DETROIT – When the pandemic finally began to recede, I had lunch with a scientist in a modest restaurant. My companion asked the server if she was vaccinated. Yes, she said, but she wasn’t going to get the booster, because “that’s how they track you.”
We showed her our smartphones. “Do you have one of these?” we asked. Of course she did. “Did you know “they” can find anything they want about you through this?” I said.
She hadn’t thought of that, but she clearly didn’t believe the scientist when he told her no one could track someone through a booster shot, saying, “I read about it on the Internet.”
Today, we live in a nation where survey after survey show that most people don’t know the three branches of the federal government (executive, legislative and judicial); that fewer than half know that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, etc.
Many think foreign aid is the largest part of the budget, when it is less than one percent. And for our nation and our democracy, this is more dangerous than it has ever been.
Civil ignorance is nothing new. On Election Day in 1988, a puzzled voter called me at the newspaper in Tennessee where I was working. He knew the names of his U.S. Senators, then Al Gore and Jim Sasser, but he saw other names on the ballot he didn’t know.
“Those are your candidates for state senate, sir,” said I. When he expressed puzzlement, I added helpfully that “They go to Nashville to make laws for the state. Incredulously, he said “You meant to tell me we are paying for two whole sets of the (expletives deleted?)
For a long time I thought that was funny, and he was an extreme case. But later I realized the only thing unusual about him was that he attempted to find out what he didn’t know.
But while voter ignorance isn’t new, today it is far more dangerous for three reasons: First, Americans have long gotten more of their news from broadcast outlets: Radio and TV. Prior to 1987, broadcast stations were restrained by something called the Fairness Doctrine, which, broadly speaking, required them to present both sides of issues, and not spread hate, demagoguery or racism. This didn’t always work perfectly, but it was an ideal, and the Federal Communications Commission could and did punish offenders.
Second, politics were often contentious and nasty in the half-century after World War II, but within certain civilized parameters. Had the Speaker of the House’s spouse been attacked by a maniac, not even their worst political foe would have openly speculated that maybe the man had been assaulted by a gay prostitute he hired.
Nobody, even in a bad novel, would have dreamed of charging that a presidential candidate was running a child prostitution ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. But both these rumors, and more, have been spread by people in the national media.
Finally, the third thing that is threatening our democracy is perhaps both the greatest tool and the biggest threat of all: The World Wide Web, the part of the internet that hundreds of millions of us use every day. You can find, for free, information about any subject in the world, including videos as to how to do virtually everything.
But you can also just as easily find, in addition to hate and filth, misinformation and disinformation. Worse, unlike the new iPad you access it on, the internet doesn’t come with a user manual.
Journalists and professors are taught how to evaluate information; we know that while the New York Times and Wall Street Journal make occasional mistakes, they try hard to be factual, and their websites are far more reliable than Joe’s Basement Blog.
Doctors know how to find reliable information and maladies and diseases, and know that the National Institutes of Health and the New England Journal of Medicine can generally be trusted, while some guy ranting about ivermectin can’t.
Today, we have seen lives lost to self-medication and political violence because of wrongheaded disinformation and conspiracy theories people have imbibed on line, and there’s the threat of worse to come. Millions believe that the 2020 election was stolen, when it has been soundly proven that this never happened.
How do we counteract this before it destroys us?
Many politicians in both parties have called for better civics education in high school. That would certainly be a good idea, especially if taught better; I didn’t really understand the court system, for example, until after I became a newspaper reporter years later.
But even if taught brilliantly, that won’t be enough; it’s a rare 17-year-old who can see that learning about legislative powers has much relevance. Somehow, we need courses in media literacy, not only for in schools, but for adults. By media literacy, I mean the ability to distinguish between information that is reliable, and that which is not so much. The nonprofit group medialiteracynow.org is doing its best to promote the idea, and there are many librarians eager to help.
Employers of all kinds might think about having their employees attend a mandatory class in media literacy and understanding how government works. Most CEOs I’ve met like to say they are proudly patriotic. Helping Americans understand how their governments work, and how to get accurate and reliable information, just might be the most patriotic thing they could do.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
