In Defense of Knowledge: Developing an Intelligence Brief on Voting Rights
On Election Day in 2019, I launched (with a lot of help) The American Leader, a news and knowledge center that tackles the systemic problem of misinformation by offering a new journalistic approach to seeing the world. Using our guiding principles on bias, common purpose, problem-solving, priority setting, accountability, and the search for truth as our framework, we have set out to become a go-to resource for casual news consumers who lack the time or energy to consult multiple resources for the answers to their questions, and for purpose-minded citizens who are looking for inspiration on how they can get involved in the issues that matter to them. With the help of a MisinfoCon microgrant, we were able to address the corrosion of voting rights, which we published in a problem brief shortly after launch.
In the battle against misinformation, particularly in the political sphere, knowledge seems to be swimming upstream. It is so much easier for a rumor or overt effort at disinformation to go viral than it is for evidence-based information. Whereas today’s knowledge is dependent on thousands of years of human trial and error, observation of patterns of nature and behavior, and problem-driven innovation, the disinformation that plagues our discourse today is untethered from all but contemporary fears and insecurities and partisan opportunism. It’s as if disinformation, unencumbered by the weight of what’s come before, is able to float higher and travel farther and faster than information weighted down by the burden of proof.
The incendiary tweets, denials of science and eyewitness accounts, and “alternative facts” are nothing more than word bombs tossed on the fragile trust on which knowledge depends. Sow enough doubt and confusion, and we fall into darkness.
That’s one reason why I committed to launching The American Leader. Technologies that combat the spread of misinformation are critical in today’s connected world, but, ultimately, the battle won’t be won until we restore people’s faith in knowledge and their trust in the people who develop that knowledge, and in the people who use it. Knowledge is a cornerstone of democracy — it reveals to us the challenges of managing conflicting views amidst a world of rapid change, giving us the opportunity to choose together how we can most effectively respond for maximum benefit and who should lead the way. When knowledge works, it works for this common good. When knowledge is ignored or attacked and undermined, it weakens support for the system as a whole.
The American Leader makes it easier to access the knowledge that is needed and available for understanding the systemic problems that shape the world we live in, and it brings focused attention to the people who are acting to solve them and the progress they are making. Traditional media, our window on the world, is not optimized for these tasks. Instead, despite courageous and sometimes impactful work, it remains headline-driven and diffuse and too often beholden to the newsmakers of the day, making it all too easy for those who wish to distract from, confuse, and obfuscate the systemic issues that need our attention.
Those of us at The American Leader are building a more outcomes-driven news media.
To this end, The American Leader gathers and synthesizes the best available knowledge on systemic problems like voting rights and presents the information in the form of an intelligence brief. Each brief establishes what we can learn about a particular problem from the multiple sources available to us. As importantly, we also highlight what we don’t know because humility and respect for the accumulation of knowledge and our limitations in that process are essential to regaining trust. The brief puts all this information in a context that connects it to the broader political, social, and economic landscape. The intent is to surface the deeper currents that drive the problems so that we can bring about greater understanding and more lasting solutions to them.
Connecting the Dots, Building a Broader View
For our brief on voting rights, thanks in part to the help from MisinfoCon, our first consideration was to decide whether to draft separate problem briefs on gerrymandering and voter suppression or to prepare a broader overview of the corrosion of voting rights in which we would cover several specific areas of the electoral process that are contributing to it. Given the complexities involved, it would have made a lot of sense to treat each of these problems separately, but ultimately, concluded that that approach dilutes a fuller awareness of how oppressed and impotent our votes have become.
By treating gerrymandering, voter suppression, interference, and structural components of the system as four critical elements contributing to the corrosion of voting rights, we believe we can better spotlight a problem that threatens to undermine one of our nation’s foundational principles — that every vote actually matters.
The decision proved daunting in execution, as the goal of gathering and synthesizing “best available knowledge” is challenging enough in a single narrowly defined area like gerrymandering. Doing so in all four areas offered so many rabbit holes to fall into that at times it nearly paralyzed our work. We were able to move on by remembering that our mission is not necessarily to be comprehensive but to be insightful — to present the landscape in terms of strongest, evidence-based features and to identify the features where that evidence is weak or limited.
While we published it a month later than anticipated, we are not done. These briefs are not static documents — there is always more knowledge and new discoveries to consider that bear on the problem. As our sphere of understanding expands and circumstances shift, we will update this and every problem brief accordingly.
At the top of the website on every page are the words, “work in progress.” This is not a reflection of a website that is under construction, but a comment on our democracy and the problems we need to address in order for it to thrive. These are ever works in progress.
The American Leader does not stand alone. Now that we’ve launched, we are beginning to partner with organizations that can bring technical expertise to what we publish, as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget did to our brief on the national debt. We are also seeking additional grants, corporate sponsorships, and individual donations to support our work. And we are looking for engagement and guidance from those purpose-minded citizens who share our interest in making progress on our long-term, systemic problems, despite the noise that strives to obscure the common goals of a diverse and inclusive and sustainable democracy.
Please take some time to explore The American Leader and consider how you can get involved.
