Approaching the news leveraging information literacy

We have entered a trustless society. Our best bet for a future with trust in it is to have information sources we can trust, that don’t have AI touching them before publication and aren't repeating narratives without due diligence. But to have those sources, we have to know which ones to trust so we can support them. All while also dealing with information which is already being manipulated in ways that makes almost any source potentially questionable.

My approach to how I trust news agencies is complex, but it’s also something that can be learned. It’s a steep curve, but it does get easier with time. Watch your sources (see ‘shifts’), and when they are stable and we aren’t in a paradigm shift, it’s potentially easy.

My approach to emerging information sourcing is a mix of the three traditional thinking models: triangulation, scientific method, and critical thinking. To that I’m adding cognitive patterns of the organization. Not every reporter will be a facsimile to that pattern, but the fact that each reporter is going through that organization’s internal process means they are within a range — think of it like a candlestick chart.

So, here’s the outline what I’m looking at.

Triangulation

I’m using several aspects of triangulation as I look at the news:

• Agencies that tend to use multiple sources
• Agencies that fact check and correct inevitable mistakes
• At-hand experiences
• Tendency to refer to eyewitness accounts
• Tendency to triangulate eyewitness accounts
• Acceptance and inclusion of triangulated facts and witnesses that don’t fit neatly inside their cognitive biases
• Attempts to right-size the inputs, e.g., somehow showing if they are giving airtime to a low-adhesion minority, and why
• Organizations that are careful about information, but also have a clear lens; think along the lines of ACLU
• Multiple agencies
• Formal communications channels;
  Note that as of this writing many of the government sites no longer meet the above criteria of triangulation, and/or the below criteria of critical thinking and scientific method. This is entirely due to the current administration trying to nix any information that doesn’t support their ideology. They are no longer trying to use government to try to get ever-closer informational reflection of reality. Instead, they are using government as a battering ram to force adhesion to their reality, and anyone for which it doesn’t work for: fuck ’em. Which pages I trust are a mix of narrative and checking sites that have tracked changes; I’m still triangulating elsewhere, where in 2024 I would have often left it as a single, robust source.

Critical thinking

• Most often, literally: does this interpretation hang together logically when I include triangulated sources?
• Are others picking up the story? Which others? What are their mien?
  Note that if the mien is super-similar, I’ll check into the background of the organizations. This is how I nixed Breitbart as a news source very, very early. They were publishing stories incestuously. Check a few times, and the pattern became very clear. Once the information is that compromised, I only paid attention to the headlines, and then as a reason to go out and look for other lenses. For whatever reason this narrative on this information was important to break into as many brains as possible. They were manipulating pattern-building, memory, and repetition as a means to short-circuit into people’s trust.

Scientific method

• In-house acceptance of alternative views, unless/until they have a significant pattern of accepting and airing information manipulation as valid lenses
• Multiple people in the bylines; this does assume that they are working the information, acting as springboards and poking at the information stability from multiple points of view, which can be a bad assumption.
• Willingness to walk readers through the history, sources, and logics, with bonus points for admitting to and walking through early confusions; in other words, they are offering more than enough information for others to process themselves even if it means they come to a different interpretation
• Following the narrative throughline of scientific papers (executive summary, build up of evidence, hypothetical interpretations) rather than clickbait (tease, heighten emotion, bald statement of seriously biased narrative)
  Note that more of the big-player news agencies are tending towards the latter, purely because they are a) measuring, b) metrics that don’t pertain to trust and valid information, while c) chasing marketing budget. YOU can help them shift their focus by cutting their first-blush metrics: clicks. Simply avoid clicking the tease-heavy headlines.

Organizational patterns of human cognition

Emotional mien

I’m a fan of the AP and Reuters because they are focused on a neutral emotional stance. For the most part they aren’t telling people how they are expected to react.

Anger, fear, and desire are the three most derailing emotions for our cognition. Anyone — yes, Fox News — who is actively trying to keep people in these emotions are automatically suspect. There is a high probability that they want to impress their interpretations of the information they are presenting, and are depending on emotions to rally people quickly so they don’t triangulate or check logic. If an agency (multimedia or written) cannot spend at least 60% of their time calm and neutral, I turn them off completely. The closer they are to 100%, the more they are included in go-to sources.

It’s only this low (60%) because I want to include Rachel Maddow, and she’s boarded the emotions-to-rally train; I’m sure she’s had to in order keep her ratings-driven job. BUT her information is usually triangulated, meets critical thinking, and is often presented in line with scientific method. I keep a cap on the percentage of my news that I get from her, and always triangulate.

The exception is when the news is actually distressing. Even then, I’m still noting the tipping point — how easily/quickly they switched from reporting to reaction.

Cognitive bias

We all have cognitive biases. Every. Single. One. Of. Us. The differentiator is what you do with them. At one extreme is letting them free-reign your approach to the world, making your life the epitome of ‘fateful’. At the other extreme is working to understand, accommodate, and even derail those biases, putting you closer to true personal agency.

Organizations are people. Organizations have processes that are effectively cognitive biases.

For instance, Fox News has a deeply embedded confirmation bias. Science.org has an information bias. A confirmation bias tends to only see what it’s looking for: the world becomes exactly what it predicted. An information bias is always looking to include more information to come to a better balance of holistic and potentially quality truth: it can be slow off the marker, but the interpretation is going to be closer to functional reality.

There are a handful of cognitive biases that are ascendant in our current culture. I tend to look for those before any others. It’s not that I’ll automatically dismiss a news source for having them, but that I keep it in mind while I fold their information into my personal information system.

Social conditioning

This one is getting into an aspect that I didn’t write up in my book. Part of what we do as people is fit in with other people. We are social animals. How we see ourselves fitting in shifts when and how we share the information we have.

I really haven’t articulated this very well even for myself. It will take probably hundreds of hours of writing before I’ll be able to collapse it to a handful of paragraphs, let alone a single paragraph. But for news, it’s a little easier: how quickly off the marker they’ll be, coupled with what standards of veracity they try to meet as they get faster.

Take, for example, the New York Times (NYT). When it comes to US news, they tend to be slow off the mark unless it’s something they saw coming (elections, a new pope announced). They are checking their facts AND checking the general mien of what they think will ‘land’ with their leaders, then readers, then staff. It wasn’t always this way. Go back a years, and the pattern used to be staff (as the closest to the pulse of the details and able to spot emerging patterns), then readers, then leaders. Go back even further, and they didn’t even check for how it would ‘land’; this is what happened, and it needed to be reported. And it’s a cycle; go back even further and you can see where leaders were dictating the framing of the news.

Remember that shift, I’ll be coming back to it. ;)

Broadly speaking, AP and Reuters tends to be the breaking, verified news. They literally feed the big players. BBC and The Guardian will report on US events even days before it will hit CBS, NBC, CNN, NYT, or WaPo. Investigative journalism from NYT or WaPo tends to be more robust, while research journalism is hands-down Science.org, Nature, Scientific American, and their ilk.

Wired and 404 Media are emerging news sources building solid reputations of being both faster than the big players, informationally sound, and staff-driven. It is incredibly exciting to watch them gain market share while investing in quality information, purely as an information architect.

Politics isn’t actually news. It’s newsworthy, but it’s not actually new information. It’s interpretation and human cognition within social power dynamics. Politics is how different cohorts of people are trying to convince others that their interpretation matters. Again, this is currently shifting, along two lines: process, and what “matters” means.

In terms of process, think of it like pulling in information and future-sense emotions of anger and desire. One could look at the disagreements of our founders as information, then passion: they were trying to figure shit out, and got upset at each other while still working the problem. Now, we’re stuck in passion, then information. We have a cohort of people who want certain things to be true regardless of how reality actually shakes out, and they are seriously pissed that people aren’t just falling in line with their wishes, so they are manipulating information.

Then there is “what ‘matters’ means”. It used to be what lenses would be included. Our founders were trying very hard to include more lenses. They often failed, but they tried — I like to think it’s one of many reasons they went with the phrase “more perfect”. They understood it was an iterative process. They were working towards integration.

Now, many of our politicians are looking towards what lenses should have precedence. Good news: there is general acknowledgement that more lenses exist. Bad news: there is a cohort that vehemently believes those lenses need to be thrown out as impertinent/moot/wrong, on a sliding scale based on traction and affected by manipulation and aggression. This is in effect driving towards compartmentalization and segregation. Have/have-not. White/POC. Male/female.

Win/lose.

Shifts

Nothing stays the same forever.

WaPo used to be at the top of my list because they were reasonably fast off the mark, focused on quality information, staff-driven, and understood the underlying quality of politics (i.e., information interpretation for actionability). The expectation of quality information is no longer valid because it’s become leadership-driven instead of staff-driven. Now I only include those articles that have support through triangulation, even if it meets standards of critical thinking and scientific method.

The most dangerous information sources are the ones you trust, but which are shifting. They can pull you along with them. That’s when we most need a vast array of information sources, even if during stability it can feel overwhelming.

That’s also the biggest reason to include news from outside the US while we are dealing with this administration’s rewriting of information. The BBC and Guardian have been faster off the mark for US news, the BBC for decades now. I think it’s because they didn’t worry about the US market reaction as much. Now they are the most out of reach in my go-to publications to be pressured by Executive Order. Unfortunately, it will only last as long as the supporting society allows. I’m assessing other international outlets as I see signs of Starmer caving to Trump’s shenanigans.

That’s it. Triangulation, critical thinking, scientific methodology, human cognition, as applied to emerging data.