Engines of Outrage Pt. 4

Summary

Landslide: Engines of Outrage Pt. 4
Hosted by Ben Bradford
Release Date: February 27, 2025

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Introduction

In the fourth installment of the Engines of Outrage series, NPR's Landslide delves into the profound impact of the Internet on our information consumption and the subsequent polarization it fosters. Hosted by award-winning journalist Ben Bradford, this episode intertwines historical perspectives with contemporary analysis to explore how digital media reshapes our political and social landscapes.

The Internet’s Impact on Content Creation and Consumption

The episode opens with a conversation between Ben Bradford and Atlantic writer Charlie Warzel about the transformative power of the Internet on content creation. Using YouTuber MrBeast as an example, Warzel illustrates the relentless drive for engagement that defines online media.

“He is sort of the human expression of the algorithm, right? Which is just like, do more, do more. Like do something. Oh, you did something cool. Top it.” — Charlie Warzel [01:12]

Warzel emphasizes how the demand for constant content leads creators to push boundaries, often resulting in sensational and high-stakes productions that thrive on viewer engagement.

The Evolution of Traditional Journalism

Transitioning from digital media, Ben Bradford introduces media historian Matt Pressman from Seton Hall University to discuss the evolution of traditional journalism. Pressman highlights the shift in investigative reporting during the 1960s and 70s, particularly through the New York Times’ coverage of NYPD corruption.

“Prior to the 1960s, you didn't really do that much to interrogate what the people in power were saying and doing. You weren't really trying to address the question of why things were happening.” — Matt Pressman [05:16]

Pressman explains how journalists began to adopt a more critical stance, seeking not just the “who, what, where, and when,” but also the “why,” fundamentally changing the nature of investigative journalism.

The Decline of Traditional News and Rise of Digital Media

The conversation shifts to the disruptive impact of the Internet on traditional news outlets. Pressman describes the gradual decline of newspapers, accelerated post-2008, leading to reduced quality and breadth in reporting.

“The newspapers have just been decimated. You know, many no longer exist. The ones that exist, for the most part are operating with… maybe 10% of the number of people that they had in the 1990s.” — Matt Pressman [07:29]

Bradford and Pressman discuss how the financial strain forced newsrooms to cut back, diminishing their ability to conduct in-depth reporting and maintain journalistic integrity.

Polarization and the 'Justification Machine'

Ben Bradford introduces the concept of the Internet acting as a "justification machine," a term coined by Warzel and a co-author to describe how digital platforms reinforce individual worldviews by presenting information that aligns with preexisting beliefs.

“We are attached to this Internet where there's this bespoke ability to get any kind of evidence that you want to support your opinion.” — Charlie Warzel [19:04]

This mechanism amplifies polarization by making it easier for individuals to find and share information that justifies their beliefs, often at the expense of factual accuracy and comprehensive understanding.

Case Study: Coverage of the January 6 Capitol Attack

Warzel provides a poignant example of the justification machine by examining the varied narratives surrounding the January 6 Capitol attack. While mainstream media reported it as a violent assault by fringe groups, right-wing media outlets propagated alternative explanations, portraying the event as a peaceful protest or an inside job.

“You’re trying to see what sticks.” — Charlie Warzel [17:25]

This divergence in narratives demonstrates how different media ecosystems can shape entirely disparate perceptions of the same event, deepening societal divides.

Combating the Information Divide

As the episode progresses, Ben Bradford seeks solutions to counteract the pervasive influence of the justification machine. Experts offer strategies to navigate the complex information landscape fostered by the Internet.

Expert Insights: Awareness and Intellectual Humility

Charlie Warzel emphasizes the importance of recognizing emotional reactions to information:

“When I see something crossing my feet and I feel like all these defense mechanisms come up, I'm just simply letting myself know, okay, you're doing this, right? Just be on the lookout for this.” — Charlie Warzel [25:55]

Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher, advocates for a more active approach to information consumption:

“Understanding how the polarizing content that's being presented to us and what it does to us can help us fight the engines of outrage.” — Ben Bradford [27:38]

Danicle Young, a media and political psychology expert, introduces the concept of intellectual humility:

“Maybe I'm wrong. It's called intellectual humility, and that is the extent to which people are willing to acknowledge that they might be wrong.” — Danicle Young [28:46]

Young argues that maintaining openness to the possibility of being wrong reduces susceptibility to misinformation, fostering a more resilient and informed populace.

Conclusion

Ben Bradford concludes the episode by acknowledging the formidable challenge posed by the justification machine but remains cautiously optimistic. He underscores the necessity of individual and collective efforts to cultivate intellectual humility and mindful information consumption.

“Maybe I'm wrong.” — Danicle Young [28:46]

The episode wraps up by encouraging listeners to remain vigilant and proactive in their approach to news and information, emphasizing that awareness and intentionality are crucial in bridging the growing information divide.

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Produced by Nuance Tales in partnership with WFAE and distributed by the NPR Network. For more information and to access the source list for this episode, visit nuancetales.com.

Transcript

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[Ben Bradford]

This episode may contain some strong language or violent imagery. Listener discretion is advised.

[Charlie Warzel]

Like the most popular YouTuber is MrBeast, right?

[Ben Bradford]

The Atlantic writer Charlie Warzell and I are talking about how the Internet changes us. His example is Jimmy Donaldson, who goes by Mr. Beast.

[Charlie Warzel]

And Mr. Beast's big breakout video back in 2017 was. I'm gonna count to. I think it was a million. 1, 2, 3.

[Ben Bradford]

It was 100,000.

[Charlie Warzel]

5, 6, 7, 8.

[Ben Bradford]

The video is 24 hours long.

[Charlie Warzel]

And that's like a pretty intense thing, right? 90 2009-1890-2009-1993.

[Ben Bradford]

You watch him bleary eyed struggle to say the next number and it went viral.

[Charlie Warzel]

He took the money he made from that video and invested it to make another video and he never spent any of it and he just kept doing that. And if you cut to like four years later, I just bought this train.

[Ben Bradford]

And it is currently barreling full speed.

[Charlie Warzel]

Towards that giant pit over there. We're also crashing countless cars, blowing up thousands. And it's like that's just it right there, right? Like he is sort of the human expression of the algorithm, right? Which is just like, do more, do more. Like do something. Oh, you did something cool. Top it.

[Ben Bradford]

This happens constantly, everywhere across Internet media. And no matter how much you try to unplug, it's inescapable.

[Charlie Warzel]

It has like a real effect both on viewers, but also on the creators.

[Ben Bradford]

This is Landslide Engines of Outrage. I'm Ben Bradford. We've spent the bulk of this mini series exploring right wing media alarming for its promotion of politically motivated misinformation and conspiracy theories. But now let's look outside that ecosystem because many of the same forces tear at all the time. The incentives of the Internet, the hunt for engagement. It's reshaped all of our information diets. In a way, we all live in bubbles. Choosing what media we consume or often not actually choosing it. How does that polarize us? Me, you, anyone? And how do we shield ourselves? Or can we? We started this mini series by looking back at the origins of today's conservative media in the 1960s and 70s. So this time let's first look at the primary building block of information outside of the right wing journalism, traditional news. And how that changed in the lead up to. There was a series of stories in the New York Times in 1966 about a spat between the NYPD and the mayor of New York City.

[Matt Pressman]

You know, some shake up in the police department brass.

[Ben Bradford]

This is media historian Matt Pressman at Seton Hall University. The stories sounded bureaucratic, involving who could control a board that reviewed complaints against police. The paper covered who wanted what, their arguments for and against all of that. But inside the Times, one editor was frustrated with his colleagues at what didn't make the pages.

[Matt Pressman]

He said, you know, what this is really all about is that it threatens all these systems that the department has in place for basically shaking people down, right? For, like, getting illicit payoffs from bookies and. And prostitution rings and all this sort of stuff. And, you know, how come none of that is in there, but none of that was in there?

[Ben Bradford]

The fact that there was just massive corruption underneath all of it? Yeah. Yeah.

[Matt Pressman]

No, the editors knew, but the public didn't. Yeah.

[Ben Bradford]

Just a few years later. In 1970, the Times ran news stories about the NYPD. This time, it was in there.

[Matt Pressman]

A whole series on police department corruption, based in part on what he learned from the detective, Frank Serpico.

[Ben Bradford]

The articles were explosive.

[Matt Pressman]

An article about how cops are often sleeping on the job in their squad cars when they're supposed to be on an overnight shift.

[Ben Bradford]

They even had a name for it. Cooping the stories led to a major public investigation of the nypd, the Knapp Commission. It exposed massive graft protection rackets. Said she didn't mind paying the police for protection if she could get it. The reason for that remark was that apparently she wasn't getting it. The Times reporting required stellar investigative journalism, but Pressman says that could have happened years earlier, when the paper was printing bland reports about bureaucratic squabbles. The bigger change was a shift in how journalists and their outlets perceived the job.

[Matt Pressman]

Prior to the 1960s, you didn't really do that much to interrogate what the people in power were saying and doing. You weren't really trying to address the question of why things were happening. You know, journalists sometimes talk about the five W's of who, what, where, when, and why. Well, it was often just the four W's, just who, what, where, and when.

[Ben Bradford]

The process of newsgathering, even at traditional outlets aiming for fairness, does change over time. And I think it's worth asking how it's changed since the time of the Knapp Commission. Pressman, the media historian, great name, says as the 60s and 70s wound on, journalists became more willing to challenge the official record and provide context in their stories that didn't necessarily come straight from someone's mouth.

[Matt Pressman]

And that interpretation could often be a lot more contentious, much more likely to call into question the motivations behind what people were doing, the possible implications of it.

[Ben Bradford]

The change partially stemmed from the culture. The Vietnam War and the civil rights movement led to more skepticism of authority, but it was also just business, Pressman.

[Matt Pressman]

Says, for the publishers, because they felt like that's what the audience wanted, that if you, if you want to differentiate your news organization, well, you need to go into more depth and you need to try to explain to people why things are happening, why all this tumultuous change is happening in the country.

[Ben Bradford]

For the rest of the 20th century. Pressman says newsrooms fluctuated in how hard they would push.

[Matt Pressman]

Watergate casts a long shadow.

[Ben Bradford]

It valorized the idea of the investigative reporter.

[Matt Pressman]

You know, in some ways it got to be considered a sort of be all end all right.

[Ben Bradford]

By the late 1970s and early 80s, he says, newsrooms pulled back somewhat.

[Matt Pressman]

Publisher of the of the LA Times, I believe it was saying, you know, we got carried away. All this stuff about trying to look under every rock for a scoundrel.

[Ben Bradford]

The pendulum swings back and forth and varies, newsroom to newsroom, even reporter to reporter. But the basic template, Pressman says, largely hasn't changed since the days of the Knapp commission. So the next major change that did occur in traditional newsrooms is the one we touched on last episode.

[Matt Pressman]

Well, the huge disruption, of course, is with the growth of the Internet.

[Ben Bradford]

Ad revenue dried up, new websites spun off key pieces of newspaper's business.

[Matt Pressman]

It was kind of a slow motion disaster. And then after 2008, it became a, you know, a fast motion disaster.

[Ben Bradford]

Give me a sense of what we're talking about. I mean, what's the scale of this?

[Matt Pressman]

Yeah, the newspapers have just been decimated. You know, many no longer exist. The ones that exist, for the most part are operating with you know, maybe 10% of the number of people that they had in the 1990s.

[Ben Bradford]

It's not just that there are fewer new sources. It's what happened to the ones that remain.

[Matt Pressman]

You know, frankly, those publications just, they got less good.

[Ben Bradford]

Their pages grew thinner.

[Matt Pressman]

The quality and volume of the coverage goes down.

[Ben Bradford]

Reporters at those local papers are asked to do more to produce video and social media posts, cover a wider variety of issues where they can develop less expertise.

[Matt Pressman]

It makes it less likely that your typical news consumer is going to be spending as much time with sources or publications that are merely trying to give you the news without a huge dose of opinion or without an ideological slant.

[Ben Bradford]

There have been other shifts. Pressman mentions the summer of 2020 in the wake of police kill, killing George Floyd and mass protests it sparked.

[Matt Pressman]

It had a really big impact on news organizations.

[Ben Bradford]

Many newsrooms adjusted their reporting on police violence, many added social justice beats and scrutinized the diversity of their hiring and coverage, pressman says. It led to criticism on the right.

[Matt Pressman]

And the left, and for the most part it didn't go nearly as far as most of the advocates would have liked to see. But for many people on the right, it was a sort of confirmation of their suspicions that there was this underlying liberal bias to all mainstream media organizations.

[Ben Bradford]

When we talk about people who are upset about mainstream media, which I think is just about everybody on one end or another, right, to what extent is it that their process has changed, their viewpoint has changed, and to what extent is it that we have changed?

[Matt Pressman]

Yeah, I mean, I think people have always griped about media coverage that they don't like, but a crucial difference now is they just have so many other choices.

[Ben Bradford]

In other words, the far bigger shift than in the pages or broadcasts of legacy media is the mountain of other options that's built on top of it.

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[Charlie Warzel]

You know I saw something that as I'm talking to you about this just it it's just sticking in my head.

[Ben Bradford]

Charlie Warzel covers the Internet and media for the Atlantic, and he has an example of how news gets absorbed online. Today.

[Charlie Warzel]

There is A big investigative story by the outlet ProPublica about infiltrating a far right militia.

[Ben Bradford]

Yeah, it's crazy. I read it. The story followed a vigilante who'd gone undercover and embedded in far right militias.

[Charlie Warzel]

And it's. And it. Yeah, and so it's this, like, feat of reporting from somebody who, you know, had the trust of someone who was doing something truly life threatening and wild. And it's exactly what investigative reporting is supposed to do. Right.

[Ben Bradford]

ProPublica produced the story, but that's not where a lot of people saw it.

[Charlie Warzel]

I was directed to a YouTube video from this outlet called the Midas Touch, which is sort of like a political aggregation. A lot of, you know, virulently anti Trump.

[Ben Bradford]

Midas Touch has 4 million YouTube followers and a hit podcast. It produces videos with titles like Idiot Trump Screws Over Americans. Wow. Trump Screws Himself With Public Confession. And Trump Loses Stamina as his term Starts collapsing. To name just three of the latest, as I look.

[Charlie Warzel]

And there was a young guy working for them who's like an aggregator type, and he was reading the tweets and showing them on the screen in this YouTube video of the ProPublica reporter and then just going. Going through the story, reading it, sort of line by line discussing it.

[Ben Bradford]

But to Orzel, what was more interesting were the comments.

[Charlie Warzel]

The comments were like talking to the influencer who was reading the article and saying, thank you, thank you for your reporting. Thank you so much. You're so brave. We need more truth tellers like this. And it was just this disconnect between where the information came from. That base atomic unit of hard, grueling, you know, factual work, and the disconnect between that and, you know, the relationship that these people clearly have with this influencer online.

[Ben Bradford]

The dynamic he just described happens constantly on the Internet. Americans absorb huge portions of their news this way from sources other than newsrooms where reporting originates. I asked Warzel if he could detail what this information environment looks like.

[Charlie Warzel]

Yeah, so I think that there's like, you know, maybe this is not totally correct, but like a food pyramid. Right. Kind of thing. Right. Of all this. And you have sort of like the base material. Right. And then you have it getting more and more processed and refined and, you know, maybe of less nutrition the further you go up. Right, yeah, that's a good analogy. You know, the base thing here is on the ground, original reporting. Someone goes and gets it, and it's expensive as hell. It's not really widely respected anymore by people, but it is that, like, again, it's the base of the pyramid. And then it starts to get disintermediated.

[Ben Bradford]

The reporting on that first layer of the pyramid becomes the grist for the rest of the Internet ecosystem, you know.

[Charlie Warzel]

In the sort of the next level, like influencers and personalities and the people who are often taking that original information and commenting on it in some way.

[Ben Bradford]

And repackaging it into social media memes, influencer videos, podcasts, or just opinion columns and newsletters. Not necessarily bad.

[Charlie Warzel]

I, for better or worse, do a fair amount of that myself. Right. Like, I am someone who ingests a lot of information and writes columns about it.

[Ben Bradford]

I mean, that's what I'm doing right now, Right?

[Charlie Warzel]

Yeah. It's what a lot of people do, and there's value in that.

[Ben Bradford]

But the prevalence of that, repackaging that second layer of the pyramid creates two challenges for us. First, the more a piece of reporting gets laundered through other sources, higher and higher in the pyramid, the more it risks losing context or being replaced, intentionally or not, with misinformation.

[Charlie Warzel]

You know, almost like a game of telephone or something.

[Ben Bradford]

And second, with so many options all vying for our attention, it's hard not to embrace the interpretations we prefer and tune out what we don't.

[Charlie Warzel]

That's why I think we see huge disconnect with people saying we need more factual information. Also, cancel your subscription to the New York Times because it's very biased. And, you know, instead, please, like, you know, support these guys on Patreon. And it's like, oh, you're not seeing, you know, how this system works, Right? But that's just the nature of, you know, the Internet.

[Ben Bradford]

It's an Internet constantly presenting us with information of various quality shaped to our own beliefs, and it encourages us to create our own bubbles.

[Charlie Warzel]

It traps you in your worldview.

[Ben Bradford]

Warzel and a co author have a name for how the Internet does this. They call it the justification machine. Do you remember where you were when you first saw the footage of the storming of The Capitol on January 6, 2021? What you felt.

[Charlie Warzel]

There were gallows outside the Capitol building. There were people shooting, there was violence, people slamming through flagpoles into Capitol police, people running for their lives.

[Ben Bradford]

Charlie Wurzel was watching how right wing sources covered it, and it looked similar to most other coverage.

[Charlie Warzel]

And there was outrage, I mean, even among Republicans about this happening. Right. This was clearly an attack from a fringe group of people who were trying to overturn the election. And there was a lot of outrage. And you watched that have to collide with their worldview.

[Ben Bradford]

The audience for Fox and other conservative media were used to the idea that they were the heroes.

[Charlie Warzel]

Very quickly you saw people starting to throw out these justifications.

[Ben Bradford]

Right wing influencers, fringe sites and just random posters picked through the footage for any alternate reason behind the attack.

[Charlie Warzel]

Actually, the rioters are really anti fascist protesters. Right? And you can tell because of this tattoo here. And here's a screenshot from a video here. You know, the Capitol police actually let the rioters in.

[Ben Bradford]

Some insisted it was a peaceful demonstration. Others claimed it was an inside job, like trial balloons.

[Charlie Warzel]

Right. You're trying to see what sticks.

[Ben Bradford]

And over time, the stories did begin to stick.

[Charlie Warzel]

Flash forward to, you know, it was a couple weeks later and you had sitting congressmen say, you know, this was nothing more than, you know, a peaceful tour of the Capitol.

[Matt Pressman]

You would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.

[Charlie Warzel]

And you watch as those cracks start to build and then the thing just kind of explodes.

[Ben Bradford]

They may have had some connection to the government. I saw moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas in that crowd. I didn't see people that went there to charge the Capitol, did you? No. It's on video. It's all antifa.

[Charlie Warzel]

And you have, you know, a completely different representation of something that we all saw.

[Ben Bradford]

We've talked about this before, about the audience in the right wing media ecosystem believing the narratives there and reinforcing them. But Warzel is actually making a slightly different point about how all of us use the Internet. This is, he says, an example of how the Internet operates as a justification machine.

[Charlie Warzel]

Because we're humans, right? We are evidence foragers. We're trying to always collect evidence to fit our worldviews or understand the world or, you know, whatever it is.

[Ben Bradford]

We're constantly evaluating the evidence we find, whether posts, videos, articles, word of mouth, and trying to determine what's right and what's wrong.

[Charlie Warzel]

Everyone can relate to this feeling of scrolling online, seeing something, and going like, all right, I need to check that person's credentials.

[Ben Bradford]

Right? Totally.

[Charlie Warzel]

You know, that kind of sounds propaganda esque, you know, what have you. And sometimes that's really good. Like that is a as evidence foragers, right? That's a good instinct for us. Like, we should approach things that don't quite fit our worldview with this idea of, like, all right, let's prove it.

[Ben Bradford]

If something seems wrong, we check it out. That's what our brains evolved to do. Sort through all the stimuli we're getting and send an alarm when something seems off.

[Charlie Warzel]

But flip it you know, 180 degrees. And it's if I encounter something that like exactly fits with how I see the world, right, A study that proves X, Y or Z, there is a human desire to amplify that, right? You repost it, you share it, you do whatever you comment without doing as much of that skeptical work.

[Ben Bradford]

We tend not to put information we agree with through the same intellectual wringer, which also makes sense. Now add to that the food pyramid of information on an Internet looking to produce exactly what we want to see.

[Charlie Warzel]

We are attached to this Internet where there's this bespoke ability to get any kind of evidence that you want to support your opinion. And it's not that you are being brainwashed to think something you would never think. It's that you think something new information comes in. And misinformation acts as almost like a vaccine. It inoculates you from having to take on something that would challenge your ideology as it exists.

[Ben Bradford]

And that's what happened after January 6th for so many people. They saw an event that dramatically conflicted with their beliefs about their party, the president they supported and their worldview. And instead of changing those underlying beliefs, which is emotionally painful, they picked from the pyramid the misinformation that made sense of it for them, that justified it. The engines of outrage in the right wing bubble are particularly good at generating justification, as we've covered, but it's not exclusive to them. In the lead up to the 2024 election, or Zel saw a narrative build up among many Democrats that you may.

[Charlie Warzel]

Remember throughout the 2024 presidential campaign. You would see it on cable news a lot. You would see it across social media of people taking photos or videos or interviewing Trump supporters who were leaving rallies early. Right. But it was this notion that support for Donald Trump is flagging clips circulated.

[Ben Bradford]

Of the now president slurring his words or misspeaking.

[Charlie Warzel]

And it was this idea that like Donald Trump doesn't have the juice anymore. He's kind of played out and there's really no energy.

[Ben Bradford]

I think that makes perfect sense. And then if you extrapolate that further, of course, you know, the polls were tight. They were tight all the way along. They were a toss up. We didn't know what was going to happen. And I think, you know, those rallies are an example of a narrative that built up trying to sort of argue, oh, the polls are wrong, they're under factoring something, therefore that's going to lead to a Kamala Harris win. And I saw a lot of people that were really baffled on election night when reality did not match.

[Charlie Warzel]

Yeah, I mean I parsed through a lot of content online and some fringy like newsletters and things like that of people who were marshaling evidence in that same way.

[Ben Bradford]

It was the Internet as a justification machine. And so the question is, how do we do our best to sort through the machine, combat its effect? Is that even possible?

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[Charlie Warzel]

You know those things you shout at the radio?

[Matt Pressman]

Or maybe even at this very NPR.

[Ben Bradford]

Podcast on NPR's Wait, Wait, don't tell.

[Matt Pressman]

Me we actually say those things on.

[Ben Bradford]

The radio and on the podcast. We're rude across all media. We think the news can take it. Listen to NPR's Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me. Wherever you get your podcasts, I'm going to ask three experts that we've heard in this mini series about how to fight against the justification machine, an Internet designed to feed our worldviews. Unfortunately, the answers start with pain.

[Charlie Warzel]

It's painful in so many ways. Like, it's actually psychologically painful to have your worldview kind of dismantled or like picked apart.

[Ben Bradford]

When we confront information that conflicts with our deeply held beliefs, our bodies rebel.

[Charlie Warzel]

There's a really powerful governor in our heads that is trying to keep us from having to go through that painful work. And I think just being like really aware of it is key.

[Ben Bradford]

It reminds me of an old web comic from the site the Oatmeal about this psychological Phenomenon. I'll link to it in our source notes. The comic presents a series of facts, starting with one about George Washington's teeth. So you may have grown up hearing about George Washington's wooden teeth. Forensic analyses have shown they were not actually made out of wood. One set were gold, lead, and donkey teeth, among other materials. And the comic asks, how did it feel to hear that? The answer is, probably fine, right? It's not going to rock your worldview. I mean, that's a cocktail party fact. But then it presents another fact about a different set of President Washington's dentures. They were made from human teeth, from slaves. Again, just a fact presented without comment. How did you feel? Maybe you already knew it. I did. And it still creates a little bit of an emotional reaction at how it affects my schoolyard perception of our first president. That's the fight or flight mechanism in the brain.

[Charlie Warzel]

It is a natural human thing to want to protect your the way that you understand the world.

[Ben Bradford]

Charlie Warzel says fighting the justification machine starts with just what we did with George Washington's teeth. Being aware of our own emotional reactions.

[Charlie Warzel]

Ever since we wrote this piece, I have been trying to do this with information. Right. Like when I feel. When I see something crossing my feet and I feel like all these defense mechanisms come up, I'm just simply letting myself know, okay, you're doing this, right? Just be on the lookout for this.

[Ben Bradford]

It doesn't mean just accepting any new piece of information, but being wary of that emotional response and why it's being served to us by the engines of outrage.

[Charlie Warzel]

Yeah. And I also think too, just like I think that just having a really healthy contempt for what these platforms are doing to us, we encountered a similar.

[Ben Bradford]

Piece of advice last episode from disinformation researcher Nina Jankowicz.

[Nina Jankowicz]

And the most engaging content on social media is the most enraging content on social media. And the most enraging content is often false or misleading.

[Ben Bradford]

Jankowicz has an exercise that she does with her grad students. It's one we can all do on our own.

[Nina Jankowicz]

They're all smart kids, and yet one thing that we find every semester is that they, like all of us, are shocked at how much their information consumption is passive. So I have them track their information consumption for 24 hours. And the vast majority of stuff that they get is through push alerts. It's through score scrolling passively on TikTok and Instagram. It's through looking at Twitter. It's text messages that they get. It's not stuff that they're Seeking out and saying, I'm going to sit down with a paper or, you know, whatever the 2025 version of that is. I'm going to go to newyorktimes.com and look at all the stories that interest me. Nobody does that anymore.

[Ben Bradford]

Hardly anyone. We can take a more active role in deciding how we want to get information, how we can have a balanced diet from the pyramid, perhaps adding a bigger mix of straight news along with analysis, or finding sources that we wouldn't necessarily agree with, but that we think are credible. And we can think more deeply about what is being delivered to us and why.

[Nina Jankowicz]

Understanding. Okay, this weird AI slop made its way into my feed because for some reason, Facebook is prioritizing that right now. This is an advertisement that I got because I visited this website a couple of days ago, and now they know that I'm looking for shoes.

[Ben Bradford]

So we can get better at choosing our own information diet, paying attention to what we're already being fed, keeping track of our feelings, and taking a closer look at the media that we react strongly to, whether it's because we agree or disagree. Danicle Young, who studies media and political psychology at the University of Delaware, has one more phrase to keep in mind, a counterintuitive way that we can fight misinformation in our own mind. The phrase is maybe I'm wrong.

[Danicle Young]

It's called intellectual humility, and that is the extent to which people are willing to acknowledge that they might be wrong. And how open are they to new ideas? What I like about intellectual humility in general is that it is associated with a reduced belief in misinformation, which is kind of wild. So the more open you are to the possibility you might be wrong, the more likely you are to be empirically right, because you are constantly looking to update your views based on new information.

[Ben Bradford]

Maybe I'm wrong. Young says it's important to keep in mind because it's also the opposite of what the engines of outrage are pushing at us.

[Danicle Young]

One of the things that I find really upsetting is that there are no mediated spaces where intellectual humility is modeled. Right? In fact, it's usually punished people who are like, oh, this is what I think, but I could be wrong. That is portrayed as weak, right? And it's, you know, in. In the pundit panels on cable news, it's all about, like, who is the most blustery, like, who is the most confident, who talks the fastest. Intellectual humility is quite the opposite. And I think that there's. I think that there's a hunger for it.

[Ben Bradford]

I think it's lovely that just being aware of our own fallibility can help us resist the pull of misinformation, that understanding the polarizing content that's being presented to us and what it does to us can help us fight the engines of outrage. But those engines are strong and deeply embedded across our information environment. So I doubt these tactics that we've discussed on their own, spread by you and me to others, can make a substantial difference in diffusing the engines, in healing our information divide. But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong. Landslide and this miniseries are a production of Nuance Tales in partnership with WFAE and distributed by the NPR Network. Work I'm the host, creator and producer Ben Bradford. Noia Carr is the editor, Jay Sebold is the sound designer and engineer, and all the music is by Matt Bradford. Thanks to everyone at WFAE and NPR who's made the series possible. Stay tuned to this feed and to nuancetales.com for updates about what's next for Landslide. And if you're interested in ensuring that there is more to come, you can help by sharing this series with friends and family, enemies, everyone, and letting us know that you want more by signing up for our mailing [e-mail] you can also view a source list for this [e-mail] thank you again for listening.

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