If you’re old enough to remember the pre-Internet period how did you decide which information you got from newspapers, magazines, paperbacks, encyclopedias and other sources was reliable? Did it even occur to you to wonder?
Nowadays, the availability of Wikipedia, Google, two gillion and three blogs, online pages from almost every newspaper and magazine and countless other sources of information must make the typical web surfer suspicious of how much of what’s available has any legitimate claim to accuracy. So most of us are wary of even the better credentialed sources after the various scandals at places like the New York Times and Time have shown that even these outfits have feet of clay.
But back before the quick and easy access to Snopes and Skepdic and other debunkers, what did you use to get some sense of accuracy of what you were reading?
(Well,sonny,…sit down on that thar rockin’ chair, and let me tell you how it was back in the old days, when I was a whippersnapper …)
We simply relied on the reputation of the author, and our own experience.
For news:The New York Times was the ultimate in respectability, the National Enquirer was the ultimate in junk.
For sex: Playboy was respectable, seedy porn shops were not.
For science: thick, hardbound books published by a university press were respectable. Thin, paperback pamphlets published by a relgious organization were not.
It wasn’t such a big problem, because the rules were known and respected. And private individuals had no input at all-- Only corporations or large organizations could publish.
We never had to ask "is that wikipedia article accurate? Because all encylcopedia articles were accurate-- there weren’t any other options.
You looked at the author , and who was financing him, to know whether something was reliable.
Well, that’s just the point–we didn’t have two gillion options. We had our local library.
Of course, there were always cases of stupidity run rampant. But it was harder to spread the stupidity, which required a lot of money.
For example, take the famous book about aliens “Chariots of the Gods” by Eric Van Danikan. This was a popular bestseller for 10 or 20 years, claiming to provide proof of visitors from outer space. You simply read the book, and had to decide for yourself if you believed it. You could talk it over with one or two friends, but that was all the input you could expect to find easily. No teeming millions to help you.
Well said, chappachula, and that squares with my memory of things pretty well. Book reviews in the paper or magazines could help to isolate really shoddy and spurious “reporting” and the few TV shows (and radio, too) that dabbled in debunking stuff like Chariots of the Gods helped to keep the lid on rampant bullshit.
But I have no telling how many trivia books like Book of Lists and Imponderables and other such “stranger than fiction” things that I somehow just trusted to be factual or reliable. The old Believe it or not things were easily swallowed as accurate or at least well researched.
I just wonder now how much of the crap that I have remembered from those days of reading those “factoids” in places like The Farmer’s Almanac and such places never was any good.
Think back to 100 years ago when even less criticism was available. Just how much of that lore got passed on as truth. How much History can be relied on as much more than glorified opinion and hype?
First Wife: “I know it’s true, I read it in A BOOK!”
Me: “I don’t care how many books it’s in, that’s total bullshit.”
First Wife: “So I’m supposed to believe you instead of A BOOK?”
Me: “Yes, or use some common sense and figure out for yourself that it’s BS.”
First Wife: “I won’t believe you if A BOOK says you’re wrong.”
Me: “What-say we get a divorce?”
We split long before the days of the internet. I don’t know how she’s dealing now, and don’t particularly care.
Yes. I wonder how much of the “It’s in the Bible” mentality just got transferred to any book as if seeing it in print made it true and incontrovertible. In my own case it took something being utterly ridiculous and obviously satirical before it would occur to me to doubt it. That didn’t apply to things I already thought of as spurious and claptrap like Astrology and Horoscopes and that sort of thing. But if the author was somebody like Asimov I just swallowed whatever he had to say without a doubt. Same with Sagan.
Oddly enough it was Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit (or whatever he called it) that caused me to start being much more skeptical and questioning, but sadly that came long after I had amassed a huge cache of “useless information.”
The most crucial function of what we now call “mainstream media” is gatekeeping – the process of deciding what does and does not get published or aired. Gatekeeping was possible back when the purpose of newsmagazines, broadcast news and newspapers was … well, news. It was accepted that gatekeeping was expensive, but it was the tradeoff for more profitable entertainment media. Big-city newspapers (NYT, WashPost, LATimes, etc.) were parts of media empires that derived most of their profits from more lucrative but less credible publications. In Smallville, USA, the local newspaper supported its news effort with job printing and even selling office supplies (you can still buy pens, notebooks and highlighters in some weekly community newspapers here in rural America.)
The mainstream media was actually more credible then because the competition to attract readers/viewers/listeners was based on the assumption that people would most often read/watch/listen to the medium that gave them the most accurate facts, regardless of how palatable those facts were. The assumption also was that the truth would out if enough journalists were digging up enough facts and presenting them. This led to the formation of a strict canon of ethics that covered everything from how journalists conducted themselves in public to fairness tests for content and, of course, verification of sources and facts.
That all began to unravel in the late 1980s and early 1990s with “corporatization” of the media – concentration of most of the ownership in a few powerful and profit-driven corporations. This has had its most profound impact on small communities where local newspapers, radio and television stations tended to be owned locally. News reporting standards began to erode as media owners “maximized revenue” to pay for the massive debts incurred by consolidation.
Into this volatile mixture of lowered journalistic standards and increased pressure for revenue came the World Wide Web – and the media world exploded in a money-grubbing free-for-all. For the first time ever, people could find, at their fingertips, ostensible “facts” supporting whatever crackpot idea they wanted to believe. Partisan broadcasters and journalists (Limbaugh, Hitchens, etc.) had to take positions that were increasingly ridiculous just to be noticed. By 2000, the internet had blown down the gate – and the walls on either side of it. Gatekeeping was almost irrelevant as an increasingly lazy public was satisfied to consign its information needs to Google and Wikipedia.
Nice synopsis there, Sunrazor, and one to be wary because of. If we can assume that younger folks – whose only main exposure to Truth, Justice and the American Way has come from the WWW – are willing to accept the veracity of Wikipedia and the “weight of evidence” provided by numbers of Google hits to determine which of two versions of some issue has more likelihood of being true, and to take The Daily Show as being most likely to pass along an acceptable version of the latest upheaval in the news, how long will it be before we have to holler “Cite!” after anything more questionable than “Hello”? And once we holler “Cite!” and some link is provided, how many levels of research are we going to have to wade through before arriving at something reliable?
It’s almost like rewording Descartes to “I doubt, therefore I am.”
Meh. H.L. Mencken once wrote a little faux history of the bathtub as a joke for April Fool’s Day (IIRC). Among other things, he stated that the first bath tub in the White House was installed by Millard Fillmore, which made the custom of bathing socially acceptable in the United States. If there were any facts in it, Mencken said, they got there accidentally and against his design. He also said that he never dreamed anyone would take it seriously. To his dismay, the article was widely quoted as factual in newspapers, books and even encyclopedias. This went on for decades, despite repeated attempts by Mencken to set the record straight.
There may have been more filters back in the days of hot metal typesetting, but that doesn’t mean BS never got past the editors and fact checkers.
This is one of the reasons Mencken, revered by many in the American public, is not in the pantheon of American journalistic gods. He worked for years to become a trusted, credible journalist, then squandered that trust with stupid tricks and unabashed bigotry.
For nonfiction works produced by reputable houses, there was (and presumably still is) an expectation of factual accuracy, although where debatable issues and subjects arose, such as politics and history, you would have to sift through what you read, just as you do today on the Internet.
I’ve also suspected that cable TV with it’s 24-hour news was at least partially to blame. Before cable, TV news was 1/2 hour of local news at 5 and 10, and a 1/2 hour of national news at 5:30. Once CNN and cable TV arrived, they suddenly had to fill 168hrs of news a week. Rather then being the gatekeepers, the news media became te newsmakers.
This is a central point around which Fark.com’s founder Drew Curtis wrote his book, basically that the media will make up crap as filler because they have to, there just isn’t enough real “news.”