About The Rank Of Sources And The Reliability Of Data In The Scientific Study

Douglas Kellner
Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Education, Gender Studies, and Germanic Languages at UCLA

 

In his study “About The Rank Of Sources And The Reliability Of Data In The Scientific Study,” David Procopio provides a classification system that “makes it possible to have a clear understanding of sources used in the research” and to help to differentiate between “scientific work from a journalistic one.”^[1]

His paper is a comprehensive one and I do not have internal criticisms of what I consider a useful, original, and productive paper. I do want to suggest an external critique based on work from British cultural studies and Science Technology Studies (STS) that argue that science is a social construction and that concepts of science, truth, and evidence change historically over time and are often contested. I would also argue that sciences involve natural, social, and cultural science, and since my own work falls in the latter category I will approach the notion of sources, the reliability of data and science from a social and cultural science perspective as found in the work of the critical theory of the Frankfurt school, British cultural studies, and French postmodern theory such as Baudrillard. I will also make a distinction between reliable and dubious journalism and information sources and not between scientific work and journalistic work.

Procopio’s work engages a stage of history when books, peer-reviewed journals, and standard canonical academic texts and textbooks stood at the apex of ranking sources and producing reliable date for scientific studies. I suggest we are now living in a new world described in detail by Marshall McLuhan in his 1964 book Understanding Media and subsequent writings in which book culture has been supplanted by media and electronic culture in a new cultural configuration that French postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard also described, and that Steve Gennaro and Blair Miller, building on McLuhan, have described as the “Googleberg Galaxy,” contrasted to McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy, named after the printing press that inaugurated in his view the modern world, profoundly shaping its economy, social order, politics, culture, and educational system – and I would add its concepts of reason, truth, evidence, and science.

In this new cultural matrix, information is digitized and virtualized, spread through broadcast media and social media, and even books and academic journals circulate information on the Internet and social media making it more important than ever to evaluate and rank sources, to have a clear understanding of the sources of books, articles, and studies that purport to be science, media reports information, and internet sources of a variety of sources.

This is important because in the United States and countries throughout the world—especially ones with authoritarian and rightwing leaders like Donald Trump—we are engaged in cultural wars and wars against science, reason, and truth while authoritarians and their supporters promote fake news and bogus science, as well as attacking evidence, truth, and science itself. Moreover, in the United States and throughout the world we are immersed in a Covid-19 virus pandemic that is threatening in the US and elsewhere to get even worse as we enter the Winter season -—I have been in lockdown since mid-March, much of Los Angeles and UCLA where I have my office and once worked is shut, and the pandemic is even getting worse, so my paper obviously reflects this situation.

From the beginning, Trump repeatedly uttered falsehoods regarding the pandemic, contributing to the more than twelve thousand confirmed lies he had told as president as of August 8 (Kessler, Rizzo, and Kelly 2020) — a total that grows daily. One theme of Trump’s falsehoods promoted unapproved treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, even to the point of claiming that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine to protect himself against COVID-19, despite claims by his science advisor Tony Fauci and other experts that it doesn’t work.[2] More ridiculously, Trump advocated at one time that perhaps ingesting the cleaning detergents used to scrub and sanitize surfaces might provide a cure.

This might be laughable but unfortunately Trump’s millions of loyal followers take his comments and actions as gospel truth and a role model to be followed—which thousands of his followers did, often with fatal results. This example dramatizes the importance of having reliable sources for public pronouncements on serious matters such as health and pandemics. Unfortunately, Trump’s followers took him as the source of information about the COVID-19 pandemic from the beginning, with Trump first denying it completely, as did his followers, and then saying that it was no worse than a flu and would soon disappear[3] – it is raging and setting records in December 2020 as it write, so this was disastrous advice from a totally untrusty source who, however, continues to be the Voice of Truth for his followers.

Not surprising by Fall 2020, Trump did get the virus as did his wife and two of his sons from different marriages, as well as countless members of his staff, the secret service members protecting him, and many others he came in contact with. Trump’s false medical advice feeds into an “infodemic” that describes an overload of information from public officials, media, the internet, and social media. False information about the virus leads people to attempt dangerous medical solutions, often with fatal results. Facebook, Twitter, and responsible social media sites and medical authorities are forced to fight and respond to the dangerous misinformation, but in an infodemic it is difficult to get false information under control and to advance reliable information.

Trump himself has repeatedly refused to admit mistakes as reporters confronted him with false statements or erroneous claims about the COVID-19 virus and crisis, instead blaming many others. The Washington Post estimated that around 15 percent of Trump’s April 6–24 speeches were spent blaming others for the Covid-19 pandemic, with the most frequent targets being Joe Biden and the Democrats, followed by the media, state governors, and China. Trump went go far as to attacks science in one press conference, saying that “science doesn’t know” i.e. how to deal with the Covid-19 virus.

In this context, I would argue that it is a life and death matter to defend science, reason, facts, evidence and truth – all under attack by Trump and his followers and authoritarian leaders and governments all over the world — but also to see how important the media and internet are in circulating news and information and presenting contested notions of science, facts, and medical information making it a life and death matter to distinguish between reliable news and information and fake news, fact-based scientific and medical evidence and quackery, and more broadly truth and lies.

In my response to the second question I will suggest strategies for distinguishing between reliable and fake news and information, and truth and lies.  I will offer concepts of critical media and digital literacies developed by myself, Jeff Share and Steve Gennaro—who will also present on this panel—in answer to the question of what constitutes reliable evidence and sources that meet rational scientific and epistemic criteria.

To conclude my first presentation, however, I want to answer two possible objections to my own framework and approach. First: When a visiting Professor at Tubingen University in July 2006, in a city where I studied philosophy with a DAAD Fellowship at Tubingen from 1969-1971, I was asked to teach a course in Cultural Studies which I had been teaching in various forms in the US since the 1970s based on my book Media Culture in 1995 which I’ll expound upon in the second round of questions.

I assigned the students to write a paper doing a cultural studies critique of a media text that could be a film, TV series, documentary or news program and that they should analyze its ideologies, values, and impact on society, doing their own analysis and using two internet sources that provide reviews or discussion of their topic to see how their chosen artifact was received in their society – i.e. to discuss differing interpretations or debates over it and their own position.

I quickly had hands go up and was informed that in Germany students could not use Internet sources in an academic paper. I insisted that the topic of the course was cultural studies and while we were reading key academic textbooks and articles in the field, the object of study was the media and digital culture and that students, their families and friends, and even many teachers got their information from the media and Internet which shaped their view of the world, work, family and social life, and their own ideas and personality. In this context, I argued it is of utmost importance to distinguish between reliable and unreliable media and internet sources and that vast scholarship and sound academic analysis could help them with this task.

At this point, I should perhaps state my own bias and history being a product of book culture, teaching philosophy and cultural and technology studies for over 50 years—half at UT Austin and half at UCLA with guest professorships all over the world so I am thoroughly a book guy who continues to spend at least 8 hours a day reading and 8 hours studying the media—a schedule which is necessary in the pandemic lockdown which has hit Los Angeles since March and with no end in sight.

Moreover, I would describe my own intellectual matrix as critical theory, including critical philosophy from Kant through Marx and Nietzsche up to the Frankfurt School, Baudrillard and postmodern theory, and British cultural studies. My own orientation is thus a critical one that critiques media texts, artifacts, political discourses and ideologies, and books and academic studies according to their truth value, reliability, progressive or regressive political effects, and how they function in society today.

In the era of Trump and a New Relativism I have returned to stress the importance of reason and rationality, truth, facts, reliable information, and democracy and democratic norms in the face of the attacks on them by Trump and his political, media, and, yes, even academic allies who have normalized lies, propaganda, the shattering of political and epistemic norms, and are continuing their destructive work even after Trump was decisively defeated in the 2020 election.[4] In this world, the topics of our panel are more important than ever and I will provide my own views on the importance of critical media and digital literacies in the next panel.

In discussing “How to distinguish reliable information from false information, fake news, and lies,” it is important to assess the sources of news and information, in order to determine fact from falsehood, and science from superstitution, lies, and ideology.[5] Taking as an example Co-Vid 19 and the question of  “what counts as reliable evidence,” it is obvious that the simple answer is Science. From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic Dr. Anthony Fauci and our science and medical organizations and experts have provided reliable information of COVID-19.

Science has proven its’ reliability by having successfully fought plagues with vacdines before and discovered the sources of plagues and pandemic and how to fight them and inoculate the public against them. This was the case with the Spanish flu of the 1920s, and the polio epidemic in the 1950s when I was treated by a doctor who was himself involved in the research to find a polio vaccine, and so my parents reliably trusted this doctor to inoculate our family and none of my family or friends who were inoculated against polio ever got the once dread disease. Vaccines have cured many other diseases like smallpox and even the flu have been brought under control and even in some places eliminated.

Indeed, when I first came to UCLA in the mid-1990s I had been for years travelling the world to give lectures and attend conferences and seemed to pick up every conceivable flu from Latin America to Asia. At UCLA, I began getting a new flu vaccine every year and have avoided major flus ever since. So it is obvious that science  and up-to-date medicine which is well tested, confirmed and successful provides reliable information and evidence and Procopio’s paper encompasses a broad field to assess reliability of sources.

As for evaluating media and internet sources, it is more complex as there has been disseminated conflicting and opposed “information” on fighting Co-Vid so how do we distinguish between reliable and unreliable information, hard news and science and fake news and quack science? Here we need a cultural and media studies approach that appraises media Sources to evaluate sources between reliable and unreliable sources. When I was growing up in the 1950s this was easy: we had three commercial television network and one public broadcasting network and most countries had state broadcasting networks like the BBC in the UK, or French, German, or Russian state broadcasting that dominated the news and presented the dominant ideologies of their countries so television news in its early days was not especially reliable, controlled by big broadcasting corporations that had their biases or state media organizations.

During this period, the consensus in my family was that CBS News was best source of news and information. My father and uncles had fought in World War 2 against German and Italian fascism, and CBS radio commentators and reporters like Edward R. Murrow, Cronkite, Eric Severed, and later Dan Rather were deemed the most reliable sources of TV news and information by my family and we ritualistically watched CBS Evening News every night. This was a 30 minute broadcast so one needed to read newspapers and journals to be adequately informed.

A major source of news for my family was newspapers.  My first job in Falls Church, Virginia in the 1950s was delivering the Washington Post which was deemed one of the nation’s best newspapers and was subscribed to by almost every house in my neighborhood as everyone, including my father, worked for the U.S. government, military, or intelligence forces and needed to be informed about what was going on with U.S. and global politics, and the Post was deemed a reliable source. During the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s when Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke crucial Watergate scandal stories about corruption in the Nixon administration, the paper won renown, almost every journalism award at the period, and continued to be respected to this day.

In the later 1950s and early 1960s my family moved to Valley Stream New York and I immediately got a job delivering the Long Island newspaper, plus the New York Times and other New York daily newspapers. I read the New York Times every day after I delivered my papers and my family too took the New York Times as the best U.S. newspaper. When I got my first job teaching philosophy at the University of Texas in Austin in the 1970s I was thrilled when the Times was available nationally for daily delivery and continue to this day to read the New York Times in Los Angeles which I consider, along with the British Guardian, the best sources of news in the English language.

The 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of digital media and I was thrilled again when the New York Times, Washington Post, and Guardian became available on-line which I continue to read and have found them the most reliable source of news during the Trump era. As for cable television, I initially followed CNN in the 1990s that was the first global TV network and a reliable sources of news. Yet the 1990s also saw the rise of TV cable networks MSNBC vs Fox News with MSNBC on the liberal and Democratic Party side of the spectrum and Fox News on the conservative and Republican party side; during the Trump years MSNBC savaged Trump from the beginning while Fox was pro-Trump until almost the end when he inexplicably turned on them after they announced that Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election while Trump to this day insists against all evidence and facts that he won the election and has refused to concede.

In general, one needs critical media and digital literacies to assess the reliability of Internet, broadcasting, and print media sources learning how to assess their biases in terms of Corporate ownership, with the major TV networks ABC, CBS, and NBC centrist in orientation to attract a mass audience while cable networks have their biases as I indicated above. One also needs to be able to assess specific News broadcasters according to their biases. While the TV networks and CNN purport to be neutral and centrist, researchers have over the years noted a liberal bias, while cable networks MSNBC is strongly liberal and anti-Trump whereas Fox is strongly conservative and pro-Trump.

These biases are not difficult to detect though one needs experience in critical media and digital literacy to assess Internet sources to see which are most reliable and which portray lies and disinformation. Yet, in my book-centric view, books and the best print journals remain the best sources of information, and indeed critical media analysis from books of TV networks and Internet sources from reliable experts provide an excellent source of reliable information.

Obviously, every individual has their political bias and their media biases dependent on their personal history from youth on of media and internet consumption and I’ve indicated some of my biases in these comments. It is up to each individual, however, to develop critical media and digital literacies to properly assess reliable media and internet sources (Kellner and Share 2019). There is consensus concerning some sources whereas others are contested. Each individual, therefore, has the responsibility of developing critical media and digital literacies to be able to think, read, and assess reliable sources for themselves.

 

REFERENCES

Kellner, Douglas (1995) Media Culture. New York and London: Routledge; second updated edition 2020.

_____ (2016) American Nightmare: Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2016.

_____ (2017) The American Horror Show: Election 2016 and the Ascent of Donald J. Trump. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

Kessler, Glenn. Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly, “Trump is averaging more than 50 false or misleading claims a day,”

Washington Post, October 10, 2020 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/22/president-trump-is-averaging-more-than-50-false-or-misleading-claims-day/ (accessed on December 11, 2020).

McLuhan, Marshall (1964) Understanding Media. New York: Basic Books.

Quammen, David (2013) Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. New York: Norton.

Toobin, Jeffrey (2020) True Crimes and Misdemeanors. The Investigation of Donald Trump. New York: Doubleday.

Trump, Mary L. Ph.D (2020) Too Much and Never Enough. How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Notes

[1]  https://jewishreview.co.il/about-the-rank-of-sources-and-the-reliability-of-data-in-the-scientific-study-10202/.

[2] For information on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, see “Wildlife Markets and COVID-19,” Humane Society International, April 19, 2020 at https://www.hsi.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Wildlife-Markets-and-COVID-19-White-Paper.pdf (accessed on August 11, 2020). For background on this issue, see Quammen 2013.

[3] On Trump’s lies and misinformation, see  Toobin 2020 and Mary Trump 2020.

[4] See my analyses in Kellner 2016 and 2017.

[5] I am not using the concept of “ideology” in this paper although there is a copious literature on truth vs ideology and science vs ideology, which are major themes in science and technology studies. See my earlier studies of ideology in Douglas Kellner, «Critical Theory and Ideology Critique,» in Critical Theory and Aesthetics, Ronald Roblin, editor, Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990, 85-123; Ideology, Marxism, and Advanced Capitalism,» Socialist Review 42 (Nov-Dec 1978), 37-65; and review of John Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, American Journal of Sociology, 1991: 1184-1186.