33 GENIUS INTERVIEW Francesca Tripodi
USERS DON’ T UNDERSTAND HOW WHAT YOU PUT INTO GOOGLE DRAMATICALLY ALTERS WHAT YOU GET OUT FT: The people I spoke to were telling me they were looking for just the facts. They said that the mainstream media has become too emotional, that it is favouring emotion over intelligence and feelings over facts. But what I argue is that facts are not neutral, and there are ways you can present ‘the facts’ that can sway arguments. It’s very complicated, but I think there are conservative media producers in the US who are promoting the story that the mainstream media is a bunch of emotion and not fact-based. Then these media producers are saying ‘We just present the facts’, but are very careful and very meticulous about the facts that they present. FEED: Your study was around American conservatism. But what is your understanding of how media tunnel vision happens in other parts of the political spectrum? FT: Unfortunately, that was the limitation of just having a year-long project. I gained access to Republican groups straightaway and quickly realised that was all I was going to be able to actively observe and understand. But in future I want to continue to explore this idea of partisanship and trust in news and information more broadly. I studied people who identify as US conservatives, but I don’t think this is exclusive to conservatives: I don’t think many of us understand the implications TUNNEL VISION Dr Francesca Tripodi presenting her research into how partisan groups use media for think tank Data & Society
FT: They were actually looking at a wide variety of sources. Fox was obviously a very important one, and within Fox, Sean Hannity, Parker Carlson and Fox & Friends were the most commonly discussed. Online, there was the Daily Bell, which is a daily email news summary from the Heritage Foundation, and The Daily Signal, which is another Heritage Foundation outlet There were also YouTube channels like Prager University or The Rubin Report, which tended to be watched by the younger people I spoke with, as well as podcasts from The Daily Wire. And in terms of major publications, there were The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal . A lot of the young people I spoke with got their information from their phone. They subscribed to a variety of news alerts, either through Apple News or
downloading various news apps, and they subscribed to a fairly wide variety. A lot of the younger university students said they regularly read The New York Times and liked its long-form journalism. Markedly not on the list were MSNBC or The Washington Post . FEED: Did they get any news from any non-US sources? FT: Interestingly, Russia Today (RT) and Al Jazeera were also sources they talked about. FEED: We talk about finding news sources we can trust. But what does ‘trust’ mean in this context? When people are looking for sources they can trust, are they looking for new information or just looking to have their world view confirmed?
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