Transcriber: 欣慧 姜 Reviewer: Anna Sobota
“The world is on fire and we’re all going to die.”
This sentiment reflects almost every front page news,
every alert that pings on my phone.
Every breaking news story that I read is in some way a version of this,
told in many different ways about many different topics.
I’ve had a decade-long obsession with understanding why this is
and researching what effect this has on us,
especially given how frequently were exposed to it -
and whether you’re a news addict or a news avoider,
you will be affected.
I know I was.
I got to the point where the news made me feel so depressed about the world
that I couldn’t watch it anymore,
and this is incredibly common.
But feeling depressed
doesn’t have to be overriding side effect from being informed.
There are ways we can engage with the news and feel more empowered,
more connected to the world and more capable to act within it.
But to achieve this, we have to change the way we use the news.
Navigating the news is, in fact, a skill.
And it was only recently that i learned that there was a name for it,
that it was called news literacy.
So even though I’d been in this space for the last ten years
researching the impact of news on our mental health
and developing ways to build healthy news habits,
I had never heard this term before.
And this is because news literacy
is traditionally about being able to protect ourselves
against misinformation.
And although this has become a slightly polluted term,
where people claim fake news
to undermine information they disagree with,
it is an actual thing.
And it’s designed to sow discord, disrupt and divide society,
as well as damage our ability to make informed choices.
And it can be harmful.
In 2016, a 28 year-old man entered a pizza shop filled with families
in Washington, D.C.
He took out his rifle and began shooting.
Why?
He believed, because of misinformation,
that this pizza shop was the base for a paedophile sex ring,
involving Hillary Clinton.
Now, this is one of the more well known
fake news stories,
but misinformation is everywhere,
and it’s difficult to identify.
Only 22 % of UK adults have been able to successfully spot false information.
And so, news literacy has grown around this need to help teach us
how to separate fact from fiction
to become reliably informed about the world.
This is the central pillar of news literacy.
But for me, this approach is fundamentally incomplete.
It’s not that it’s not valuable, it’s just not enough.
We are missing something,
because misinformation is not the only thing
that prevents us from being accurately informed.
In fact, we need three pillars.
You see, we have a culture in our newsrooms
that “if it bleeds, it leads”.
The news reports on the worst things happening in the world
at any given moment,
prioritizing problems, conflict and violence
and ignoring stories of solutions, progress and development.
So we need a second pillar within news literacy
to address the fact that this negativity bias
creates an imbalanced and distorted picture of reality.
And it leads us to think
the world is a more dangerous and terrible place
than it actually is.
When in fact, we have achieved and continue to achieve
some of the most rapid improvements in our history.
I’ll never forget a conversation I had with my mother-in-law, Eva,
right after I had my first child.
She said she worried for my daughter
because the world is so much more dangerous and terrible
than when she was young.
Now, bear in mind,
Eva was born in Germany into a World War in 1945,
but she believes the world is much worse today.
But since 1945, globally speaking, we’re more prosperous,
we have fewer people living in extreme levels of poverty,
we have better health,
we are living for longer,
we have better technology.
The technological advances are incredible.
We have more processing power on our smartphones
than the whole of NASA’s had for the moon landing.
We have lower levels of child mortality.
We have fewer deaths from conflict.
We’ve made meaningful progress in our development of renewable energy,
as well as being able to afford better access to it.
And this isn’t to say
that everything has improved for everyone, everywhere, at every moment.
But it’s to highlight that despite significant progress
many of us continue to think the world is getting significantly worse
because that’s the story we’re most often told -
“The world is on fire and we all are going to die.”
So this negativity bias creates a whole different form of misinformation,
it’s misrepresentation.
It is not an accurate reflection of the state of the world
and as a result,we don’t have an accurate understanding of it.
And thinking of the world in this way,
that we’re in a perpetual state of decline,
is not only inaccurate, but it can be harmful.
It can make people feel anxious,
and not necessarily about a particular issue,
just generally anxious, depressed, fearful
hostile towards each other
and helpless in the face of large global issues.
So how do we fix this?
Well, we don’t stop reporting on problems,
but we begin seriously reporting on solutions too.
And I’m not talking about light-hearted, uplifting stories
that just make us feel better.
I’m talking about real journalism that investigates progress
and helps us understand how issues are being dealt with.
And there’s a skill to this,
because it’s not just knowing that things have gotten better,
we need to know how they have and why they have.
This gives us critical information.
By learning from how communities are successfully responding to problems,
it helps us better identify and implement effective action,
especially in areas where these problems aren’t yet solved.
And this does more than just improve our mood,
this shifts our mindset.
This creates new parameters for possibility.
And this has been shown to increase our levels of hope,
optimism, resilience, connection and self-empowerment.
And the thing that is really important to stress about these feelings
is they don’t arise from denying
or shielding ourselves from the world’s problems,
they arise when we allow ourselves to see what’s possible in their presence.
To be clear,
this is not about ignoring problems,
nor is it about redirecting the media lens from here to there.
It’s about widening the lens to see the whole picture.
But there is a huge resistance to this.
With all the terrible things happening in the world,
reporting on progress can be considered insensitive or irresponsible
as if it would give us a false sense of security,
but this is just not true.
And it’s irresponsible not to because without it,
we’re left with a false sense of insecurity
where we believe the world is worse than it actually is.
So we need to expand the definition,
and these first two pillars of news literacy that I’ve spoken about,
seeking truth and striving for balance,
they relate to how information is produced.
But there’s a third pillar,
and this focus is on us and how we process information.
And I’m referring specifically here to our cognitive biases.
So these are our thinking shortcuts,
which have been developed over thousands of years,
and then, fine tuned by our own personal experience.
They exist to help us prioritize and process information quickly.
But because of their rapid speed, they are filled with processing errors
which interfere with us processing reality accurately.
So if I was to ask you to roughly estimate, in the last five years,
how many people have died from commercial plane crashes
versus car accidents?
Just as a rough estimate,
roughly 1200 people have died from commercial plane crashes
versus nearly 6.75 million from car accidents.
And if I was to ask you,
what percentage of the world’s population are currently refugees:
14.5 %, 4.5 % or 0.5 %?
The answer is, in fact, 0.5 %.
And the bias responsible for these often incorrect answers
is known as our availability bias.
This is because the more often we see something,
the more common we believe it to be.
Now these examples may seem abstract,
but these inaccuracies in our assessment can have real life consequences.
They affect what we care about, what we act on,
what we legislate against and what we vote for.
And we need a basic understanding of our cognitive biases, not least of all
because these vulnerabilities in our psychology are exploited
by the very companies that we use to inform us.
It’s our own negativity bias that helps explain why we even have
the “if it bleeds, it leads” news culture -
because we are prone to pay attention to threats in our environment
and news organizations want to get our attention.
And then, there’s our confirmation bias
where we actively seek out and agree with information
that reinforces our existing way of thinking
and we reject or avoid information that challenges it.
And we’re particularly vulnerable to this bias when we get our news online
because the algorithms are designed
to give us news that we like and that we’re primed to engage with.
And considering 73 % of us get our news online,
this bias can often be very busy.
Now, these are just three, but there are many.
And it’s important we understand our cognitive biases
and how they manipulate information
so that we can better protect ourselves against the distortions they create.
But it’s not like a magic trick.
It’s not like once you know what your biases are and how they work,
they stop working.
But it allows us to account for them
and to build strategies to limit the exploitation of them.
Now, what all of this shows us is that the news is complicated.
Our relationship with it is not straightforward,
and if used incorrectly, it has the potential to cause serious harm.
And if this were any other products on the market,
one of two things would happen:
it would be recalled or it would be relabeled,
and it would be given more rules to ensure it was used safely.
Well, news literacy provides us with those rules.
We need these three pillars to support them:
one, to combat misinformation and seek truth;
two, to counter the negativity bias and strive for balance;
and three, to account for our own cognition.
Truth, Balance, Cognition - T. B. C.
And this acronym is better known as to be confirmed.
For me, this is just a perfect summary because it reminds us to pause,
to be critical and aware that the news we consume
is always in some way to be confirmed,
that there is effort needed in our engagement with it.
And this effort is a really important element
because news literacy isn’t something we just learn and have,
it’s something we practise and do.
And at this stage, people always ask me what I do when it comes to the news.
So I’ll share with you three things.
Firstly, I try and get my news offline,
and this can be a physical news product or a news program.
The reason why I like this is because it’s intentional and deliberate.
You are seeking the news rather than the news seeking you.
My second recommendation is just to slow down.
We do not need to be checking in with the news every minute of every day,
the world doesn’t change that quickly.
And even if it did, we would still need time to make sense of its events.
So I prefer a much slower form of journalism:
a weekly newsmagazine or program that has time to fact check
and that takes a longer time frame on an issue.
And finally, include solutions.
If you don’t actively seek them, you will not see them.
And without them,
we psychologically starving ourselves of understanding what we’re capable of
as individuals and as a society.
We’re instead limiting ourselves to learning from failure,
and that can be a slow way to learn.
Now, these three small things can have a big impact,
but we need more.
We need a fundamental and radical shift in our relationship with the news
and our education about the news.
Since having children, I’ve become acutely aware of
how much earlier in life this education needs to begin.
Because the news is everywhere.
It affects everyone.
And we all need better guidance on how to successfully navigate it
in a way that leaves us reliably informed about the world.
But being accurately informed isn’t the end goal, it’s a tool.
Because if we want to build a better world,
we have to understand it better first.
Thank you.
(Applause)