Farhad Manjoo Lectures on "Post-Fact World"

By Lauren Jones, public relations junior, with additional material by Calvin Berman and Adriana Merlo, public relations juniors

Farhad Manjoo, technology columnist for Slate and the author of "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society," spoke Thursday, Nov. 11, as part of the lecture series sponsored by the Senior Fellows Honors Program of the College of Communication.

In his lecture, "Navigating a Post-Fact World: How to Make Sense of Rumor, Innuendo, and Faux News in the Internet Age," Manjoo argued that despite more and better access to information, people don't necessarily have a better idea of reality and truth.

The internet "amplifies some negative aspects of human nature, particularly our tendency to go look for news that we like and avoid news that we don't," he said.

Manjoo, who is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times and Time magazine, explained that people's tendency to choose the news sources that reflect their perspective of the world is known in psychology as "selective exposure."

To convey how this applies to news consumption, he cited a study by researchers at Stanford showing that self-identified Republicans favored headlines that were labeled "Fox News" while ignoring headlines labeled "CNN." Students who identified themselves as Democrats, on the other hand, favored the headlines labeled "CNN" and ignored the headlines labeled "Fox News."

What is significant about the study is that the headlines were not even about politics, but sports, entertainment and the weather.

"This behavior explains all kinds of trends we see in the news these days," he said, such as why Republicans and Democrats have divergent views of the economy and even why some people are still convinced that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11th attacks.

Dave Junker, director of the Senior Fellows Program and a lecturer in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations, said Manjoo's lecture had some good messages for public relations majors.

"Public relations students need to understand how people seek and process information," he said." They also need to appreciate the consequences of deception and of selectively presenting the facts."

Public relations major Elsa Morales said the lecture made her aware of how she processes news.

"After this lecture, I am going to think critically about my sources," she said.

Manjoo explained that selective exposure also applies to the way we use social media.

"When you go online, you're not just going to news sites, you are also choosing the groups that you want to hang out with, through social networks and blogs," he said. "We are only talking to other people who are just like us, while ignoring people who are different."

Manjoo said this is not the only reason he believes that "reality is splitting" along partisan lines. Even when people with different politics see the same thing, they still may not agree on what they're seeing, due to a psychological process called "selective perception."

To illustrate the point, he alluded to a famous study of how college football fans viewed a game's officiating as biased in favor of their opponents, an example that clearly resonated with the crowd.

In his closing remarks, Manjoo stressed the need to be vigilant when searching for truth among the clutter in today's media and to be aware of one's own psychological tendencies when seeking out and interpreting information.

"Manjoo's talk makes us question the idea of how important facts are," said Brian Ferguson, a Unitarian minister who drove up from San Marcos for the talk. "We put our own emotions before facts because we are emotional creatures."

The lecture was held at the Flawn Academic Center at The University of Texas at Austin.