view of government. >> good morning, students. >> teachers are doing whatever they can to connect with students and cox is also. >> who wants to see it again? >> with the connect to compete program from cox. >> cox supports c-span as a public service along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. >> next, a look at truth, misinformation and the future of democracy with washington post columnist, jennifer rubin and rand corporation strategy director, jennifer cavanaugh, offer -- author of the book truth decay. book "truth decay." >> i'm pleased to welcome you to america at a crossroads.

tonight, we feature one of our most frequent guests, jennifer rubin. she's been enough cited pandit with the post since 2010 and a contributor to msnbc news. she's been described as a phenomenon and one of the most prolific online political writers. i might add, one of the most thoughtful. she was a guest in our very first program in april of last year,. -- of last year. jennifer kavanaugh is the director of the rand corporation, one of the largest and most influential think tanks in the world. one of the largest and most influential think tanks in the world. 32 nobel laureates have been associated with rand. jennifer leads the countering truth decay initiative. part of her research focuses on disinformation and the relationship between american political and media institutions. our host is a good friend and our most frequent moderator, warren alvey. his resume includes decades of

programs at kcrw, and now the to the point and to the point climate change update podcast. he is a respected voice of reason in today's troubled media world. in the interest of full disclosure, warren received an honorary doctorate in public policy from the rand graduate school in 2016. warren? warren: david, thank you so very much, and thank you in the audience very much for being with us as well. you will not be forgotten. when you send your questions in to david, he will ultimately, i think in about 35 or 40 minutes, text them to me, and we'll get our guests to answer as many as you can. but i want to thank america at the crossroads for giving me the opportunity to talk to two such very distinguished and accomplished jennifers. i have to tell you that my own daughter, my oldest daughter's name is jennifer, so i won't forget what to call you as the program goes on. and i'm delighted to be here with both of you.

so, let me start. since we're talking about truth decay, let me start with a book, which is called "truth decay." this was published by the rand corporation in 2018. jennifer kavanagh is one of the authors of that book. and jennifer, let me put the first question to you. you said at the outset, in the introduction, that you wanted to find a clear definition of truth decay. you listed some trends, and in other ways, described what you had in mind. but let me ask you, how would you define truth decay, as you're studying it now at the rand corporation? jennifer: well, thanks for that question. we define truth decay as the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis increasingly play in our political and civil discourse, and in the policy making process. and as you mentioned, we used four trends to bring that definition to life.

the first is an increasing disagreement about facts and data. an example would be the disagreement about the safety of vaccines. as we get more and more data that vaccines are safe, we see an increasing number of people that believe that they're not, and that was true before covid-19 was even something that was on our radar. the second trend and the third trend go together, a blurring of the line between fact and opinion, and an increasing relative volume of opinion compared to fact. you can see examples of this on social media or cable news, anywhere where facts and opinion are presented in an interchangeable way. that makes it really difficult for the average reader or viewer to disentangle what's a fact and what's not. and the final trend is a declining trust in key institutions that we used to look to as sources of objective factual information. places like the media and the government. so we end up in a situation in which people are not only not sure what's affecting, what's not, but they're not even sure

-- what's a fact and what's not, but they're not even sure sure where to turn to find that factual information. so that's the general characterization of this phenomenon that we call truth decay at rand that we've been studying for about five years now. warren: thank you, jennifer. jennifer rubin, let me get to you right away and ask you this. you wrote a column today, which is about the jim crow style legislation cropping up in legislatures around the country. jim crow, the term that you use to describe legislation that appears to be designed to prevent people of color from being able to cast their votes. do you see it or the arguments for it, this legislation, as an example of truth decay or the consequence of truth decay? jennifer: well, first of all, thank you for having me. it's always nice to see you, warren. i think the basis for this legislation is precisely what jennifer kavanagh was describing, the justification

for all of these measures is that we had some incidents of fraud or confusion or irregularities during the 2020 election, and therefore, we have to cure it by making it, quite frankly, very hard to vote. we know factually that is false. we had some 60 lawsuits, we had states that did multiple audits. georgia, which just passed one of these bills, did three of them and found no evidence of any kind of significant fraud. and in fact, i believe the statistic is in georgia that since about 2008, there have been eight instances of fraud which have been detected, and which have been prosecuted. so the entire premise behind this is, i think, a sad and precise example of what has happened.

rather than debating how do we make voting easier, how do we make voting more reliable, the premise on which this surge of legislation is based is just factually wrong. and so, it's very difficult to have a conversation then with people who are behind this if their premise is, well, we have to fix it, because there was all this fraud. and that's the dilemma in a fact decayed political environment. you can't debate on the issues because you can't even agree on the facts. warren: so jennifer kavanagh, back again to your book, "truth decay." you list causes of truth decay in the book. what cause would you find for what we just heard described by jennifer rubin? jennifer: well, so i think that the phenomena of truth decay and the example that jennifer rubin gave have a number of causes, and i think the first is just

that over several decades, our society has become really comfortable with peddling in misinformation. misinformation is so prevalent and spread so quickly and so widely, that it's not a stretch to have false narratives and conspiracy theories emerge and then spread like wildfire around a whole range of different issues. and that's fueled, i would say, by a couple of things, i would point to two kind of key drivers. the first is our information environment. our information environment is very diverse. we have tons of different sources. the online space is filled with different types of information and easily accessible information. that's a good thing, in the sense that a democratized information environment allows for more voices to have a platform, it makes it easy for us to find information, we're not reliant on one person to filter information down to us,

but it also means that we don't have the same kinds of quality filters or the same kinds of indicators that we might have had several decades ago, which makes it difficult then to distinguish between high quality and low quality information. at the same time, there's so much information, that it can just be an overwhelming task for the average person to sift through it and to figure out what to focus on and what to discard. and so, this environment then allows false narratives to really spread like wildfire and to spread really far. so that gives these narratives around election integrity as well as a whole host of other issues a lot of power and a lot of amplification. and then the second factor that i would point to is the polarization, and sort of the political and social climate in which we live. when we talk about polarization in the context of truth decay, we're not just talking about political polarization, but

about social and demographic polarization and the extent to which these different types of cleavages are really reinforcing, so that we end up in communities that are pretty insular and surrounded by people who are like us. this type of environment then gives additional foundation, additional grounds for these alternative and false narratives to really flourish and thrive. and there's a demand for them. so, on the one hand, we have this information environment that is really well suited to spreading and producing these false narratives. and on the other hand, we have a society, a social and political infrastructure, and that's both at the institutional federal government level and all the way then down to the popular societal level, a kind of a bed in which these same narratives then can really catch fire. so a good example would be, or an analogy -- you have a lit match, if you

drop it into a bucket of water, it goes out. if you drop it into a bucket of gasoline, it explodes. so if we think of that lit match as our information environment, our societal foundation right now is sort of like that bucket of gasoline. and so, those two factors together really give conspiracies and false narratives a lot of power. warren: jennifer rubin, let me ask you this. is this a paradox, that on the one hand we have this multitude of sources, of information, which again, initially, when it began, and cable television began, and we began to have the internet, and so on, was greeted as a wonderful thing, because there would be -- there are so many voices in our country, that everybody would be able to be represented. on the other hand, we have polarization, which seems to divide people into just two camps, generally speaking, at least politically, and that does seem to carry on beyond politics.

and we have essentially two competing groups. is that a paradox? jennifer: i don't know if it's a paradox, but i think it's an illustration of yet perhaps another driver, and that is really the assault on democracy, not only in this country, but worldwide. this decay of truth coincides with the rise of illiberal regimes and the popularization of authoritarian nationalist, -- of authoritarian, nationalist, often racially or ethnically based politics, and in that ecosphere, it is extremely helpful to their cause to not only misinformed, but to -- to not only misinform, but to create an atmosphere in which facts don't matter, in which there is a general on distrust of all information, and therefore, it's only the leader, only the strong man who you could trust to give you the real truth. and that's a phenomenon that we see around the world. it's a phenomenon we see in the

suppression of free and independent media in europe, in asia, really every continent. if you really want to be depressed, you can read freedom house's latest report on liberty freedom around the world, which is going in the wrong direction. so i think the way in which this manifests itself is that you not only have -- i think if you ever eloquently put it, the match, the fuel, but you have someone, or some bodies who are inclined to throw the match. it is in their interest. there is a purposefulness that we can't ignore. and i would say in this regard that the social media companies bear a lot of responsibility. by now, most of us know that we are all victims of these dreaded algorithms, in which the time online and the engagement is

driven by anger, is driven by negative emotion, and it gets leveraged on top of somebody even more extreme, and pretty soon, you have a system that is designed to increase polarization, designed to create conflict. and so, rather than spawn this wonderful collaborative community of voices, you have an intentional effort for us to attack one another. and we saw how terribly distressful this is, after building this frankenstein-like monster, suddenly, the social media companies had a problem. what do we do about the big lie, about the election, what do we do about misinformation, about vaccines? suddenly, on these vital issues, it becomes really important to distinguish fact from -- not

-- it becomes really important to distinguish fact from not fact, but the system they've created does not lend itself to that, and in fact, i think it leads itself to elevate the loudest, angriest, most extreme voices out there. warren: jennifer kavanagh, one of the things you talk about in your book is cognitive bias. what does that have to do with what we're hearing? jennifer: well, i think cognitive bias is really the starting point for this phenomenon, but it's not something that's new. so, you know, there are a lot of things that are related to truth decay, and what jennifer rubin's talking about are things that we've seen emerge over the past 20 or so years, like social media, and the internet environment. cognitive bias has been around forever, and that's just simply the characteristics of the way we as human beings process information. and we use heuristics to help us make decisions, to help us sift through large amounts of information quickly, and that's adaptive, and it makes sense, we don't necessarily always have time to go through all of the steps of making a decision or assessing a situation.

and so, examples of cognitive biases that are really relevant to truth decay are things like motivated reasoning. we like to be right. we seek out information that confirms what we already believe. that can be a challenge, though. on the one hand, that may be useful in some situations, but if we're searching online for something, that means that instead of searching objectively for both things that agree with us and that disprove our pre-existing beliefs, we're really only focusing in on those things that confirm what we believe, and then we're stopping with that. the online environment is really well suited to feeding that need, that desire to be right, because no matter what you believe, you can probably find somebody out there who agrees with you and has written about it. other things that feed into this phenomenon are things like recency bias. we tend to more heavily weigh things that we heard more recently. things that we heard more frequently similarly are more heavily weighted. we are influenced more strongly

by our friends and family and anecdotes that have emotional resonance than we are by facts and data that are just presented on a page. even though facts and data that are drawn from potentially large and thousands of different observations are much more generalizable than a handful of anecdotes, those anecdotes, what our friends and family tell us, can still have much stronger power over our decision making and our beliefs. so these types of cognitive biases, while on the one hand, they they serve a kind of evolutionary purpose, on the other, they they tend to lead us astray very often. and they make us prone to falling prey to false information and conspiracies, and then to cling on to that false information once we believe it. and i think that's the really important thing, is that once that belief becomes lodged, it's very difficult to change somebody's mind, if they believe something, kind of, you know, with any sort of strength. and so, those cognitive biases create the starting point.

and then the way social media is set up, as jennifer rubin, was -- is set up, as jennifer rubin was talking about, really play into that. they prey on those cognitive biases and exacerbate the effect of those biases on the way that we process information and the way that we make decisions. warren: and as you pointed out, the algorithms do the job, because they go go back again and again and again to what you were interested in before. only perhaps in an even more emotional and and anger producing way. but jennifer, let me ask you this. with regard to the politics of it. you talked about the need for a strong man, or not the need for a strong man, but the fact that there is this tendency around the world for illiberal regimes to be led by strong men, who become the authority, whatever it is that they say.

how do you explain qanon? and nobody knows who is -- who qanon comes from. jennifer: yeah, you know, this is exactly one of these conspiracy theories that is emblematic of what is going on now, but it's also emblematic of something america has always had. and americans have always been prone to conspiracy theories. it's a telltale sign of democracies, and particularly the american brand of democracy, of which there are lots of historical and sociological reasons. so you can you start with a pool of people who are perhaps more predisposed to conspiracies than anything else, and you know, this is one of these conspiracies which illustrates that you cannot disprove them. there is no set of facts that you or i or jennifer can come up with that would disprove this notion that there's this individual that is somehow running the show, or part of the secret state, because whatever example you give is just part of the plot. it's part of the conspiracy.

how clever they are that they have now captured, you know, they would say even bill barr or even mike pence, if you're talking about some terrible thing that they think has befallen the former president. so i think it is, you know, pinpointing on why something sticks rather than something else is interesting. but in this case, as i have argued, it served a utilitarian value for a certain segment of our electorate. how do you maintain a sense of victimhood? how do you maintain a sense of, you know, the society has done me wrong, if your site is in control of the government and the answer is, they are really not in charge of the government, there's this mysterious other force that is in charge of the

government. so often, these conspiracies are linked to a utilitarian purpose that is helpful for one or another political party, or religious group, or ethnic group , and that they serve their ends. so it's not simply by coincidence that we have a theory that is going to somehow explain why it was that when you had one party that had a congress and the white house, that things were still not going according to plan. and that may seem ridiculous to you and i and our audience, when you hear the particulars, that there's some kind of pedophile, you know, ring being run by hillary clinton -- it sounds absolutely nuts, and it is, but once you have gotten in that frame, as jennifer was saying, it's really hard to break out. it really is like a cult-like

phenomenon, in which there's no way to disprove a conspiracy that is firmly held onto. warren: you talk about the dimensioning role of facts and analysis. it would seem to me this is an issue of analysis, because the facts that are produced by, or whatever it is that is alleged facts that are produced, you seem to subject them to what the normal analysis is, it would seem to be. then nobody could possibly believe that, if they had a rational, reasonable approach to things. how do you explain qanon? jennifer: there are a number of reasons why people cling onto conspiracies. one, they use that to help expend the world. that is why we have seen a real surgeon conspiracy theories in the context of the pandemic, because there's so much authority and people are feeling afraid and unmoored and

isolated, and so they cling to sort of anything that allows them to help explain the world -- so even though something like q1anon seems to make sense from the outset, there are attempts to take all these disparate events that are upsetting and weave them into a narrative. so for people who are on the inside, that can be comforting, because everything seems to fit together and they believe that there's this and point at which they will get some desired goal. but conspiracy theories serve a much broader purpose as well that is really entirely separate from the substance of the beliefs. and that has to do with this sense of identity and belonging. also something that people cling to in times of uncertainty. so being a part of this conspiracy, feeling like you are on the inside, you have this family, like a tribe who also believes this, that can be an incredibly comforting thing. and something that people may not want to give up, because if you give up the belief, you have

to give up the belonging, and you have to give up that whole piece of your identity, which is wrapped up around being a follower around this set of principles. that is why the actual substance of the police might be secondary and white even when you subject them to analysis, even when you present contradictory facts, there's all these points at which certain things are supposed to happen, according to the qanon philosophy or principles, and those things haven't happened, and yet the narrative keeps changing. so anybody who subjected that timeline to any kind of analysis would find there are holes and that maybe this isn't happening the way it was supposed to come about that analysis is sort of unimportant. people are willing to push it aside or not look at that carefully, because they are getting all of these other psychological and emotional

value or benefits from being a part of this group or this cult. warren: you mentioned a lot of people have been waiting around for the end of the world on a certain day, and when it doesn't happen on that certain day, they still managed to believe that it must be some other day. and they begin to focus on that. jennifer rubin, why do you think it is that the traditional institutions of authority in the united states have collapsed to such an extent in people's estimation that they're no longer to give them any credence at all? they are used -- there used to be things we could rely on, like science, for example. jennifer: well, this is again a not an american phenomenon but a phenomenon of the west, and there are lots of explanations for it. in the american context, you can point to government scandals you can point to the vietnam war,

which bred a sense that we are being lied to not just occasionally, but in everything about everything by everyone. you had really some economic failures which led people to believe that you couldn't believe those experts, those economists. you couldn't believe business, you couldn't believe other institutions. and so i think some surreal failures in the west tended to breed to these. and to create more than a cynicism, almost a nihilism on that, you know, nothing matters who can say what's true, they're all out to get me. and i think in that sense going back to something that jennifer kavanaugh said, one of the things a conspiracy theory does is it gives you power or it gives the illusion of power. i know what's going on, i'm the one who possesses this special knowledge, and therefore i'm not some helpless person, i'm not adrift in a complex global

society, i'm really in control and i have more power than you do, because i figured out the clue to this, you know, grand conspiracy. i think you really had a collision of all of these factors and there have been innumerable books written about them, and we should also be aware that these things also have kind of a cyclical history throughout american history. we've gone through periods of time when trust in government was very high, when there was an emphasis on communal action, when the two political parties were not that far apart, when in alex de tocqueville's vision there was a lot of communal activity, and now we're in a period of time in which it's a zero-sum game. if you get something, i lose something, and it's a very tense

i think political social climate where people think that they're always about to lose something, and that is a situation that's right for a demagogue to come along and say you're right, they're trying to take something from you, they're trying to cheat you, only i will be on your side, and you really can't believe anything you hear from anybody else. i will give you the sense of power, of belonging, of purpose. and i think we get to a very bad place, which is that i think skepticism is a good thing when dealing with power, but cynicism and more importantly nihilism is not. at some point, we have to be able to check with some semblance of objective reality in order to solve our problems -- we cannot solve the covid problem if everyone believes that covid is just a myth, made up by, you know, elites that are

trying to manipulate us in order to solve problems. in order to frank was survive, we have to re-associate reality with people's belief system, and that is i think why it's come to a head now, when you see that how fragile our democracy is, our health is come our economy is. so it's really easy in these situations to imagine someone taking advantage of a situation and pushing the whole thing down in order to capitalize on chaos, distrust, cynicism. and that makes for a very fraught environment politically and socially, culturally, for many, many americans. warren: jennifer kavanaugh, in your book, to go back to it again, you talk about causes which we've discussed to some extent, cognitive bias and other things, you talked about agents whether they're political figures or russians from abroad

or whatever they might be. we've talked about consequences, including the polarization that's going on. you also say you want to find a road to solutions. what kind of road to solutions have you found? jennifer: that is office of the toughest question, is trying to figure out what to do about it, because it is such a tricky problem, and it's a systemic problem, in the sense that it's now woven into sort of every aspect of our society come our relationships with each other. our relationships with our institutions and the way the institutions function. and so i think when we think about solutions, we are focusing on kind of a couple of angles. there's going to have to be multiple solutions, it is a multifaceted problem. the first is to think about this as a demand-side problem. one of the major challenges we face is that when people go online, they don't always have the skills and the resources that they need in order to

navigate this complicated and diverse and quickly changing online environment and identify what the facts are and what is not coming to sift through different types of information, to identify low-quality sources, to read something and understand the bias for the perspective of the author, to identify things that are written with advocacy re-motion -- advocacy, or emotion, or anger in mind. so providing education, media serves the education, science education, statistics -- these are the things that can help people have the skills and the tools they need when they go online. to understand what they are reading. to have the types of civic knowledge you need to understand with the government is supposed to do. to evaluate claims about election integrity. to understand the the purpose of democracy. the fact that in theory in a democracy we want more people to vote, to understand like kind of

what that means, to understand the role of the media and statistics to be able to understand polling. there's so much data on polls -- how can you read that if you don't have a basic knowledge of statistics? these are things we can provide to students and then we also have to figure out how to reach adults. there's a lot of energy around providing especially media literacy and civics education in k-12 schools, but that only reaches a really a small portion of the population. adults similarly struggle with these same things, and so i think a growth area, an area we really need to focus on is how we reach adult populations who aren't necessarily the ones who would opt in to the resources that exist. warren: back to your column today that i found really interesting about the jim crow legislation, around various places you talked about, the idea of there being a boycott against atlanta, against georgia in general, because of its

involvement in the new laws -- the jim crow laws. then you suggested we do minute, the boycott is going to hurt the people that are not possible for this issue. so one of the things you talked about was shaming. and i'm very interested in the idea of shaming, because that does imply a kind of authority that people might call on or might respond to if there is in fact a truth decay going on. jennifer: what a great question. i think there are a few things happening. first of all, just on the minor point of a boycott, unfortunately, we have so many voter suppression activities in over 40 states now that you can't boycott all of them,

there'd be no place to go so there's some practical problems when a problem gets to be of that magnitude. i think when you look at the larger picture, there are instances in which an agreed upon system of rules of morality and a right and wrong of object reality still has a little bit of a foothill. you're not going to shame our former president, but you can shame some big corporations because they depend upon the goodwill, the reputation, their national presentation of a brand which increasingly in our era people select brands based upon intangible issues. do i think this is a good company, do i like this company, is this company behaving in a respectful and responsible way? what happened to this week is that under a lot of pressure,

executives of two very big companies, coca-cola and delta, which couldn't manage to criticize the law when it was going through the state legislature, in fact one of them -- delta -- sort of praised it for getting on better. the epiphany of course coincided with a lot of people talking about boycotts but also a public letter by 72 african-american executives, and that shows i think the power that you can still have in not only shaming but developing resources and figures that still have resonance. one of the things jennifer mentioned was that people close to home tend to have a higher -- place a higher trust in them than people who are distant, regardless frankly whether they actually have expertise or not -- it's your mom, it's the guy

down the street, it's your neighbor you tend to trust those people because you've built up a history of social trust with that person. in this case who better than to move the ceos off the dime then a whole lot of publicly enraged and forthright african-american senior executives of big companies who said no, this is not the right way to behave, you can't behave in this manner. and i think that had particular relevance, because for that group of decision-makers, that group of people, this group still carried the weight of authority. and i think that's why when you're looking at how to unravel some of these conspiracies and attacks on the truth, we keep coming back to finding the right people to communicate to their community. so i think there's been a lot of discussion, who are the best people to break down resistance to immunity?

turns out, the best solution may not be putting a bunch of ads up on television, which everybody has learned to ignore and distrust, but it's having people your community -- people in your community, your pharmacist, your doctor, the health clinic on this -- the health clinic down the street. i think part of the effort to right this ship is to find and elevate those voices who are perceived as trustworthy and who actually do have a grasp on reality and can bring about some cohesion and some intellectual and moral clarity. that is not easy, and depending on the problem, those people may look very different. i will share one political note to illustrate this. during the 2020 election, a group of those of us who would call ourselves never trumpers, people who had in essence defected from the republican party, decided to do an ad campaign trying to convince

like-minded people not to vote for the former president. they thought, well, maybe we could get a bunch of celebrities and a bunch of governors, all kind of things. turned out the most effective thing was ordinary republicans who were who were shooting on their phones or on their screens -- completely unscripted. they looked and sounded just like your neighbor, like an ordinary person. so sometimes, expertise can be alienating. having a republican governor get up there on a 30-second ad and saying, here's all the reasons you shouldn't vote for this guy is way less effective than having a guy who looks like your neighbor in this poorly shot kind of shaky video on explaining his own revelations -- and finding those sorts of credible messengers is a lot i think of the challenge that

we are going to face. warren: that's really a fascinating answer. we have come to the time when i would love to go on with this for hours, but it is time to give the audience a chance. they certainly deserve it. they have come up with some interesting questions. jeffrey asks, and it really is quite relevant to what we just heard i think, can democracy survive in this environment of decaying truth and blurs a -- and polarization? can you suggest a way that maybe it is surviving? jennifer: yeah, i guess i would consider it too early to declare the death of democracy quite yet. certainly, there are more worrying trends, and there are things to be concerned about, but i think if you look over the experience of the past year, one thing we've seen is a real like renewal of concern and focus around this topic of diss and misinformation and what we're going to do about it. a growing recognition of the

real-world consequences of having an information environment which is so polluted with false information and of living in a society in which distrust is so high and in which we often face a situation which facts and analysis seem to be discarded. and we've seen the consequences in the context of covid. we've seen the consequences in the context of the events around january 6. and so those types of things i think really made the immediacy of the consequences much more real for a large swath of the population. certainly not for everyone, but i don't think you could expect everyone to kind of have the same experience. so i think that's certainly one one reason for hope is kind of this renewal focus around this issue. and i agree with jennifer ruben's focus here on strategic messaging and thinking about who are the right individuals to provide these messages. i think a really good example in the context of covid is thinking about the way that in washington

they're using churches to -- churches and other religious institutions to actually provide vaccines. so not just to provide information to combat vaccine hesitancy, but you can actually get vaccines in churches in a lot of the poor areas of the city. and so, that is a really good example of a way of identifying who has trust and using them to help kind of rebuild trust from the bottom up. and i really think that that's sort of where the focus has to be, is rebuilding trust from the community level, at the local community level and then gradually kind of building that up to the state and federal level. warren: so you focus on those authorities that have survived so far and still maintain some kind of credibility with large numbers of people. jennifer rubin, richard asks this one. in this is a fun one i think for those of us in the media. how do you convince unsophisticated folks that for example cnn is more accurate

than fox? and i would throw in msnbc to that one too because if you watch msnbc, it looks pretty much like it is an arm of the biden administration at the moment. [laughter] they don't do a lot of criticism of the new president or his ideas. jennifer: right, well, i think there are degrees of misleading unfortunately, and i think fox kind of takes -- warren: i'm not accusing and -- accusing and missing bc of anything. jennifer: i think there is a a difference between a political bias where the glass is always half-full, everything is going great, and another network, which is trying to create conspiracy theories. we're trying to peddle in conspiracy theorists who puts guests online and puts hosts

online who are going to make up a conspiracy about a young man who was killed and had to pay a pretty steep price. one of those networks of fox is now being sued royally by a couple big companies who are accused of manipulating the election returns, as part of the big lie, so i think there are degrees of culpability here. how do you tell? well, one thing you have to do is i think you have to impress upon people that no one should be getting their news one hour from one person active. it takes a lot of work. i get that. but encouraging people to kind of check their facts or check around or to look at those institutions that have a tradition of accuracy and have a structure that promotes fact checking, that requires retractions when they get it

wrong, that has editors who are there to catch mistakes and cash -- and catch errors. who when they are defrauded by someone will reveal the imposter -- maybe it's a storyteller, maybe it's a writer who's decided to come up with some you know bizarre story and has gotten himself onto the pages of one of the networks. so i think you can look first of all for people who have a track record, secondly for people who you see are institutionally devoted to correcting themselves -- that is always i think a good sign. and i think frankly we should just be gosh darn critical and skeptical and cynical about anything that you're seeing on facebook. how many times have you heard from somebody saying something ridiculous -- i saw on facebook, i saw on twitter. twitter doesn't generate them. nor does facebook.

it is a reservoir of unformed, unchecked opinion and discussion. so i think getting people to perhaps return to a more traditional sort of -- more traditional sorts of media, to check themselves, and to interact, and to also check with their lived experience on one of the more dangerous things about the tellier and is him -- about totalitarians and about non-democratic movements is they ask you not to believe your lying eyes but believe what you are hearing. so if you see that there are millions and millions of people who are getting the covid vaccination and they're not dying, and you do know that there are over 500,000 americans who have passed away -- believe your eyes. use some common sense. user lived experience to check these. and if something seems a little

too bad, a little too weird, it's always worth double checking. and i think it does put the onus on the reader, the listener, the viewer, but i think we'll have to be engaged media customers -- media consumers now. that is the only way we are going to survive this democracy. warren: richard has a really interesting question. which is this. if there are standards, shows has -- such as jennifer rubin suggests, are there effective programs for teaching critical analysis in elementary or secondary schools? kids obviously are growing up in this crazy milieu that we're talking about. they are exposed to it all the time. are there effective systematic ways of educating them to the ideas that i think all of us on this program espouse? jennifer: yeah, well, there are actually a lot of curricula that exist to try to get at some of

the of the things and to teach some of the skills and the critical thinking techniques that jennifer rubin mentioned, so as i said, there's been a lot of energy in this space for the past five years, and so there's a lot of curricula and a growing number of schools are using them and a growing number of states are, if not setting up standards or requirements, are at least encouraging schools to integrate these types of curricula into their broader educational portfolio. there are a number of caveats to that. the first is that teachers according to some rand research that we did, teachers still feel like they lack the the resources that they need to actually find these types of materials and then to integrate them into their year-long curriculum and part of that has to do with time and resources. they face an increasing number

of demands, especially focused on math and reading and it can be hard then to add something additional into the school day -- especially over the past year where we've been doing virtual schooling. so there is still a gap between the resources that teachers have and what they feel they need to teach us effectively. teachers themselves may not always feel like they have the skills to be teaching this. they may need some kind of training, if they don't feel comfortable in this online space -- they may not have received education in this area, so that's another another gap, and then the final challenge here is that we don't really have the set of robust evaluative data and evidence that we would like to have to understand what types of media literacy curricula work best. so we have some initial evidence that students who complete these types of curricula are better able to navigate in online space and to identify fact versus opinion, to make smarter choices

about which news sources they trust. but we don't have really good randomized controlled trial or over time analysis to understand what teaching methods, what types of materials provide the biggest benefits and how long those benefits endure after the students receive them. so that's an area where brands -- where rand and a number of other organizations are really trying to beef up and build up this evaluative research base that we can then use to help teachers make choices between curricula and help them to develop, if necessary, new curricula that really highlight and leverage the lessons from that research base. warren: jennifer rubin, ava has an interesting question, and just let me supply some background, that used to be that the communications act required equal time and required what was referred to as the fairness

doctrine. ava wants to know, is there any way that the communication act could be amended now to allow regulation of social media that would alleviate some of the problems we are talking about? jennifer: boy, is that a good question, that is a very very hot topic right now. when the internet was in its infancy, there came up on a provision in the federal communication code that essentially said the internet doesn't have to take on the responsibility of a publisher if the washington post publishes something that is defamatory or publishes something it knows to be false. it can be sued, it can be held civilly liable. not so with twitter or with facebook or other social media platforms. they in essence got a a -- they in essence got a dispensation because they wanted to include all these different

voices, they didn't want to strangle the baby in the crib, all of these explanations. and as a result, they put up information with impunity and allow people to put up information with impunity that a publisher, and i don't mean necessarily a newspaper a publisher could be any speaker any source of information could not get away with because he or she might be held civilly responsible. so i think one of the things and i think this goes to jennifer's point about how we kind of begin to think about this and fix this, is increasing accountability and increasing transparency. one of the things we don't know and the average person doesn't know is that they're being manipulated when they go on social media by these algorithms . -- by these algorithms. one possible solution that's been suggested is if they're gonna continue to have this

exemption from civil liability in many instances, then they have to disclose really what their algorithms are doing and how they work and how your attention is being drawn to other like-minded people, or even radical people. so one concern is that a lot of the disinformation, misinformation, bad sources of information tend to pop up where there's no accountability and no transparency. so if you think about using both of those, they will tend to help people and encourage people to clean up their act. we mentioned a little while ago that fox is being sued by two enormous technology companies who were involved in the production of the software and the hardware that was used to run our election. they're being sued for billions of dollars. we don't know whether they're

going to prevail or not, but say they do prevail, that acts as a powerful deterrent to start behaving in ways that more traditional media does, with attention to fact checking, with attention to editorial control, and that sort of thing does prompt people to think twice before they put some loony theory on the airwaves. i think we are in for a period of time now and i know many people involved this organization and many listeners have been involved with efforts for social media to regulate hate speech. to take down hate speech. they all have policies that say we won't tolerate all this stuff and yet their social media platforms are filled with it, whether it's anti-semitism, anti-asian prejudice, white supremacists, whatever it is and holding companies accountable for policing themselves even if

they're not held responsible for the content of that hate speech is critical. and groups like the anti-defamation league have been somewhat successful in trying to enlist major companies, advertisers to try to exert some leverage. it's difficult, because as we all know, these social media companies have gotten to be very powerful. and in some sense are immune to a lot of the normal pressures corporations would face. but i think if people continue to think of these two important principles, accountability and transparency, i think we'll be moving in the right direction. i do want to say as well that leadership matters. we've gone from a administration in which facts were not valued to put it mildly, or misinformation was dispensed to

an administration that as an example has three day a week briefings on covid with nonpolitical figures. dr. fauci, dr. walensky. other experts. and what they're doing i believe is trying to recalibrate our expectations and our information that you can trust these people -- we're going to give you critical information, we're going to be honest with you when we have screwed up. we have to evaluate whether they're making good on that promise, but at least they are offering impartial expert scientists to speak directly to the public without the filter of a crazy person and highly ideological political players. so leadership does matter. warren: we are pretty close to being out of time. is there anything you would like to add to all of what we have heard so far?

what would you like to suggest? jennifer: i think in this conversation, we have covered the key point in the solution space. we can focus on the problem, but we should be focusing on the solutions, where they should be. we talked about education, the value of communicating come look research findings in a way that people risen it with the average individual, which i think is something that both journalists like jennifer and researchers like me have to think about as well, and terms of how we communicate and what we are trying to say. we've talked about the importance of trying to reduce the the vulnerability of online spaces, especially social media platforms, to harmful and dangerous disinformation, and then we talked about the importance of trust and how we can rebuild trust, this idea of transparency as jennifer was just talking about, the frequent briefings from renowned experts in their field

-- this gets to a concept that michael rich, my co-author on the "truth decay" book and i wrote about in december on civic infrastructure and the role of kind of transparency and expertise of providing data and evidence, and helping people to kind of see behind the curtain of how policy decisions are made and making sure that those decisions are evidence-based, and that can go a long way to start to rebuild this trust and these kind of ties between individuals and between institutions, which can be really the foundation for them helping to overcome some of these challenges that we've talked about. warren: well we are in fact out of time. i'm sorry i can't give you this opportunity i just gave jennifer. i would say programs like this, thanks to american crossroads for airing this, it seems to me, are one of the ways we can begin to penetrate the issues that truth decay raises.

and is going to raise for some time to come. jennifer cavanagh and jennifer rubin, thank you very much for being with us. announcer: next, the history and future of the alt-right movement in america. after that, a recent cpac conference. then, conversation with james clyburn, including his involvement in the civil rights movement, democratic victories in georgia, and the filibuster. announcer: this weekend, watch the trial of derek chauvin, charged in the death of george floyd. here testimony from a pulmonologist. the trial, sunday at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span.

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