Fixing the Internet with Harleen Kaur (Bonus Minisode)

0:00At least somebody's trying to fix the news. About time. And we got them on this show. Yes. Where else are you going to hear about it? Where else are you going to see this? I don't know, because we just try to deal in objective truth. I know. We'll look at the biases and why, where, how. Who's doing it, who's not? We are all in here on StarTalk, special edition coming up. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk, special edition. Mm-hmm, how about that? Neil deGrasse Tyson here, right next to Gary O 'Reilly.

0:43When you see Gary, it is special. Today, we're talking about a very important subject. Yeah. The news. Yeah, it was something we've been wanting to come to grips with for a while now. Who would have thought that you'd have to talk about that? When I grew up, the news was just the news and you went on about your life. You watched the news and then you went to the real TV when you were growing up as a kid. This news thing got in the way. Right, yeah, the news was like, yeah, I don't need this. See, now it seems we live in a constant need for news. It's not just on the hour. It's every hour, 24 hours a day.

1:20I would say that it's a desire for news, but a strong enough desire becomes a need. Wow. That's what I think is going on here. All right, okay. I mean, just have to think about the number of news channels there are on TV, if TV even exists anymore. Then there's online, there's social media platforms. Not just how many are there, how many hours a day they broadcast news. Oh, gosh, yeah. Right. I mean, it does fold out into a large number. I mean, throw in the unfiltered influences, and then the news landscape will and can look a bit of a mess. We all have our trusted news preferences, our go-tos.

2:03And as I've said before, the better the information, the better the decisions. That you're going to make based on that information. Exactly. Right. But do we know if these news sources bring their own filters or their own biases? It's not always obvious to see from the outsider just by a headline. Sometimes it is by the headline. This is where our guest comes in, Neil. So if you would introduce them, please. I'd be delighted to. Yes. We have with us Harleen Kaur. Harleen, welcome to StarTalk. Thanks, Neil. Delighted to be here. Excellent. And you're in from Canada. That's right. Canada. They let me in.

2:41The 51st state. That's right. We have no water. Do not do that. Where did you read that, Neil? I don't know. Some news source told me that that's what it was. That happened? Co-founder and CEO, I got it here, of Ground News. All right. Are you grounded? Grounded means you have an objective understanding of reality in any language, I'm pretty sure. Because the ground is the ground. Yep. You're a former engineer? That's right. And what kind of engineer? A space engineer. Space! Loving it! In the right place. Yes! Yes! So big fun, Neil. Okay, thank you. You are trying to fix the news problem, not by giving it a bias of your own, but by figuring out a way to de-bias it.

3:31That's right. In some objective way that people around the table say, hey, I see what you did there. That's right. And we kind of all agree, no matter which side of the aisle you're on. As Gary said, if I have what I would consider a trusted source of news, and what you do to the news makes it look different from that, why should I have any confidence at all that you're doing the right thing? Yeah, that's a very good question. So let me try and explain what we do at Grand News. No, there is no try. There's do or do not. I shall explain what we are doing at Grand News. So how we view news is that something happens, as you call the objective truth, something happens, and then it goes through this prism of the media landscape, and then it fragments into all these million different versions of what exactly happens.

4:18And depending on where news outlets are, what their biases are, or what their agendas are, or who's funding them, who owns them, who is the audience that they don't want to piss off. And who's the sponsor. Who's the sponsor. Yeah, yeah. Then they will tell you, although the event that they're reporting is the same event, but how they're reporting it is going to be very, very different. And depending on what version you're reading, your perception of the reality of what happens is going to be very, very different to each other, to the point, yeah, using a space analogy, we are literally sometimes living in the different universes, depending on what news outlets or a group of news.

4:59That analogy totally works. Thank you. You've met people and said, what universe did you come from? Yeah, literally. I've said that way too many times lately. Yeah, are we finding the same thing? So, yeah, our job is not to say that this one's right or this one's wrong. And what we do is we literally reconstitute all of that, those versions together to reverse engineer what might have happened. So we'll show. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. It's a new take on it. That's badass. Yeah. So what criteria? But let him finish your thing. You just used the word reverse engineering. Let that sentence finish. The engineer said reverse engineering.

5:40What a surprise. Yeah, yeah. I hope it doesn't become scientist versus the engineer here. No, no, no. Not for this interview. No, no. Otherwise, meet me outside. We'll talk about it. No. I give up. We put all those sources together. So let's say there is some executive order that has passed and there is a news story saying, hey, this is the headline and this is what happened. We will show you along the spectrum how the different news sources cover it, all the way from the far left to the far right. And then we don't put any check marks or Xs against any of them. We very much let you decide where the truth kind of gets reconstituted and you use your critical thinking to put that together.

6:24You use your critical thinking. Yes. What does that presume? Yes. Where's the big assumption there? You're absolutely right. Or you should use your critical thinking. Which is a skill we are all losing. It's interesting you say that. Yeah. How it's more herd mentality then? It's herd mentality, but also I think we're becoming lazy a bit because I feel like we like to be intellectually lazy because it's great to hear somebody else talk about what they think about it or what their opinion is about something. and then regurgitate it rather than using your own brain to be able to say, because it takes effort to be able to do that.

7:01I'll just pick one guy, one girl, one sub stack, one podcast, one newsletter, one news channel, whatever it is, and then just follow the one that I agree with and reinforces my cognitive bias. So the psychology of the news and how it's absorbed, how it's portrayed is now much, much deeper than you and I growing up. oh, there's a nice guy in a suit and a tie and he's reading the stories from the day at 6 p.m. And then we moved on. There are a couple of reasons why that's not the case anymore. So one is there was a doctrine called fairness doctrine, if you've heard of that, that came into existence, I think, late 1940s.

7:40That early? That early. Yeah. That's before TV. That's because FCC wanted radio and then TV to take responsibility to provide more equitable and honest version of what's really going on. So there was a fairness doctrine where the onus was on the broadcasters to actually show all versions of what happened. And they had that control of them because the federal government allocated the electromagnetic spectrum to them, right? That's right. That's how they controlled it, the licenses. It was a public trust. That's right. Right. And then it got repealed during the Reagan administration. So that's where the fragmentation really, really happened because then there wasn't any legal obligation to be able to say that.

8:22I have to show all this various versions and show. That's why the guy in Thai that told the Walter Cronkite version of the news that used to exist didn't exist. And then, of course, everything spun out of control when news hit the internet and then later hit social media. And then it just went crazy. Because I remember, I mean, this is how old I am. I remember when the news would give an opinion. It was like, are you seated? Okay. we're about to give an opinion. Get ready for this opinion. We're going to come back and we're going to sit here and this is going to be an opinion. Like flashing an opinion.

8:59And then it was over and then... And it wasn't told, it wasn't snuck in to be said, this is news, this is an opinion. Yeah, as you said, very much categorized. So let me ask you, what criteria are you using at Ground News to determine an outlet's bias, be it left, center, or right? That's right. And can a center be biased? Oh, that's a philosophical question. I told you, you're in that date. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, go ahead. So one decision we made early on, again, to be as neutral as possible, and in a way as scientific as possible, we do not determine the rating, that if the CNN is left or Fox is right.

9:36We're using third-party rating agencies, and actually we are using three of them who use three different methodologies. One of them is using crowdsourcing. One of them is using experts. One of them is using algorithms. And then we take a statistical average of them and then say, okay, based on these rating agencies, that's where the news outlet lies. And do you look for keywords that would indicate? That's right. That's right. How does a story get framed? What topics do they cover more often than less often? And how much time they give to that topic. To that topic, which is very, very interesting as well.

10:10that it's not one thing that we stumbled upon, to be honest, I did not set out to do, was it's not necessarily the spin on the coverage. It's the lack of coverage completely. That tells the bias of the outlet as well. That's a whole other thing. Yeah. Very recently, when markets were crashing, there were certain outlets, if you went to it, then you wouldn't know that there was anything terrible happening in the financial market. Nothing to see here. The nothing to see here approach to news. You said the spin. Yes. Do we still call them spin doctors? Or is that such an archaic term now? Well, for the politicians, yes.

10:47But I think, yeah, the news outlets are very much doing that. No, spin doctor was one person among many who was doing the spin. Yeah. But now the many are spinning. Yeah. So it's a spin hospital of doctors. Several doctors. Convention. Okay, so when, I suppose, an article goes beyond simple bias, and it's actually misinformed, misleading. Yes. I mean, not misinformation, but disinformation. Yes. How do you sort of scan that? And what's behind that, I think, is you began this conversation saying there's an event. Yes. And then you watch how people cover the event. Yes. Or don't. However, that presumes that everyone has equal access to the objective true information about the event.

11:37Yeah. But in the days of reporters, different reporters would be delivering information back to the newsroom from their view. So there's another layer in there, isn't there? It's not just the person presenting the news or writing the article. It's the person who's supplying the information. Yes, yes. So again, it's very hard to say that anything is objective because this is a chain of humans, as you described it. somebody is reporting it, somebody is writing about it, and then somebody is watching it and making sense out of it. Did you have the game of telephone in the UK? That's exactly what I'm finding.

12:15Well, maybe I did, and I don't remember. No, you would so know. I know we invented the telephone, so maybe you didn't do it. We wouldn't play it just out of spite. No, in elementary school, you do it in elementary school, like kindergarten or something, and someone starts with a story that has a little bit of detail, but not on a level that you can't remember it, right? It's like, so Mary wore a blue dress to Johnny's birthday party. Right. And he turned six. And he blew out the candles and made a wish he'd go to Disneyland. Something like that. Yeah. There's nothing weird about that. And I tell it to you, you tell it to the next person.

12:56You whisper it. And then at the end, it's like, hey, Joey wanted to go into space and have a birthday party. It's one of the first things we learn in elementary school, how unreliable the human means of communicating information is. That's right. But if you had the versions of all of those people along the chain and put it together, perhaps you can decipher where it's happening. But everyone's version is accurate in their own mind. There it is. and is passed on, but the helicopter view is something very different. That's right. So let me answer your question, Gary. How do you determine if there is disinformation included?

13:36So let me take an extreme example. I don't know. There was a claim a few years ago, a totally false claim, that medicine called ivermectin cured COVID. And let's assume a news outlet publishes that claim. So what Ground News does is, again, we will not just show that claim published by that outlet. We'll also show all the other outlets commenting on it, saying, hey, there are claims out there. So they react to it. Reaction videos and also correcting it. Soundists go out and correcting it and publishing reports that, hey, this is a claim that's not true. The second thing we do is, apart from biased ratings, we also provide factuality ratings of the news outlets.

14:23So how have they historically been reporting? And so on their reporting practices, we'll say, hey, this is historically. Is it from one source or again, is that cross-reference? Again, it's from a cluster of sources. Again, trying to be as neutral and as close to objectivity as we possibly can be that we do. So again, when you're reading that news, not in isolation, but again, clustered with the other reactions, other disproving of that claim, then you have all the information at least in one place to be able to say this is true or not. But that's what we're trying to do. Okay, word salad question.

15:05Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and cognitive biases. They're not phrases that you would have heard 10 years ago probably. But now... Cognitive bias is well known. Yes, but I'm saying... psychological literature. Or in terms of a news. A news. Yeah, definitely not a news. So this is now the landscape of news media. You've got to go through filter bubbles or look through someone's bubble, understand if that is something, and then find yourself in an echo chamber. That's right. So interestingly enough, I'll start at a very different place. I think the reason all this has happened, again, going back to what's happened with news, one of the main reasons is the revenue models of the news outlets.

15:44So the revenue models of news outlets have gone to, similar to social media, advertising, and how much time can we retain you on the channel or on the app or on the website? The commodity is your attention. That's it. That's what they are. But then how do you do that? By not showing you stuff you might disagree with and leave the site or leave the app. So keep showing you, again, reinforcing that cognitive bias, creating that bubble. So, and then you're like, yeah, this news outlet gets me or this guy and girl gets me. I want to keep... In the old days, and I just know this from what I was told.

16:21I didn't research this. The news was not expected, TV news was not expected to be a revenue generating center. Yes. It was funded by all the other programming that went on in the day. And the news was a service to, of course it had ads. Yes. But there wasn't a calculation done that they have to adjust the news to boost ad revenue. But now each news channel is its own profit center. So then how do you make sure that remains profitable as you're saying that if that is the revenue generating source, then you keep showing people what they want to see and not let them. You say that, hey, I cannot own the entire population.

17:07I'm going to own this slice of population that believes in these things, and I'm going to keep reinforcing these few things. I like that phrase to own them. Own them. You basically do. They do what you say. They think what you think. Yeah. They think what you tell them to think. Yeah, and then they own you. And then you're working very much with the demographics. That's right. So that's where I think, again, going back to the different universes come in, that if you're reading that channel or listening to that channel or reading that newspaper or even group of newspapers that are similar to that ideology, then you would think of things happening very differently.

17:45What another person at an opposite end of the spectrum might be thinking.

18:01If you're enjoying this episode and want to start using Ground News, head to ground.news.com to get 40 % off their Vantage plan. The same one we use here at StarTalk. That's ground.news.com for access to their top tier plan for just$5 per month.

18:29Now that we understand a little bit better what's out there and how it's sort of, brought forward, what strategies can people develop to be able to see through, to be able to be aware of what bias might be spun at? It's self-awareness. That's what it comes down to, right? It is, but it's a very tough ask for somebody to do. I think to challenge that a few tools that we are using, and as a layperson, even if you don't want to use ground news. I hope you do, but if you don't, you can use it yourself. One is very much what we call lateral reading. Again, take the news sources and read it across. Even if you don't agree with them, you don't have to, but just having that access and challenging yourself, as you said, having the self-awareness that there are other versions of what's happening.

19:19Second, as I said, by going across the news sources, or if you are, let's say, on social media, you are the person who gets news on social media, go follow accounts that you might not agree with and they might make you angry, but at least going out and seeing what we are calling blind spots. So we have a feature called blind spots. What we mean is that if you were reading a certain set of news sources, you would have never come across these news stories and every single day. And it's not just one side or the other. Both sides of the spectrum are very much, they do that, they just leave certain news stories out.

19:54So how are you going to find them? And by the way, just as a professional educator, can I call myself that? You just did. Yes, it's true, you are. Okay. You are. I, you know, I'm born and raised in New York City, so I lean left politically. But when someone starts railing on the political right, and I say, well, where did you get that information? And they talk about the New York Times or MSNBC, whatever. then I tell them, I probably watch much more Fox News than you do. So you're doing that already? Yes, yes, I do it on purpose. And what that helps me is I know there are demographics that watch Fox News exclusively.

20:33And I've been on Fox News, okay, with a couple of other shows. So when I'm out in the wild, we let you loose. When I'm set forth into the nation, I have some sense of what forces are operating on people's thoughts. And it makes me a way more potent educator, I think. I'm so glad you say that you do that because then you can exactly have that empathy to understand where people are coming from. It's not to pass judgment. It's to just understand what force is operating on the brain. We get such heartening feedback all the time where, hey, I stopped talking to my father or stopped talking to my uncle or husband and wife stopped talking because our political views didn't agree.

21:19And it's fracturing people. And one common thing that do is, OK, let's agree not to talk politics. But that cannot be the solution. Like we cannot solve other problems if we don't address and bring people back to common ground. So that's, I think, the only way you can do that is presenting all of the different opinions. And you don't have to agree with it. But when you run into that person who had this opinion, you can have at least an educated conversation about it. That's a strategy for an individual that wants to get a better understanding of the news landscape. Doesn't that assume they want to get a better understanding?

21:57I think so. Yeah, suppose they don't want to. It's interesting you say that. Being fed the way they are. So I think nobody wants to be gamed. I think that's for sure. Nobody wants to. You just say you're being gamed. Oh, those are fighting words. I love that. You have been gamed. Yeah. That is going on. Everybody thinks they have self-awareness, right? Everybody thinks they have self-awareness. Oh, my gosh. It's just that it's very challenging when we are presenting the worldview that we don't agree with and how are you going to go find it if you keep cocooning yourself with information. And if it's not in agreeance with you, then it's wrong.

22:35Yes. That's just different. Let's spin that round. Rather than put the burden of responsibility on the individual, could the corporations, and there are major corporations in play here, could they be more responsible for their messaging? We can. I think, again, things like fairness doctrine was one of the ways that we could ask, but I don't think that's going to happen again. One specific thing is, of course, social media. I think social media is, as you know, it's the most intense form of those reinforced algorithms. It's an outrage engine. It's an outrage engine. They know that more outraged you are, more time you'll spend on it, and more likely you are to click.

23:19But that's an example, though. It's the opposite of what you said a moment ago. There's one thing to show me what I want to see because I agree with it. But if you show me something that I vehemently disagree with, that gets me bubbling. And then I forward that, look what they said over here. Without checking what exactly. Right, so it seems to work on both extremes. It does, but I think, again, it's not that it's showing you, yeah, the emotion works on both extremes. But again, you might forward it, But it's such an exaggerated version of whatever it is on the other side as well that you are shown.

24:00It's not exactly that you're becoming enlightened by seeing that news story. You're getting enraged by seeing that news story, but not necessarily. But yeah, because it's, again, whatever the hot button topic is, take the most emotional exaggerated version of that and show it to you. What is your revenue model? Yeah. That's a good question. That's a good question. Whoa. Whoa. We're talking about other things. We're right in there, didn't we? Right? How do you like that? No softball questions here. Try to answer that one. Yeah. It is straightforward. So one thing early on we decided is we are not going to do the ad revenue model because then you are just recreating the problem that you're trying to solve.

24:45So we decided to go with a subscription model. If you find our navigation tools to read news helpful, if you find our analysis helpful, then you can pay us a subscription to be able to use the product. It's 100 % subscription supported. That's the cleanest way to do that. If you find value in the product, pay it to us. But we have a freemium model. We realize not everybody can afford it. And if they don't find any value in it, then you pay them. Sorry, you wasted your time. You wasted my time. My time is$100 an hour. Outside of the revenue models. Is it my imagination? Yeah. It might be. But has science become a trigger, especially on social media?

25:28That's an interesting question. What do you mean by that? Yeah. Okay. Throw a view at somebody that aggravates the out of them, right? Yeah. And science seems to be one of those trigger points. My answer to that would be because I think people like making compelling arguments on social medias. And that's why throwing a scientific, I don't know, an excerpt of scientific report or scientific news, which is either taken out of context, which as a scientist you would never do. You would explain the nuance. And to make. So good point. So you throw in a little bit of science. Exactly. You get to boost what your audience might think is the authenticity of the account.

26:05It goes back to that old adage of every good lie. Yes. Has a grain of truth. Now, it depends on the size of that grain. I've never heard that. Oh, you're kidding me. Never! So you haven't heard of telephone any? No, no, no, I've heard... Every day is a school day! No, not every lie, I've heard every stereotype has a grain of truth, I've heard that. Oh, then copy and paste. Every good lie has a grain of truth. Okay. It's one of those sort of, it's part of the storytelling. It goes back to telephone, it's the storytelling. That we never went to the moon has no truth in it at all. That's why, that Earth is flat has no truth in it.