Sensationalism

I had an interesting back-and-forth with Alon Levy on Twitter... it's a long-ass thread but it starts here:

1. It clarifies a lot if you think of racism as a type of crime, and of media coverage of racism as similar to media coverage of crime.

— alon_levy (@alon_levy) June 30, 2018

I largely agree with Levy about this. Where I disagree is whether people should unilaterally disarm in the face of this tactic, or use it themselves. But I'll come to that in a minute.

First I want to explain my view of what's going on here. People have two salient characteristics: they don't put much effort into learning about anything unless they are motivated to do so (another way to put this is that public attention for almost any issue is going to be suboptimal), and they don't really use statistics to understand the world, preferring to rely on personal observation (the "availability heuristic").

The consequence is that people are easy to mislead even if you don't lie to them. You simply have to slant the coverage in a way that induces them to believe things that aren't true. (In the degraded parlance of our times, people are easy to "hack.")

The extreme example of this is the racist website that Dylann Roof spent a lot of time reading. The game here was simply to compile every violent black-on-white crime in the news. I have no idea if the website ever broke the truth, but the point is it certainly didn't have to. In a country of 320 million people, there will be plenty of horrific examples of black people raping and killing white people. All you have to do is report them factually to give your reader the impression that white people are facing an existential threat.

Of course no reasonable person would spend time on a website like that. But less extreme examples are everywhere. This is the game that Fox News plays, for instance. It makes itself highly entertaining to certain people (overcoming their general apathy about learning things), and then it feeds them a steady diet of alarmist bullshit about minority groups, left-wing college students/professors, etc. This in turn convinces them that white people can't get a fair shake in this country, you should fear black people, and so on. It is extremely effective propaganda.

Now of course this is regrettable. But the problem is that you can't just snap your fingers and make people pay attention to important matters, or make them learn and apply statistics to their understanding of the world. I suppose formal education probably helps along these dimensions, but obviously not enough. So it can be effective to mimic the tactics used by Fox News. (Something like the Daily Show fits this model. It provides entertainment while alerting people to all of the ridiculousness going on in the world of conservatism.)

Anyway whatever you think of the Daily Show, there are certainly responsible ways to get people to pay attention to issues you care about. The question Levy was addressing was whether it is ever good to sensationalize relatively minor events to promote a narrative. The most common way this occurs on the left (in my experience at least) is through viral content on social media. One example that Levy cited was a white person calling the cops in response to innocuous behavior on the part of black kids or something like that. Lately these have been going viral, bringing a lot of stigma to the individuals calling the cops. When I brought up the example of sensationalizing incidents in which bicyclists are hit by cars, he agreed that those are an example of what he means.

My view is that this kind of thing has to be done judiciously, and ideally activists would confine themselves to cases where an individual won't be targeted or where something serious has happened. (The nature of viral social media posts is that the level of stigma is related to virality and not to the gravity of the underlying harm. If, like, 20 people shame a woman for calling the cops too readily, that might be okay. But for 200,000 to do so is probably overkill.)

But you can't just unilaterally disarm. You can say that ideally everyone would cite statistics rather than vivid examples, and would be equally (un)entertaining, so that people's information would be unbiased. But that's not the world we live in, and activists don't have the luxury of pretending it is. If you want safe streets for bicyclists, you have to break through people's natural apathy with vivid examples. And you (probably) aren't going to publicize cases where cyclists injure or kill pedestrians, because that's not the information you want the public to have heightened awareness of. (You might do it to encourage good behavior on the part of cyclists, acting as a kind of cop. It's just a question of what your priorities are.)

And the same goes for the overuse, misuse, and abuse of police power. Or everyday incidents of sexual harassment. Or bigotry. Or whatever. When these things go viral, it helps educate people and it increases their sense of how common they are. Of course that kind of thing can be bad (as when it leads people to believe black-on-white crime is much more prevalent than it is), but it can also be good (as when it gives people a more realistic sense of what it's like to be a woman or person of color in this country).

So in short, while there are definitely pathologies to this way of spreading ideas, I don't think it makes sense to shun the tactic. It simply has to be used responsibly.