I subscribe to Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo because I started distrusting legacy/mainstream media outlets quite a long time ago, once they started chasing clicks and bending the knee to their corporate overlords. It is amazing to me, that people in my line of work still chase placements in the New York Times and the Washington Post, when both of those once-venerated newspapers have done the bare minimum with respect to exposing Trump’s corruption and the complicity of tech billionaires and corporate oligarchs in the downfall of our society while completely ignoring the horrific acts of violence that continue to happen every day.
Anyway, I actually read TPM’s daily emails to my inbox, which I can’t say for most of the things I subscribe to, and one recent piece from the BackChannel feed really stuck with me – he was talking about a recent article from RAND corporation on the existential risk and growing panic around artificial intelligence and he said that one of the problems with forming a take on the study is that he couldn’t tell if RAND was worth trusting anymore or not. He said that RAND was, like, one of the OG DC-based research/think tanks (my characterization, not his), and that the article made some very sensible recommendations, like, we should adopt a safety-first approach to implementing AI and not let it, like, get over-involved in our military-industrial complex without safeguards (well, duh, and also, my words, not his). But then he took the time to look up the citations in the article, and guess what? They were from AI zealots – people whose interests were mostly focused on the rapid advancement and deployment of AI, period.
So Josh Marshall’s point from that article, the thing which has stuck with me since reading it, is that we lack reliable narrators for the information that is flooding our airwaves at the moment. We are getting so much information in our feeds that we can’t make sense of it, and we need people who we can trust to make sense of it for us, except that we don’t know who we can trust anymore.
This point about reliable narrators really resonated with me. For one thing, finding reliable narrators is akin to a core precept of strategic communications, my line of work, only in strat comms we call this, “trusted messengers.” It is not enough, in other words, to find the right messages and narratives that will reach and activate your target audiences – you also have to find the right people to deliver those messages and narratives. Time and time again, I’ve seen this happen in message research – during the testing phase, you will have the same messaging content delivered by different messengers and inevitably, your audiences will not only clearly prefer one messaging approach over another, they will also prefer one messenger over another. I have heard people in focus groups and 1:1 interviews say things like, “I really identify with him – he talked about his skepticism about [the proposed solution] honestly, but when he talked about how he came around to it, it really rang true for me. And he’s a parent, like me.” Or, “He’s around my age – what he said really lined up with my own experiences.”
For another thing, I don’t know if people know how much we depend on reliable narrators in different aspects of our lives. The entire practice of journalism, in its heyday, was predicated upon reliable narrators. These were people who you (once upon a time) trusted to check and double-check the facts; to not get in bed with the subjects of their investigations; to adhere to certain standards pertaining to integrity, like not letting someone pay for their meal or give them gifts to change the nature of their coverage.
The problem that Josh Marshall identified, and that I think about all the time these days, is this: reliability, and to a large and related extent, trust, have become far more compromised and polarized in our modern information era of Trump and bad actors and wealth-hoarding and corruption. In other words, people are either too trusting of everything – diehard Trump supporters trust him unquestioningly, no matter how many times he screws them over – or they are distrustful to a fault, like all the people who immediately scream “That’s AI,” in the comments in reaction to a video or photo. You can see how these extremes might prevent good things from getting done. The analogy I would use is: in any work situation I’ve ever been in, I’m not going to automatically trust a colleague or a team member to carry out their piece of the work unless I’ve been able to take some measure of them. At the same time, once I do entrust a piece of work to someone else, then there’s still a leap of faith I have to make until the work actually gets done, to the standards I think it ought to get done. You see what I mean? You need to have at least a little basis for trusting someone else, but you also need to take some leaps and risks. You can’t just sit at one extreme of trust or the other, or else nothing would ever get done.
I encounter this challenge all the time with my mother (a frequent character in these pieces I write, because I love her absolutely and have also attained some level of objectivity about her), who emigrated to America and became a US citizen and retained fluency in Korean and English by subscribing to both Korean and US media sources. She trusted Korean newspapers for news about Korea; she trusted Walter Cronkite (and People magazine) for news about America. Period. And now that world has gone, and I have to a) keep on telling her that her reliable narrators don’t exist anymore (she for sure knows that Trump or Fox News are not reliable narrators); and b) I have to serve as her reliable narrator, because there is no one else to do so. (Well. She might still trust her local news weather guy. And the doctors and nurses she used to work with. And, like, former neighbors.)
I think about this challenge of finding reliable narrators, not just for my mother, of course, but for the issues I want people to care about – all the time, every damn day. And a possible theory emerged after I watched You Can See Everything, the documentary film about Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos. That film has so many takes, I’m not even going to get into what it’s about, and why I thought it got so much buzz (also, my son and I recorded our next podcast episode about it). But for the purposes of this piece, and this topic, I will just say: that film is entirely about UNreliable narrators. Meaning, Elizabeth Holmes and her partner invited the filmmakers into their lives, ostensibly for the purpose of revealing the “true,” humanizing narratives about who she really is and what her noble intentions were in creating Theranos, and instead, they present in the film as bafflingly opaque and delusional entities. I find it fascinating that people keep on debating whether or not Elizabeth Holmes was intentionally and knowingly untruthful, or whether she was duped/traumatized, or whether she was sincere. Because to me, it is clear that she is, simply, an unreliable narrator. And that people – including the original Theranos investors, and the reporters who breathlessly covered her rise to fame and wealth – were kind of dumb to believe that she was a reliable narrator, to begin with. Check your science homework, people, FFS!
However, I had an idea that came from Josh Marshall’s point about reliable narrators, and the dearth of them in today’s information ecosystem, and my own experience of watching the movie, and it was this: maybe we need to not only confront the challenge of finding reliable audience narrators, but also confront the challenge of finding reliable audience members, too. Maybe we need to arrive at a better understanding of the audiences out there who sit at the extremes of being either blindly trusting of con artists like Trump or automatically distrustful of everything. Maybe we ought to see if there’s a middle there – an audience who knows some things but are able to know the difference between an opinion and a fact, an audience who is willing to admit what they know but also admit what they don’t know, and most importantly, an audience who is willing to learn.
I will admit, I felt the tiniest bit self-satisfied after watching You Can See Everything. Why? Because I was not in the least bit disoriented after watching the movie, like so many people have reported. I realized a long time ago that people are capable of constructing elaborate fantasies for their own purposes (with themselves as the main character) that serve to justify their beliefs and values and permit them to absolutely deny objective facts and truths. I am not arrogant enough to think that my take on the movie is the only right take on the movie (that stance seems to be the exclusive territory of pathetically ignorant white male diaper-babies). But I do think I had the right intellectual and emotional apparatus to receive the information imparted to me by that movie. And I can absolutely see how many people lack that apparatus. Some audiences out there may be willing to build those muscles; some, of course, may not.
I feel as if I’ve made a decent start on being a reliable narrator and a reliable audience member, in other words. So in my continuing quest to solve communication challenges, in my line of work and in my existence as a human on this planet, I am starting to think that we have to find more and different ways of finding not just more reliable narrators, but also reliable audience members. We need to create communities of reliable audiences, guided by reliable narrators, and we need to make those communities (virtual and real) into spaces where people want to congregate together and do good work together and fundamentally…trust and rely upon one another.
