantly to these feeds, and it helps to process information.

But like The Reboot Foundation, I mean, put on your thinking cap, apply a critical approach to the way that you approach media.

Think about like, are there credible sources?

Is there a first name and a last name?

Is this person associated with an organization that you know of?

Look at the grammar.

If the grammar is a mess, and terrible, and all over the place, like that should be a red flag.

There's lots of things that you can look to that can kind of like get yours Spidey senses tingling when it comes to fake news.

- I'd like for people to think more about how they develop trust with the people around them, the people who are in their families, who are in their friend groups, who are their business associates, those relationships that trust builds over time.

It's something that you develop as a product of being associated with someone again, and again, and again.

And that person tells me something again and again, that is reliable, that is good for me, that is good for them.

We should have that relationship with our news sources as well.

And if you don't, if the information that you're getting is coming from a news source or a source, a media source, that you don't have a long-standing, trustworthy relationship with, that doesn't mean it's wrong, but it does mean you maybe shouldn't devote all of that trust that you would give to a source that you have a long-standing, trustworthy relationship in.

- And, Glen, I wanna get your thoughts.

I'm starting to get the wrap, but I wanna get your thoughts real quickly.

Is this something that needs to be taught in schools to children here in Utah?

- Oh, that's a great question.

I think when it comes to responsibility, there's potential for that in a school setting, but it probably needs to come from at home as well.

You know, as parents, we go to great lengths to make sure our kids are safe online from predators and from other nefarious things, and that's probably something we need to start looking at as well.

You know, teaching our kids how to identify that and spot that, and what to do in that situation.

Because whether we like it or not, kids, before they can read, have a phone in their hand, and they have an iPad in their hand, and they're introduced to this at a very early age now.

- Yeah.

- And Poynter's MediaWise has actually kind of taken the reverse approach of that and saying, I mean, "Yes, we should teach our kids this.

But what if we don't know?"

Because there's a lot of adults who have no concept of what it means to be media literate.

But Poynter's MediaWise is geared at Generation Z and teens, and having them kind of do the training up.

So they do some really great like, "Is It Legit" videos.

They do a lot of fact-checking.

And they grow from the high school aged up who are presenting this, and then share it broadly, publicly with adults.

And they're really kind of coming in at the generation before it's too late kind of idea.

They do some really incredible work.

If you'd like to check it out, it's MediaWise@poynter.org.

- Yep, and we have all those resources on our website at PBSutah.org.

Just go to the "Utah Insight" page and you'll find those links.

And we want you to weigh in on this show on the topics that we talk about.

You can weigh in on your screen.

Next week, we'll be talking about missing and murdered Indigenous women, and we wanna hear your thoughts on that topic.

So until next week, I wanna thank you all for being here today.

Thank you all for watching.

We'll see you then.

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