Kermit is Credible, and this is good for news
Approaches to tackling misinformation for the year ahead
What does it mean to be credible or what is credibility? In 2008, communications scholars Andrew J. Flanagin and Miriam Metzger reviewed disciplinary literature surrounding credibility and observed that
[t]here exists no one, clear definition of credibility that has arisen from [the literature]. Rather, the overarching view is that credibility is the believability of a source or message, which is made up of two primary dimensions: trustworthiness and expertise.[1, emphasis added]
These dimensions also included the traits of reliability, accuracy, and competence, among others.
There is a lot to unpack but for now, my point is simple: for many kids (and even some adults!) growing up in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, Kermit the Frog was and is considered trustworthy, believable, reliable, with an ability to channel accuracy, competence, and expertise. Kermit is in other words credible, and recognizing this is more than an effort to inject lightness into a very heavy subject. Recognizing Kermit’s credibility, even as it creates challenges for addressing misinformation, also offers some helpful suggestions in terms of approach.
You are probably familiar with misinformation, Dictionary.com’s 2018 Word of the Year, and the challenges it represents. Misinformation, and a host of related terms — false information, misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, ‘f***news’ — are known issues in today’s news landscape, but they are not straightforward to tackle. For one, the terms themselves are not always clear: what is the difference, if any, between disinformation and propaganda, for example? It can be complicated, and if one is not clear or precise about the problem, how can one successfully solve it?
The same holds for the term credible or credibility. Interest in what is credible has been steadily growing over the past 15 years, at least according to Google Trends searches in the English language.
But increased usage isn’t the same as improved clarity around the term. Which is perhaps why one question that eventually comes up in the course of our work at the Credibility Coalition is: what exactly do you mean by credibility, or what do you mean by credible?
So here are a few approaches to credibility in operation, using the powerfully credible figure of Kermit to help illustrate my points.
Kermit’s Credibility
For more recent generations, Elmo may be key but at least for this child of the 1970s and 80s, it was this green Muppet. And certainly, beyond the joy of the Muppet Show, children could encounter Kermit not just through the educational messages on Sesame Street (broadcast in over 120 countries by 2006 [2]) but also through public service announcements on water and a number of other issues.
One could learn about the alphabet and about history (or both, Kermit’s News Flash series seems apropos) as well as his videos on the environment. Millions of children and parents have been willing and continue to trust much of what he says. In the context of recent discussions on misinformation, what is also key is that Kermit is not “real”: he is a puppet.
In today’s news and information environment, how should one weigh the merits of a fictitious character? This gets complicated pretty fast. Kermit does not fit very well if the focus is only on misinformation and disinformation, but I do think he helps us reconsider the challenge of assessing truth.
Credibility is Complicated
Approach #1: Credibility, which is the believability of a source or message, is complicated.
There are a number of efforts going on to classify misinformation and related issues online, ranging from the theoretical to catalogs (for example this conceptual diagram from First Draft News, a number of lists, even our own map).
Let’s instead for a moment approach the problem positively, not negatively, or from the perspective of what is true information. Let’s even say: from the perspective of knowledge.
Doing this, you will soon encounter the fuzzy line between information and misinformation. (A related way of looking at this is through the lens of news quality).
Many times, we want truth to be a clean border, but in reality, just like the Muppets, it’s often quite fuzzy. Even in good-faith situations, truth is regularly a negotiation, or a process of navigation. We experience this fuzzy line, or how hard truth can be to navigate, all the time.
The fuzzy line around truth is visible in many familiar phenomena:
- the continued proliferation of retracted or overturned medical science that you have to sift through;
- the still developing or breaking news story;
- the difficulty in understanding statistics especially when ripped out of context or tweaked to make an argument stronger; and
- efforts to reconcile conflicting narratives by trustworthy persons, or the He Said, She Said problem.
I and my colleagues certainly see these lines in a number of news articles; sometimes the border between what is false and true is very clear. But other times, the position of the article is so nuanced, especially when opinion blends into fact, that it can be hard to separate.
If truth is complicated, then so is credibility. Having this approach at the outset is important in order to think about how credibility functions.
Credibility is a Short-Cut
Approach #2: Credibility functions as a short-cut to knowledge given the complicated nature of truth.
So how does credibility function in all of this? Since ancient times, we’ve known that truth can be difficult when it involves many viewpoints, complex information, and many values at stake. When we find Kermit to be credible, we are finding something that lessens the need to constantly navigate arguments in a world of abundant information.
Simply put, many find Kermit believable, and trust what he says. And in this way, credibility reduces the fuzziness by functioning as a short-cut to weighing all the information.
Given this complexity, propaganda, disinformation, and even marketing cannot be reduced to calculations of accuracy alone. They are modes that play with the boundary between information and misinformation to lesser or greater extent, and they might intend to harm (or not), but their power lies in their ability to provide a short-cut to certain conclusions, from certain perspectives, for specific purposes.
Think about an extremely indirect and soft example of propaganda, or politically promoting information: articles that promote the South Korean K-Pop genre. K-Pop music is a priority of the South Korean government to influence goodwill and, according to reports, also to create cultural relevance geopolitically (see here and here), and even used in certain contexts as active psychological warfare.
There are a number of questions that might follow. “Are these articles on K-pop misinforming the world?” I don’t think so. “Are they meant to influence international sentiment, and therefore geopolitical relationships?” Yes. “Is this disinformation?” Again, no.
These questions only make sense, however, if I take some of the claims made in these reports seriously. How believable, or credible, do I find the reporting by Rolling Stone, NPR, and The Outline? And even if the answer to this question varies, am I still able to see a way in which I can hold different conclusions (“K-Pop is propaganda”; “K-Pop is the result of a globalizing music marketplace made possible by streaming”)? Perhaps, though it may depend on the perspective I adopt; it would be interesting to find out how translations of these articles fare in terms of credibility from a Korean-language audience.
Considering the many factors that complicate the evaluation of information, it’s no wonder that the credibility of a source, of the content, or of the publication outlet all function in important ways to hasten the process. It also seems clear why people seek to instrumentalize credibility as well.
Credibility is Social
Approach #3: Credibility offers us powerful ways to think about the social dimensions of news, as opposed to individual perceptions on information.
The other dimension to credibility that Kermit helps us recognize is that he manages to be trustworthy and believable to many people, and not just one person. To return to that family of terms around credibility, Kermit possesses those traits for at least one audience.
Why is this important? Because when we grapple with the phenomenon of credibility, we are dealing with aspects of audiences and society, not individual psychologies or individual perceptions of reality (for lovers of philosophy: yes, we are sidestepping the problems raised by Kant’s transcendental idealism).
In other words, while we’re determining what elements of a news story are misinforming and misleading, we are confirming the group or social basis for these evaluations: such as according to those who are at least high-school educated, or from a specific background or training, or perhaps from English-speaking realms versus Korean ones.
Take, for example, the issue of health information and governments. When we turn our focus upon audiences, it can make sense that some communities have good reason to remain skeptical of information issued by governmental agencies, no matter their connection to expert knowledge.
A case to consider is the Tuskeegee Study, which is a past example of unethical treatment by a government agency and also an example of what Metzger and Flanagin might categorize as a challenge to a specific form of credibility: source credibility.
Beginning in 1932, the US Public Health Service conducted the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” for 40 years, which amounted to a passive observation of the effects of syphilis in hundreds of African-American men. In doing so, the US Public Health Service misled hundreds of participants, and neglected to inform them of proper treatment options for the disease once their effectiveness became established.[3]
On the other hand, consider the case of Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, who has recently stated that ten vaccines for preschool children were “useless and in many cases dangerous, if not harmful.” While requirements for vaccination are relatively new around these ten (their reclassification from recommended to required was a response to a measles outbreak in 2017), Salvini’s statement represents a persistent growing antipathy about vaccination that now has the weight of governmental authority.
In other words, these issues are not just about the most-up-to-date information at hand or how establishing scientific expertise can be messy. They are also about long-standing relationships with authorities, whether medical and governmental, whose trustworthiness is not always constant. Modeling these governmental bodies and audiences, their interactions, and their legacies seems important to tackle at the same time as one also tries to explain what legitimate expertise is.
By identifying the relationship between information or misinformation, or information quality and audience credibility, we open up a greater ability to answer questions like:
- What does it take to overcome an audience’s distrust of accurate information (and vice-versa)?
Challenges for a new year
If you are thinking about how to channel your efforts in this area in the coming year, here is another question around the information quality and audience credibility to (re-)consider:
- What does a credible internet for multiple audiences look like?
Another form of credibility that Flanagin and Metzger describe is media credibility: does the channel used to communicate the information have an effect upon how credible the information seems?
We know that perceptions of information quality on the internet are mixed but they have been for a while. USC Annenberg School’s 2004 Digital Future Report noted a decline in credibility: “those [surveyed] said most or all information was reliable and accurate totaled 55 percent in 2000, 58 percent in 2001, 53 percent in 2002, and 50 percent in [2004].”
The report also pointed out the following interesting perceptions: 74.4% of internet users surveyed found information on websites from established media (such as the New York Times) to be reliable and accurate, 73.5% of users said that was the case with government sites, and only 9.5% of users affirmed the same for sites created by individuals (page 52). Of course, this is during a different time with a different demographic online (comparing attitudes between then and the recent 2018 report offers food for thought.)
Perceptions, then, depend on things like the particular source (e.g., which news, governmental, social media site) as well as the credibilities (plural!) of the particular messages.
If we are going to address credibility on the internet, then this means taking audiences seriously. But measuring or determining audiences and audience attention on the internet has always been a bit tricky. Even at the basic level of daily hits or possible IP traffic, there are statistics that all need a bit of interpreting. This is also one of the reasons that ad tech and news outlet sustainability has continued to be a problem: we don’t even know how much of the internet itself might be “fake.”
A continued focus on audiences, understanding who they are and what they think without compromising their rights, and trying to imagine a way out of the economics of attention — these seem like given tasks for the year ahead.
Perhaps we could also approach our relationship with our imagined audiences, many of whom are also very active creators of their own content, a bit differently. To share some examples that the Credibility Coalition is supporting or aware of, could we design interfaces for information credibility? Or experiment with ways to actively improve trust or news quality?
Whatever we do, rethinking the relationship or engagement between audiences and the internet seems fundamental if also formidable. But the point of reflecting upon Kermit’s credibility at the beginning of a new year is to begin it with hope. Characters like these helped some of us first navigate truths about the world and understand that the world was exciting, diverse, and complex; perhaps thinking about them can do this again.
We have one more challenging question to consider for the new year: When it comes to scale, what efforts around credibility are likely to be effective? We’ll tackle this in a follow-up post.
Notes. A version of post was originally presented at CredCon in Austin, Texas in November 2018. Thanks to An Xiao Mina, for batting ideas back and forth on this as always.
[1] Flanagin, Andrew J., and Miriam Metzger. “Digital Media and Youth: Unparalleled Opportunity and Unprecedented Responsibility.”
Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility. Edited by Miriam J. Metzger and Andrew J. Flanagin. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 5–28. doi: 10.1162/dmal.9780262562324.005
[2] Friedman, Michael Jay. “Sesame Street Educates and Entertains Internationally,” America.gov, 8 April 2006. Original URL: http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2006/April/20060405165756jmnamdeirf0.4207117.html, accessed 25 January 2019 at https://archive.li/vyoMK#selection-1443.0-1454.0.
[3] “The U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskeegee: The Tuskeegee Timeline,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, accessed 25 January 2019 at https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm.
