By Sheldon
The world of intelligence and intelligence analysis is very different from that of the usual scholar or knowledge worker, with the possible exception of the investigative journalist. The difference is that the intel professional has to work with the constant awareness that someone may be trying to spoof him or her, to feed them false information and deflect their investigation from what’s really going on.
Sound like anything you’ve heard in the news lately?
“Fake news” has always been around, but never so much and so virulent. It has gone from the domain of the odd crank or trickster to practically a heavy industry. Even some efforts to identify sources of fake news are themselves highly biased and not to be trusted.
Caveat lector.
It was bad enough when it was just Fox News and conservative talk radio that formed the bulk of false news, but things have changed. There is now so much more of the stuff and, while there is some that comes from the left, the vast majority of it comes from or is targeted at a right-leaning audience. Apparently, unlike their opposite numbers, lefty readers tend to check things, verify and, if they are false, flag them as such. But the others, go viral very quickly, much too fast for most fact-checking systems to keep up. In other words, we are all intel analysts now, or we need to start acting like them.
This means several things. First, you have to vet your sources carefully, and there need to be some very strict rules. In the intel world, sources can have varying levels of reliability, but the unforgivable sin is fabricating false intelligence. Do that, and you will never be taken seriously again. Ever. Recovering from being labelled a fabricator is nearly impossible. You should adopt a similar stance with respect to your news sources. A reporter who makes mistakes, honest mistakes, is one thing. If they are willing to correct them, and if they don’t make them very often, that’s one thing. For me, I have more trust in a source that will issue prompt corrections than in one that never does, even if I don’t notice any mistakes.
Another way to test a source is to see how long they follow a story, and how they follow it. Does the analysis get better and more complete over time? Compare the long-term analysis of different sites. The ones that do well covering a story over a longer period of time tend to be better in the short-term as well. Also, beware of sources that are too eager to say something, anything, just to fill airtime or text fields. Use fact checkers, and keep score. Compare several sources for, say, three to six months. See which ones get caught running bogus or partly false stories. At the end of the trial period, drop the ones that don’t make the grade. If you’re uncomfortable doing that with whole networks (and you probably should be), look at individual reporters. Learn their strengths and weaknesses, and make note of them.
Recent news stories have featured entire operations dedicated to making up totally false news stories, written solely to garner clicks. Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of communications at Merrimack College, has drawn up a list of questionable news sites, which has since been taken down, but another list that clearly originates from a right-wing source, was uncritically published by the Washington Post. This creates problems. However, at the risk of sounding overly partisan, the right has a much longer and deeper tradition of spreading falsehoods in the media.
But I digress. The bottom line here is that each one of us must now take more responsibility for checking the veracity of our news sources. In the intel world, intelligence workers use what is called a source deck. In its simplest form, a source desk is basically a spread sheet with trusted sources listed. The advantage of this over a bookmark in a web browser is that you can add comments, keywords, etc., and you can add your sources as hyperlinks that will open directly into your browser.
I started working on a source deck of my own a couple of weeks ago. I have a page for listing news sources that I trust, another for people online whose opinions I respect, others for news analysis, statistical information, search tools, and experts I can contact at need. It’s something I should have done a long time ago, but this is probably as good a time as any.
Perhaps in future installments I’ll go over some of my trusted sources, the criteria I use for selecting them, and how I use them.