Lost in a Sea of News
IN UPSTATE NEW YORK, Travis Trudell got an alert on his phone on November 13 telling him the impeachment hearings against President Donald J. Trump had started. He turned on Disney Plus instead. In Wisconsin, Jerre Corrigan never considered watching. She spent the day giving a math lesson to third graders. In Idaho, Russell Memory worked a busy day as a computer programmer and figured he would catch up in a few weeks when the hearings were over.
The Democrats in the United States Congress took their case against President Trump to the public starting that day. But after hours of testimony, thousands of news reports and days of streaming headlines, one thing was clear: A lot of Americans were not listening.
“It’s harder now — they want to grab you with those headlines,” Ms. Corrigan said that Wednesday night from her home. “Trump did this, Trump did that. You have to go in and really research it. And I don’t think a lot of people do that.”
In this volatile moment, information, it would seem, has never been more crucial. America is in the midst of impeachment proceedings against a president for the third time in modern history. A high-stakes election is less than a year away.
But just when information is needed most, to many Americans it feels most elusive. The rise of social media; the proliferation of information online, including news designed to deceive; and a flood of partisan news are leading to a general exhaustion with news itself.
Add to that a president with a documented record of regularly making false statements and the result is a strange new normal: Many people are numb and disoriented, struggling to discern what is real in a sea of slant, fake and fact.
Of course, many Americans have the opposite experience: They turn to sources they trust — whether on the right or left — that tell them exactly what they already believe to be true.
But a poll released the week the hearings started found that 47 percent of Americans believe it is difficult to know whether the information they encounter is true. Just 31 percent find it easy. About 60 percent of Americans say they see conflicting reports about the same set of facts from different sources, according to the poll, by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public
Affairs Research and USAFacts.
“Now more than ever, the lines between fact-based reporting and opinionated commentary seem blurred for people,” said Evette Alexander, research director at the Knight Foundation, which funds journalism and research. “That means they trust what they are seeing less. They are feeling less informed.”
They are also tuning out. Mr. Trudell, a registered independent, stopped paying attention to national news about a year ago. He found it toxic and mentally taxing, and it started arguments that had no end. He decided to focus instead on local and state-level politics. As a security manager at a mall, he has to worry about shoplifters, so keeping up with the state’s criminal justice reforms was useful. National politics, he said, has started to look like eyewitness testimony: “People can see totally different things, standing right next to each other.”
So when he had the day off on November 13, which happened to be his 39th birthday, he decided to treat himself to a nap and some “Simpsons” reruns. “Yes, there are shades of gray, but what about black and white?” he said. “We assume that everything is a shade of gray now.”
Of the powerful new digital forces buffeting American voters, perhaps the most pernicious are items designed to deceive.
Matt Stanley, a school administrator and registered Democrat in West Virginia, watched as his candidate for Congress in the midterms last year, Richard Ojeda, lost badly. The result, Mr. Stanley believes, was at least partly related to a stream of negative ads on Facebook featuring doctored photographs aimed at discrediting Mr. Ojeda, including one depicting him in makeup and a pink beret. “The social media, it muddies up stuff so badly,” said Mr. Stanley, who is 50.
Then there are the politicians themselves, first among them Mr. Trump, who have helped create the confusion by making statements, over and over, that numerous media fact checkers say are not true.
“In the political space, you no longer have to have facts to back up your claims,” said Talia Stroud, director of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas. “The result is a population bordering on cynicism.”
In Russia, political leaders learned to use the online explosion far ahead of the United States.
“They spread this sense that people live in a world of endless conspiracy, and the truth is unknowable, and all that’s left in this confusing world is me,” said Peter Pomerantsev, author of “This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality.” He was referring to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and other authoritarian rulers. Mr. Trump, he said, has that style too.
Mr. Trump’s approach does not appeal to everyone, though, even in his own party. “I do not support this brand of politics,” said Mr. Memory, the computer programmer. “Any time there is any type of controversy, you just flatly deny it and you do it over and over until people are exhausted and move on.” A registered Republican, he said that was why he did not vote for Mr. Trump.
But he said he sees bias among liberal news outlets. He was annoyed that stories of Mr. Trump’s being booed at the Washington Nationals baseball game were given top billing, but when Mr. Trump was cheered in Alabama a few days later, he could find almost nothing about it.
Mr. Memory, 37, said: “Both things happened. He got booed and he got cheered. But one of them will be a much bigger story. That’s what bothers me.”
In the late 1970s, nearly three-quarters of Americans trusted newspapers, radio and television, and most Americans went to bed with the same set of facts. These days, less than half of Americans have confidence in the media, according to Gallup.
Benjamin J. Toff, a professor at the University of Minnesota, conducted interviews in Iowa this summer and found that those who say they avoid the news tended to be younger, female and poorer — people stretched between jobs and home, making hours of evaluating news sources “the last thing they wanted to do with their time,”he said.
Professor Toff added, “They had this sense that they had to be skeptical of everything out there, but they didn’t have the time to spend hours to make sense of it.”