Archives: The Solution to Fake News?

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If you spend time on social media—or with any media, for that matter—you are probably sick of seeing and hearing accusations of “Fake News!” You may feel frustrated and helpless in the face of the onslaught. After all, here in the United States misinformation and lies are protected by the First Amendment, as the Supreme Court reaffirmed in U.S. v. Alvarez in 2016. 

But fear not: You have a friend in archives. Archives contain evidence, and it’s the mission of archives to preserve evidence, so that people can use it to distinguish fact from fiction. 

In her recent book, A Matter of Facts: The Value of Evidence in an Information Age (Chicago: ALA/Neal-Schuman/SAA), scholar Laura A. Millar distinguishes between facts and evidence. “A fact is a statement that is consistent with reality or that can be proven by an analysis of available evidence. Evidence is any source of information that provides demonstrable truth.” (13) Verifiable documentary evidence, such as undoctored photos, textual documents, electronic messages, and other materials held and protected by archival institutions can be used to prove something is or isn’t true.

I work for the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, which is one of the 14 presidential libraries that is part of the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA.* It is NARA’s goal to have 500 million pages scanned and available online by 2024. As of the most recent count NARA has more than 86 million pages available online (out of 235 million pages scanned), so the goal may not be as outrageous as it initially sounds. 

If you think at all about the National Archives, you probably know it as the place that keeps the documents that define our nation. Yet the records protected by NARA are at the forefront of today’s news. For example, NARA continues to release documentation on the pre-Supreme Court career of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh served on the staff of President George W. Bush and worked as an assistant independent counsel under Kenneth Starr, who investigated President Bill Clinton. 

Many of Kavanaugh’s records are in the form of emails, which raises another issue that must be addressed in the battle against fake news. The most critical struggle archives face is the need to protect and preserve electronic records that are considered permanent but are in imminent danger of erasure or obsolescence. Regular backups, multiple storage locations, trusted digital repositories, and frequent checks for data corruption are all weapons archives are using to fight the digital preservation battle. 

Posting digitized records to prove the truth or falsity of a statement is one way to quickly support an argument or discredit a claim. I’m on the social media team at the Carter Library. While all of NARA’s dozens of social media accounts operate under certain guidelines, including ones specific to federal employees, NARA generally gives us free rein to promote our collections and our facilities in ways we see fit. 

I have discovered that Twitter can be useful for clearing up misconceptions, correcting the record, and answering questions. I refuted the frequently cited claim that Jimmy Carter’s favorite movie was Gone With the Wind by finding a clip of the President speaking to the audience at the American Film Institute’s 10th anniversary gala in 1977. What he said then was, “It was a great movie. It’s not quite as good now as it was then,” which is not exactly a ringing endorsement. 

Another repeated tale suggests President Carter switched his hair part from the right to the left side, which is why he lost the 1980 election. Google “hair part theory” and you’ll discover there is a field of study that measures the success of people who move their hair part from one side of their head to the other. I found a letter to Carter suggesting he change his part, but if you look at the letterhead, you’ll see that it’s from a college fraternity! So was it a prank? We know from photos that Carter did change the hair part soon after the letter arrived … but we can’t prove cause and effect. I posted the letter to Twitter to get it “out there” for search engines.

In July, historian Andrew Rudalevige tweeted that I fact-checked him by retweeting him a copy of a page from the President’s Daily Diary, because Rudalevige cited the incorrect date for the president’s famous “Crisis of Confidence” speech. And I also used Twitter to respond to a blogger’s post about Carter’s alleged UFO sighting, offering the president’s own version of that event. 

In all these cases the documents and footage provided the evidence, and Twitter served as the means of dissemination. If you can throw facts “into the universe,” as historian Kevin Cruse suggests, they can live on and show up in searches when future inquiring minds are seeking answers.

All the scans attached to records in the National Archives Catalog can be downloaded for free. They are in the public domain. Several years ago when I worked at the National Archives at St. Louis, PBS aired an episode of American Masters about legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix, which contained false and misleading information about his military career. NARA-St. Louis had Hendrix’s official military personnel file (OMPF), so we knew he did not receive an honorable discharge due to injury or awards of valor for jumping out of planes. The misinformation was subsequently repeated on Wikipedia, a CBS News webpage, and at a commercial military-themed site.

Shortly after the American Masters episode aired, NARA’s cataloging staff decided to add records from the St. Louis archives’ Persons of Exceptional Prominence collection to the National Archives catalog. And we had James Marshall Hendrix’s OMPFuploaded in the first batch, so the evidence would be there for people to read for themselves. I had the Wikipedia page changed by using the link to his record as evidence, to correct the error.    

You too can take advantage of the National Archives’ records, or records that are digitized and freely available on the websites of hundreds of other archival repositories, to fight for the truth. And here are some other suggestions for fighting fake news:

With tools such as these, you’ll have a better chance of being able to arm yourself against fake news. And remember, the evidence is in the records. 

* Daria Labinsky has been with the National Archives and Records Administration since 2010 and has been an archivist at the Jimmy Carter Library since 2017. She worked as a journalist, editor, and indexer for 25 years and has co-authored four books. The opinions reflected here are her own and not necessarily those of the National Archives and Records Administration. This blog post is based on a presentation originally given at the 2019 Council of State Archivists—Society of American Archivists’ Joint Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.

Fake News, November 7, and the Not-Quite-End of “the War that Will End War”

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November 7, 1918 Seattle Star headline

November 7, 1918 Seattle Star headline

November 11 holds a special place across Europe and the world as a day to remember the bloody, world-changing event that was supposed to be “the war that will end war.” In November of 1918, when World War I came to an end, people celebrated across the globe. In France, “they rang the church bells enough to break them,” according to Fred Sigourney, a doughboy from Gratiot County, Michigan. 4,000 miles from the front; in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, “the Liberty Band appeared on the streets and played a ‘Hot Time’ on all the downtown streets. A platform was built on the corner of Main and Broadway, and in the evening a regular old-fashioned jollification was held. There was lots of music, red hot speeches, and everybody rejoiced.” In Lansing, the governor of Michigan, Albert Sleeper, commented, “That is the best news the world has ever heard, if true.”

November 8, 1918 Isabella County Enterprise headline

November 8, 1918 Isabella County Enterprise headline

Governor Sleeper’s statement hit the nail on the head—the news wasn’t true. The celebrations in Mt. Pleasant, Lansing, and numerous other American communities were four days ahead of history. From Washington, DC to Seattle, newspapers carried United Press (UP) agency’s reports that the Great War was over. But while many Americans prematurely popped the corks on the celebratory champagne, the war raged on another four days. Casualties continued to mount until just moments before 11:00 am, November 11, when the actual armistice took effect. 

How did United Press get it wrong? Admiral Henry B. Wilson, commander of the American Navy, issued a comment on November 8: “The statement of the United Press relative to the signing of the armistice was made public from my office on the basis of what appeared to be official and authoritative information. l am in a position to know that the United Press and its representatives acted in perfect good faith and that the premature announcement was the result of an error for which the agency was in no wise responsible." Admiral Wilson received news of a ceasefire and, due to a miscommunication, was under the impression it was a total armistice. It was instead a local ceasefire in a single location.

November 7, 1918 Washington Times headline

November 7, 1918 Washington Times headline

The fallout from the false reports came swiftly. On November 8, papers that worked with the Associated Press, UP’s rival, ran bold headlines refuting the claims that the war was over. The papers also carried a blurb that President Woodrow Wilson would announce the signing of the armistice as soon as he had official news of it—in other words, if it didn’t come from the President, it should be considered untrue. On November 10, the Detroit Free Press reported that the US Attorney’s office in Toledo sent copies of the Toledo newspaper “containing the United Press ‘fake’ armistice dispatch” to the US. Attorney General in consideration of charges against UP. The justification was because the “fake armistice dispatch” led to undue jubilation that disrupted work and harmed the war production effort.

November 15, 1918 Isabella County Enterprise story

November 15, 1918 Isabella County Enterprise story

Amidst the blowback due to the “fake dispatch,” word that the armistice was truly agreed to on November 11 quickly spread across the Atlantic. When the news hit American shores, the celebrations began for a second time. As the Isabella County Enterprise of November 15 noted, “Monday [November 11] the real thing happened and again the town [Mt. Pleasant] went wild.” The hearty souls in Mt. Pleasant, and Americans from coast to coast, had it in them to celebrate two times in four days. 

In Mt. Pleasant, the second celebration turned into an event that went on for multiple days. Wednesday, November 13 was a “cold, uncomfortable day,” but the miserable weather could not stop the revelry. An ox roast was held and “not hundreds—but everybody—came to the barbecue.” The students from Central, including those in the Student Army Training Corps, joined in a parade with many other citizens and groups from Isabella County. The parade wound through Mt. Pleasant to Island Park, where a band played and whoops and hollers filled the air.”

As the Enterprise noted in closing, “Never in the world’s history of mankind has there been an occasion for such a celebration.” Whether or not he was concerned, Governor Sleeper didn’t have to worry that the “best news the world has ever heard” wasn’t true after November 11.

Bryan Whitledge is the Archivist for University Digital Records at the Clarke Historical Library, where he works with the history of CMU.

What Is Fake News? Answers From a Professor and Journalist

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The following are my answers to a Michigan high school student who sent me a series of questions as part of a project on fake news. Eleven states in the past five years have passed laws mandating media literacy in secondary education. The premise of these laws, which Michigan has yet to debate, is that an informed electorate must be able to consume reliable news and information in order to make rational decisions about their states and communities. The most recent development in this trend is not just examining media in general, such as movies and popular music, but news in particular. This has given rise to discussions about news literacy, a growing field in academia that seeks to develop curriculum at both the secondary and higher education levels aimed at equipping our future generations with the skills necessary to thrive in a chaotic information ecosystem.

What is fake news?

Fake news is journalism that those in positions of power and authority disagree with. We now talk in terms of fake news, false news and mistaken news. Fake news, as used by President Trump and others, is an attack on established media for reporting things that they believe make them look bad. False news is information written and produced to look like traditional news reports but is actually designed to persuade or deceive. The U.S. Senate released a report recently on the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency, which created hundreds of social media accounts and created tens of thousands of false posts in order to divide and mislead the American public. Mistaken news is simply that, mistakes. News organizations sometimes make mistakes. These are sometimes pounced on as evidence that all media is “fake.”

How has the manipulation of mass information been untrue in the past, before the word “fake news”?

There have been many episodes in the past where information has been twisted or outright fabricated. Our second president John Adams was noted for his hostile attitude (and actions) toward the opposition press. Though he did not use the term “fake news,” he regularly criticized the partisan press for distorting facts. And they often did.

What has been your personal experience with “fake news” as a journalist? How were you able see it affect your profession?

When I was a daily working journalist, the phrase was not commonly used. But, myself and the outlets for which I worked were often criticized for being wrong, twisting the truth, being partisan, and so on. This comes with the business. Truth tellers are rarely welcomed, but most people understand they are essential. Even countries where democracy has not yet taken root understand that truth – defined in the journalistic context as verifiable fact that presents a situation or issue fairly and accurately – is the foundation of a civil society.

How is the idea of fake news affecting the media?”

There was an initial effect on mainstream media when President Trump became the Republican nominee and a major part of his campaign message was pointing a finger at the mainstream press and calling journalists “fake news.” The media, too often in my view, tried to fight back by saying, “We are not fake news and you are destroying democracy by saying so.” Many politicians throughout the years have used the press as a target. Trump, in the age of social media, has been particularly good at it. But, overall, the media seems to have settled back into its more helpful mode of reporting what they find out and ignoring many of the critics.

How do journalists battle “fake news”?

Journalists, in my view, can best fight the concept of fake, or false, news by staying true to what we have always done, follow the core ethics of our profession, as stated by the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics: Seek truth; Be Accountable; Minimize Harm, and Act Independently. Those values, I am confident, will outlast any enemies of the truth.

Do journalists in this time have it harder than before?

Well, not harder per se, but more precarious. The Digital Age, especially and including social media, has shattered the traditional business model. Doing journalism is no more difficult than before, but there is less profit in it. That means fewer jobs in traditional news but far more jobs in more generic media. That is a problem society needs to address.

What does it take for someone to be a journalist in this time?

We are living in a period of generalization, by which I mean journalists not only need to be competent in the traditional disciplines of writing and gathering information but also in visual and digital skills. This is different from when I was in college, when you crafted yourself as either a reporter, editor or photographer. This means a university education is all the more important.

How does the idea of fake news affect the audience?

This is the essential question. Social media is not going away, though I suspect it will change over time. Skills once left to editors and producers now must be used by the audience. These include critically analyzing sources, understanding how things work and how previous information fits into new information. It is vital the audience understand the difference between trusted journalism and something designed to look like trusted journalism. If society is to govern itself through elected leaders, information used to make decisions about those leaders must be fair, accurate and true. This only comes from journalism.

How do you think we should try to see the media in the future?

This is a difficult question. The media is there to inform, enlighten and entertain us. How we use that source is up to each of us. If we fail to put in the effort to educate ourselves or lack the will to exercise our minds, we will be trapped in the information silos we build for ourselves. We will never experience the thrill of discovery or the challenge of a new idea that shatters our preconceptions. We must be the master of our information, not the other way around. Russian troll factories only have influence if we fail to think. We must think.

Ed Simpson is an associate professor of digital journalism and public affairs at CMU. He spent 19 years in the news business and earned his doctorate in journalism from Ohio University. He is the author of Rise of the Audience: News, Public Affairs and the Public Sphere in a Digital Nation, which explores what happens in communities when daily journalism retreats.

Reflection: Fake news and climate change

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While dwelling on the Critical Engagements theme for this year, Fake News, I cannot help but consider the thread of scientific distrust that is intertwined within this topic.  I am a climate scientist.  

I went to college for meteorology and to graduate school for climatology.  I was trained to inspect and analyze data, think critically and logically, draw conclusions from the evidence, and present results with confidence bounds to a degree of detail that makes my work reproducible.  I was trained to be a scientist.  Sometimes people ask me how I feel about the “controversy around climate change”, or whether or not I “believe in climate change”.  Every time I’m asked this I am left quite perplexed. For climate scientists and assuredly other scientists, there is no controversy, there is no belief.  There is data, evidence, analyses, and conclusions. Scientists are trained to accept or reject hypotheses based on data, there is no controversy or belief.

To help clarify the scientist’s point of view, let me go over how scientific knowledge is created in a broad sense. 

The Scientific Method

Inspired by Copernicus and Galileo’s use of observations and inductive reasoning, Francis Bacon was the first to formalize the idea of a scientific method in Novum Organumin 1620, advocating a method of systematic inductive reasoning for questioning observations in nature with a focus on experimentation to prove or disprove ideas.  The idea of a universal scientific method was debated and modified by great thinkers from the 17th to the 19th century, at which point it was more or less accepted by the common scientific culture in the form we use today. It is essentially a list of general principles used in answering questions about the natural world in an inductive manner, in which observations lead to theories which lead to experiments, which prove or disprove the theories.  The specific steps in the scientific method may vary by discipline and perhaps by question, but the basic components are fairly ubiquitous:  

  • Scientists make observations (which we record and then call data). For example, Galileo made observations of the motion of the stars and Jupiter’s moons using a telescope.  In a closer-to-home example, I study snowfall observations from around North America. 

  • Scientists form hypotheses about their data, which are testable conjectures based on the observations.  Based on his observations from his telescope, Galileo hypothesized that the Earth was not in the center of the solar system.  Based on snowfall observations, I hypothesized that the extent of Arctic Sea Ice can impact North American snow storm tracks.  

  • Scientists develop rigorous and reproducible tests (experiments) to determine whether or not they can accept or reject their hypothesis. Galileo observed the phases of Venus in such detail as to prove that it orbited the Sun and not the Earth, thereby accepting his hypothesis that the Earth was not in the center of the solar system.  I conducted analyses on Arctic Sea Ice extent data and North American snowfall, to quantify the months and lag in which there was a quantifiable effect of sea ice on snowfall.  Since my analysis showed that fall snowfall in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions are best described by the previous spring’s sea ice extent, I accepted my original hypothesis.

  • Scientists publish their results to undergo external review, and replication.  The peer review process can be a gauntlet, whereby scientist’s work is evaluated by other experts in the field.  Not just other scientists, but leading scientists in the small sub-area of specialty that your theory falls within.  I underwent this process to publish my work in the International Journal of Climatology.  Galileo had the added privilege of his work undergoing external review by the catholic church.  In her Ted Talk (linked at the bottom of this page) Naomi Oreskes refers to this process as science being judged by a jury of geeks.  I encourage you to watch her ted talk on why we should believe science (my students reading this post are required to watch it - you know who you are).  We also publish so that others can reproduce our experiments.  This is so they can confirm our results and extend them to ask and answer new questions about the natural world. 

By the time a scientific paper is published it has undergone intense scrutiny by several different scientists, to confirm that the data and methods are sound and the conclusions follow from the analyses. This entire process results in relatively high confidence in the validity of scientific claims, especially when research is conducted by multiple independent scientists in different fields of study and they all result in the same conclusions (such as is the case with climate change).  

The scientific process and the scientist are meant to be meticulous, and as exact as possible which allows for this component of reproducibility (replication of experiments).  However, this training can have an unfortunate byproduct of making scientists sometimes difficult to converse with for non-scientists.  For example, if you were to ask me if I think it’s going to be a snowy winter, I would first list the most recent observations from the equatorial Pacific to the Arctic to explain the data that goes into a winter outlook.  I would follow that with interpretations of the mathematical models that generate a winter climate projection using the aforementioned data, and then finally give my conclusion based on this data.  If I’m being a thorough scientist, I will then give you an estimate of my confidence and the potential error in my conclusions.  This is usually enough to make a non-scientist totally tune out. But I feel that anything less would be inaccurate and make my comments appear as simple guesses.  

I cannot help but wonder if scientists and non-scientists are effectively speaking different languages, which may serve to foster distrust.  However, if you are a non-scientist and have read all the way through this blog post there is hope.  You perhaps understand us a little better.  When you talk to us, listen for the scientific method in what we say and how we say it.  Ask us about the data or the evidence rather than how we feel about a controversy.  Thank you for your interest in how scientific knowledge is created, perhaps this will be a step toward bridging the language gap and dissolving blind scientific distrust.   

Daria Kluver (kluve1db@cmich.edu)

 

 

Reflection: "What is the cost of lies?"

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The HBO miniseries Chernobyl, an exploration of the 1986 cataclysmic nuclear meltdown, begins with this question as its opening salvo. Over five dense episodes, the audience follows the main characters as they live through, and sometimes try to fight, officials’ intricate machinations to cover up the disaster. It is a gut-wrenching watch from beginning to end as the truth is covered up, uncovered, covered up again, and thousands of bodies pile up. While there is hope at the end for some discovery of what actually happened, viewers’ emotions—and any truth that remains—are left in shards. 

It is so very human to want to get to the bottom of things, to have the facts, to affirm (or to discover!) the truth (the Truth?). In the days leading up to the fall 2019 semester, the newspaper headlines underline this quest.

Our desire to have answers is strong.

And yet we are clearly in a moment when we have anxiety over the truth. We write and talk about deepfakes, the deep state, and too many conspiracy theories to count. And, of course, there is the expression “fake news” itself, words irrevocably linked to a discussion about truth and lies as they relate to American politics, the media, and foreign interference in domestic affairs. 

These worries are not limited to national and global politics. They touch many subjects we research and teach: vaccinations and autism, the replication crisis of scientific studies (e.g. the marshmallow test), and the purpose of walls in the Middle Ages. The nature of climate change, one of the most wicked problems of the 21st century, is hotly debated.  

Whether a mistruth is malevolently crafted or a slight variation on a fact, what happens when we don’t have the truth or some version of it? We excuse the least of the untruths with expressions like “white lies,” “fibs,” or “innocent mistakes.” The worst, though, can have devastating consequences. Election fraud undermines the very basis of democracy. Measles—a disease up until recently eradicated in the United States—is menacing the vulnerable in places like Michigan. Lies and misconceptions about certain groups of people that spread in the media and social networks can lead to hate crimes, some even ending in the horrific mass shootings we’ve witnessed again and again. 

At the heart of this year’s Critical Engagement explorations and discussions, then, is the truth. What do we know? How do we know it? What do we do with that truth once we have it? We will explore these questions this year with faculty research and teaching, student endeavors, staff work, and community voices. We have planned conversations, lectures, pop-up classes, and other activities throughout the year as we look at truth and lies through the lenses of journalism, postmodern philosophies, the scientific method, social media, and even the role of the university itself. 

Because the truth really does matter. For some nations and peoples carrying the burden of a genocidal past, bearing witness to truths and facts of that time is an essential step in inching toward a reconciled future. Even if sometimes we ignore the truth because the facts can be inconvenient or damaging, to not be able to unearth any truth at all would be truly alarming.

Again, Chernobyl poses the problem bang on in the opening minutes of the first episode: “The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth, and content ourselves instead... with stories.”

Join in and help us search for some of the answers…. and maybe a little truth while we’re at it, too. 

Christi Brookes (christi.brookes@cmich.edu)

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And below is a trailer for Chernobyl. It has the Russian phrase “Внимание, внимание” (“Vnimaniye, vnimaniye”/“Attention, attention”) on loop. It’s a must-watch series for anyone interested in this year’s Critical Engagements theme.