“‘No One Believes Anything’: Voters Worn Out by a Fog of Political News”, The New York Times

Published November 20, 2019

By Sabrina Tavernise and Aidan Gardiner, Nov.18, 2019

Paying attention to the impeachment inquiry and other developments means having to figure out what is true, false or spin. Many Americans are throwing up their hands and tuning it all out.

WASHINGTON — In upstate New York, Travis Trudell got an alert on his phone Wednesday morning telling him the impeachment hearings had started. He turned on Disney Plus instead. In Wisconsin, Jerre Corrigan never considered watching. She spent the day giving a math lesson to third graders. In Idaho, Russell Memory worked a busy day as a computer programmer and figured he’d catch up in a few weeks when the hearings were over.

The Democrats in Congress took their case against President Trump to the public last week. But after hours of testimony, thousands of news reports and days of streaming headlines, one thing was clear: A lot of Americans weren’t listening.

“It’s harder now — they want to grab you with those headlines,” said Ms. Corrigan on Wednesday night from her home in Stevens Point, Wis. “Trump did this, Trump did that. You have to go in and really research it. And I don’t think a lot of people do that.”

She added of the hearing: “I just don’t know what to think. You would have to know the facts, and I don’t know that I’m getting the facts from the media right now.”

In this volatile political moment, information, it would seem, has never been more crucial. The country is in the midst of impeachment proceedings against a president for the third time in modern history. A high-stakes election is less than a year away.

But just when information is needed most, to many Americans it feels most elusive. The rise of social media; the proliferation of information online, including news designed to deceive; and a flood of partisan news are leading to a general exhaustion with news itself.

Add to that a president with a documented record of regularly making false statements and the result is a strange new normal: Many people are numb and disoriented, struggling to discern what is real in a sea of slant, fake and fact.

Of course, many Americans have the opposite experience: They turn to sources they trust — whether on the right or left — that tell them exactly what they already believe to be true. But a new poll released last week found that 47 percent of Americans believe it’s difficult to know whether the information they encounter is true. Just 31 percent find it easy. About 60 percent of Americans say they regularly see conflicting reports about the same set of facts from different sources, according to the poll, by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts.

“Now more than ever, the lines between fact-based reporting and opinionated commentary seem blurred for people,” said Evette Alexander, research director at the Knight Foundation, which funds journalism and research. “That means they trust what they are seeing less. They are feeling less informed.”

They are also tuning out. Mr. Trudell, a registered independent, stopped paying attention to national news about a year ago. He found it toxic and mentally taxing, and it started arguments that had no end. He decided to focus instead on local and state-level politics. As a security manager at a mall, he has to worry about shoplifters, so keeping up with the state’s criminal justice reforms was useful.

Visitors to Capitol Hill filmed the departure of George Kent, a State Department official, after a hearing with the House Intelligence Committee in Washington on Wednesday.

Visitors to Capitol Hill filmed the departure of George Kent, a State Department official, after a hearing with the House Intelligence Committee in Washington on Wednesday.Credit…Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

National politics, he said, has started to look like eyewitness testimony: “People can see totally different things, standing right next to each other.”

So when he had the day off on Wednesday, which happened to be his 39th birthday, he decided to treat himself to a nap and some “Simpsons” reruns after his kids left for school.

“Yes, there are shades of gray, but what about black and white?” he said. “We assume that everything is a shade of gray now.”

There is good reason for skepticism. Of the powerful new digital forces buffeting American voters, perhaps the most pernicious are items designed to deceive.

Matt Stanley, a school administrator and registered Democrat in Crum, W.Va., watched as his candidate for Congress in the midterms last year, Richard Ojeda, lost badly. The result, Mr. Stanley believes, was at least partly related to a stream of negative ads on Facebook featuring doctored photographs aimed at discrediting Mr. Ojeda, including one depicting him in makeup and a pink beret.

But the most corrosive part came later, Mr. Stanley said. It was not that people believed wrong things that they saw online, but that they stopped believing right things — or anything at all. That made him afraid for the future. How do you have a society without shared reference points, he said Thursday.

“The social media, it muddies up stuff so badly,” said Mr. Stanley, who is 50. “There’s so much information that’s biased, that no one believes anything. There is so much out there and you don’t know what to believe, so it’s like there is nothing.”

Fake information is only part of the problem. Another is the sheer volume of news and the growing proportion of it that is opinion. Fatigue with it cuts across partisan lines.

“There are certain programs, with their disdain for Trump, it just becomes the Trump-bashing show,” said Els Ruijter, 55, a translator in suburban Detroit who is a left-leaning independent. “It’s like eating French fries. It goes down nicely, but it gives me a little indigestion afterward.”

She added: “It’s a freaking day job nowadays to keep up with stuff.”

[Ms. Ruijter was among the nearly 400 readers from across the country who told us how they decide what information to believe.]

Fake information is only part of the problem. Another is the sheer volume of news and the growing share that is opinion.Credit…George Etheredge for The New York Times

Then there are the politicians themselves, first among them Mr. Trump, who has helped create the confusion by asserting, over and over, things that numerous media fact checkers say are not true.

“In the political space, you no longer have to have facts to back up your claims,” said Talia Stroud, director of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas. “The result is a population bordering on cynicism, where people discount everything that’s opposed to their views.”

The loss of shared facts can be corrosive for rational discourse, as in Russia, where political leaders learned to use the online explosion far ahead of the United States.

“They spread this sense that people live in a world of endless conspiracy, and the truth is unknowable, and all that’s left in this confusing world is me,” said Peter Pomerantsev, author of “This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality.” He was referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian rulers. Mr. Trump, he said, has that style too.

Mr. Pomerantsev, who worked in a Russian television station in the early 2000s, said there is a transgressive thrill in strong leaders thumbing their nose at the facts.

“We slightly miss the point if we don’t understand how much pleasure their supporters derive from this,” he said. “Did he really say that? You can’t stop watching him. It’s partly about power. But it’s also anarchic, and there’s a weird freedom in that.”

Mr. Trump’s approach does not appeal to everyone, though, even in his own party.

“I do not support this brand of politics — any time there is any type of controversy, you just flatly deny it and you do it over and over until people are exhausted and move on,” said Mr. Memory, the computer programmer. Mr. Memory, a registered Republican, said that was why he did not vote for Mr. Trump.

But he said he sees bias among liberal news outlets and that drives him crazy too. He was annoyed, for example, that stories of Mr. Trump being booed at the Washington Nationals baseball game were given top billing, but when Mr. Trump was cheered in Alabama a few days later, he could find almost nothing about it.

“I don’t think things are fake, they’re just one-sided,” said Mr. Memory, 37. “Both things happened. He got booed and he got cheered. But one of them will be a much bigger story. That’s what bothers me.”

The degree of alienation is new. In the late 1970s, nearly three quarters of Americans trusted newspapers, radio and television. Walter Cronkite read the news every night, and most Americans went to bed with the same set of facts, even if they had different political views. These days, less than half of Americans have confidence in the media, according to Gallup.

Television news cameras positioned outside the White House on Friday.Credit…T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

The decline in confidence is particularly pronounced by party.Today about 69 percent of Democrats have a great deal of confidence in the media, compared to just 15 percent of Republicans and 36 percent of independents, according to Gallup.

Conservatives are less trusting because they are suspicious of the liberal establishment and the media that they see coming from it, said Stephen Hawkins, director of research at More in Common, a nonprofit group studying polarization.

“On the right you have this feeling that the cultural tide has swung against people like me,” said Mr. Hawkins, who grew up evangelical. “There’s this sense of victimhood toward government, media and academia. ‘These people have contempt for us, if not downright hatred, and so cannot be a reliable witness for what we are seeing day to day.’”

Mr. Pomerantsev argues that news avoidance cuts across political lines and that the concept of left and right no longer fits. In Russia, it had more to do with the loss of national identity and a larger story of progress that came with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“There were no nice facts to tell people, and suddenly you had political ideology based on nostalgia,” he said. “Twenty years later, we’ve reached this point in the West.”

New academic work is emerging that supports the view that news avoidance is not about left or right. Benjamin J. Toff, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Minnesota, conducted in-depth interviews in Iowa this summer and found that those who say they avoid the news tended to be younger, female and poorer — people already stretched between jobs and home, making hours of evaluating news sources “the last thing they wanted to do with their time,” Professor Toff said.

“They had this sense that they had to be skeptical of everything out there but they didn’t have the time to spend hours to make sense of it,” he said.

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Washington and Aidan Gardiner from New York.

The New York Times