Panelists for the “Losing Truth” forums are: Jill Castellano, Consumer Affairs data reporter; Paul Daniels, dean and president of Bloy House; Farrah Fazal, documentary producer and war correspondent; Andrew Guilford, retired U.S. district judge; and Lance Larson, cyber investigator.
[The Episcopal News] Bishop John Harvey Taylor opened “Losing Truth: The Critical Cost to Our Lives and Future,” the Sept. 15 online forum, with his confession of how easily he, even as a former journalist and sophisticated news reader, recently was misled by misinformation.
“Remember last week when Tom Brady debuted as a commentator on Fox Sports, helping call the Cowboys-Browns game?” he asked the gathering of about 40. “I’m not much of a football fan, but it’s hard not to follow the career of Tom Brady, and the next day I saw a seemingly reliable commentary saying he’d done a terrible job, and I was inclined to believe it. Why not? But then I checked the online publication The Athletic and learned that, although he started off rocky, as people usually don their first day at work, by the end of the game, he found his voice.
“Turns out, many people were upset. The popular analyst, Greg Olsen, had been demoted to make room for the superstar. I didn’t know enough to be aware of people’s agenda and hurt feelings, and I believed a seeming credible report on face value.”
Confirmation bias, or the human tendency to look for information sources meeting particular needs; tribalism and the need for deeper personal connection; fluidity of truth and the need for contextualization of media and wider media diets, hate speech and abuse of the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, were among the topics discussed during the forum facilitated by Dot Leach, a former broadcast journalist and chair of the diocesan Program Group on Ecumenical and Interreligious Life.
“Recently, we’ve seen truth manipulated with misinformation, disinformation, malinformation and just plain old lies,” said Leach, a lay leader at St. John Chrysostom Church in Rancho Santa Margarita and moderator of the program, a two-part forum at 2 p.m. both Sept. 15 and 22. A link to view the first forum will be posted soon. To register for the Sept. 22 discussion, click here.
“By presenting this two-part forum, we hope to bring light to a dark and critical issue that affects us all,” Leach told The News. “Through the expertise and experience of our panelists, we will seek ways to interrupt the circuitry of lies and avoid consequences that could put us and the future in harm’s way.”
The panel discussion featured Jill Castellano, a consumer affairs data reporter specializing in politics, extremism and misinformation and Farrah Fazal, Emmy Award-winning documentary producer and war correspondent; and Lance Larson, cyber investigator with the Orange County Intelligence Assessment Center, a certified local fusion center designated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
A second forum, to be held Sept. 22, will feature the Very Rev. Paul Daniels, dean of Bloy House, the Episcopal Theological School at Los Angeles and rector of St. Mary in Palms Church, Los Angeles; the Hon. Andrew Guilford, a retired U.S. Central California District judge; and Lois M. “Lo” Sprague, president of the Guibord Center: Religion Inside Out, and a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist whose background and focus are on the cutting edge of human capacities and the nature of consciousness.
Truth gets lost among the disinformation and misinformation disseminated by some media outlets, and in the political arena, and because of tribalism, filter bubbles and the need for wider media diets, panelists said. Journalists face an increasingly complex task to deliver relevant and reliable content.
For example, the simple act of going to an online search engines results in filter bubbles, or that same search engine automatically delivering similar content to the viewer, based on business and advertising, Larson said. Search engines analyze not only content, “but our location based on our internet protocol address, the time of day, other websites, if we’re logged in, that we’ve gone to cookies and the other things that are linked to us around the internet that are digital artifacts that stay with us until we clear them. That’s what they believe we want to see, and in many cases, it’s pretty accurate.”
Phishing, or online scams that trick people into revealing personal data or information, succeed, Larson said, because people are inherently trusting. “That is one of the biggest weaknesses we have as humans. It’s also our greatest strength, right?” He recommended learning about safeguards above and beyond antivirus programs as protection.
Exercising a healthy curiosity, assessing media and asking questions like “Does the media outlet have any incentive, financial or otherwise, to be sharing this information?” is vital, Castellano told the gathering. “We all need to be our own little versions of investigative reporters.”
The media hasn’t always done its due diligence, including hesitancy to call out lies from politicians and other figures has resulted in asymmetry, or “amplifying the truth and a lie in the same space,” which confuses people, Fazal said. “Something that you always have to take into account is, who’s telling you and what are they telling you? What kind of credibility do they have to tell you what they want to tell you? What motivation do they have to tell you that story?”
Discerning truth also involves developing a wider media diet, complicated by the collapse of local newspapers, both Castellano and Fazal said. “Sixty to 70% of local newspapers have just gone away. That has been a real hit to democracy,” Fazal said. In addition to online, print and broadcast local, regional, national and international media, the panelists both said they value news from philanthropic and nonprofit organizations.
Castellano encouraged subscribing to local news. “We’re struggling right now in the journalism world, but I think local news especially has taken a really hard hit.”
Accountability is also important, Fazal said. “Right after January 6, 3% of the people in this country believed that the rioters, the insurrectionists, had a legitimate reason” to attack the U.S. Capitol. But, because of repeated misinformation and lies by politicians, and the slow pace of bringing rioters to justice, in January of 2024, that number had grown to 42%,” she said.
“The difference was it took us a long time to hold those people accountable. Twelve hundred of those rioters, insurrectionists, are in jail, and they’re paying the price. But when people don’t see that those people were held accountable, it gives oxygen to the disinformation and the lies that those people were legitimate rioters showing up to do legitimate things. And it was amplified in the reporting of it.”
Responsible reporting is complex because hate speech is protected under the U.S. Constitution, Castellano said. She offered such recommendations for dealing with hate speech as documenting what happened. “Even if what has occurred is not a crime, you can still report it,” she added. “If you feel safe and … feel comfortable enough going to law enforcement, you can do so. Remember to rely on the people you know and love and tell them what’s going on and look for those networks of support.”
A way to combat the tribalism – the strong in-group sense of loyalty – that has polarized the nation politically and led to a lack of civility in public discourse, is to communicate and validate those with whom we disagree and connect on a human level, they said.
Solutions Journalism did a study a few years ago to figure out how to break through tribalism and discovered that “when people are in these places – when they’ve joined cults, when they are in tribes, when they only hang out with people who think the same thing they do – the person who they trust will have listened to them, will have validated them.” They’re the people who will sit and talk with them about the weather, their children, how hard their jobs are, Fazal said.
“Those are the people they will want to be close to,” Fazal said. “It’s important for us to remember that when people have lost truth and fact they need a window to the outside world that does have reality, that does have truth. And we can be those people.”
Rhonda McMoran, a forum participant, said she felt the discussion was one-sided, leaning critically towards one particular political view or candidate.
Participant Sable Manson had a different view. Higher education and faith communities, she said, can and need to play a role in training young people to become “good assessors of truth” and in empowering all people to be truth seekers, to accept each other’s “human-hood” without automatically rejecting a difference of opinion.
“Even if the perspective is different, there are reasons for that,” said Manson, who is one of the Diocese of Los Angeles’ four interfaith ministers. “We must all stay the course, because it is important. We must continue fighting for truth.”