What Elon Musk doesn’t understand about journalism

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Elon Musk’s sometimes antagonistic relationship with the press is no secret. But last week, the billionaire chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla exhibited a new level of hostility.

In a series of tweets, Musk referred to journalists as “holier-than-thou” hypocrites, said that news organizations had lost their credibility and the respect of the public, and blamed the media for the election of President Trump.

Then things got interesting. Musk proposed creating a “media credibility rating site” where the public would be able to “rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication.” He suggested calling this site “Pravda”—the Russian word for “truth” and also the name of the longtime Communist newspaper. He likened the rating platform to Yelp for journalism.

Despite the bluster, Musk may be on to something. At a time when public trust in the media is at an all-time low, a reputation system that allows citizens to gauge the reliability and accuracy of news they consume could be a step in the right direction.

That said, there are at least three potential problems with the way Musk proposed to do this. For starters, readers’ and viewers’ opinions about the credibility of media sources is likely to depend, in part, on their pre-existing biases. For instance, if the country is so polarized that liberals only find liberal journalists credible, and conservatives only find conservative journalists credible, then the ratings on the site Musk proposes wouldn’t be a good gauge of what is true. They would just be an opinion poll of participants’ political preferences.  And it would be possible to game the system by encouraging lots of people (or even automated bots) who agree with you to register their opinions on the site.

This might be no better than the situation we have today. According to a Gallup/Knight Foundation survey, less than half of Americans say they can think of a news source that reports the news objectively. Republicans who can name an accurate source overwhelmingly mention Fox News; Democrats’ responses are more varied. Meanwhile, two-thirds of Americans say most news media do not do a good job of separating fact from opinion; in 1984, by contrast, only 42 percent held this view. Fifty years ago, if Walter Cronkite said it, then America believed it. There is no journalist or news organization with that kind of status today.

But if people took it seriously, a system like the one Musk proposes would provide motivation to individual journalists and news organizations to try to become broadly credible to both sides of political debates. Just as Yelp reviews provide incentives to the businesses that are being rated to get better and do right by customers, this system might compel journalists to report and tell stories in ways that will engender trust among a broad section of society—not just impress members of their own tribe. Naturally, this presumes that members of the media would care about their ratings. And even then this process would likely take many months or years to have a substantial effect.

A second potential difficulty involves how people would form their opinions of media credibility. It’s likely that most people wouldn’t do a lot of research on their own, but would, instead, rely on other people whose opinions they trusted. These trusted sources might include prominent politicians, business leaders, commentators, and even friends and neighbors. In this case, it might be useful to design a system that makes it easy for some people to make their ratings public and then for readers and viewers to find—and duplicate—the ratings of those they trust, thus creating a veritable web of trust of media credibility.

Here again, though, the problem of polarization arises. If left-leaning people look to Rachel Maddow and Tom Friedman for guidance, while conservatives look to Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, the ratings would skew accordingly. This could exacerbate the problem of liberal and conservative echo chambers, and further deepen the divisions of our collective news consumption.

The third—and deepest—difficulty concerns how we decide what is true.  The approaches we’ve just seen can provide good ways of determining which news sources are broadly credible to members of the public.  But just because many people believe something is true doesn’t necessarily mean that it is.  History is full of examples of things that many people once believed, but which most people now think are false: the Earth is flat; the Sun moves around the Earth, evil spirits cause disease.

Philosophers know that questions of what is true and how we know it are extremely subtle and complex. But for practical purposes, different communities have developed their own methods of determining what is true that go beyond just trusting majority opinion. Scientists, for instance, have developed methods for doing carefully controlled experiments, and mathematicians have honed the art of making rigorous logical arguments.

Fortunately, there are analogous standards for responsible journalism. Journalists, for example, are expected to verify “facts” they hear from one source by corroborating them with other sources. They are expected to identify the sources of information they report and to give subjects of unfavorable news coverage an opportunity to respond.  It’s reasonable to assume that these standards lead to journalism that is more accurate and objective. But using these standards to judge journalistic credibility requires knowledge and skill—not to mention time and effort.

Crowdsourcing of the sort the Musk proposes can work well when the knowledge, skill and motivations needed to do a task are widely distributed in the crowd. But it’s probably not reasonable to assume that most members of the general public would be willing and able to apply these journalistic standards effectively.

A promising alternative possibility, however, would be to create independent organizations that make it their business to rate the credibility of news sources based on these criteria. There are already independent fact-checking organizations, such as snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org and hoax-slayer.com, and if some groups like these can manage to be credible to most people of both political persuasions, then they could have a very substantial and positive effect on media credibility.

At a time when Americans are more likely than ever to get their news from social media sites—like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube—the proposed rating system has a built-in and captive audience. But these companies are not necessarily interested in what news items will help build more effective democracies. Instead, they are strongly motivated to think about what news items will lead to more long-term profit for themselves in the market for online advertising. As a result, they have the potential to make our democracies dumber, not smarter, by disrupting the flow of accurate information to voters. (Musk made a similar point last week.)

However, I suspect that if broadly trusted ratings of media credibility were actually available, many users would want to see these ratings with their news. And then providing such ratings might well become necessary for the online media companies to be more profitable—not to mention the fact that it could bolster their reputations as responsible corporations.

One key question that must be answered to make this feasible is: Who would pay? I think the ratings are likely to be more credible if they are not done by the social media sites themselves, but by independent rating agencies, perhaps nonprofits. The online media companies could then pay these ratings agencies for the right to display their ratings.

And if there are broadly trusted ratings of media credibility available, this also makes possible a subtler kind of crowdsourcing than what Musk envisioned. Crowdsourcing can work—even when most people in the crowd can’t do the task well—if there is some independent way of recognizing and giving special weight to the crowd members who are good at the task.

In this case, we could let anyone rate the credibility of relatively obscure news sources that aren’t yet rated by the rating agencies. Then, when some of these news sources are later rated by the agencies, we could see which members of the crowd had given ratings that were well-correlated with those from the agencies. These would be the “hidden experts,” people who may not have any official credentials but who are objectively good at doing the rating task in the same way the experts in the widely respected agencies do it. And we could then give special weight to all the other ratings by these newly recognized experts. This would greatly leverage the wisdom of the crowd in a way that would not be nearly as easily distorted by simple biases.

There is also, however, a pessimistic possibility. If our national dialogue becomes so polarized that no single source of information or ratings is credible across political lines—even with ostensibly independent organizations involved—then none of the methods I discussed here would work very well. Biases, real or imagined, would breed the perception that no media is to be trusted. And we would not really be a single national community anymore. That would be a very bad omen, indeed, for our country’s future.

Rebuilding our national sense of being a shared community, and restoring trust in the press are not easy tasks, and they will not happen overnight. But they are not impossible either, and something along the lines of what Musk proposes—perhaps with modifications like those I’ve suggested here—could certainly be helpful.

It appears that Musk is dead serious about creating the site. On Friday, he said that while “Pravda.com” was taken, he was able to purchase the domain name Pravduh.com. Let’s hope that he—or others—will be successful at using an approach like this to help combat the divisiveness that has infected our national conversation.

Our democracy may depend on it.

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Thomas Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. He is the author of the book "Superminds," on which this essay is partly based.

 

 

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