The article is here; here are the Introduction and Part I:
This chapter addresses an underappreciated source of epistemic dysfunction in today's media environment: true-but-unrepresentative information. Because media organizations are under tremendous competitive pressure to craft news that is in harmony with their audience's preexisting beliefs, they have an incentive to accurately report on events and incidents that are selected, consciously or not, to support an impression that is exaggerated or ideologically convenient. Moreover, these organizations have to engage in this practice in order to survive in a hypercompetitive news environment.
To help correct the problem, this chapter outlines new forms of newsgathering tools that leverage digital information to provide a sense of how representative (or not) any particular event may be. This contextualizes the news and leads to more sober—that is, less hyperbolic and reactive—interpretations of it. Newsgathering institutions can also become much more interactive so that a participant has the ability to easily find facts that they are confident will not be tainted from the strategic selection or cherry-picking of a news authority or intermediary. These tools will make newsgathering more self-guided.
[I.] The Proliferation of True-but-Misleading News
Many beliefs circulating through American discourse at any given time are in some sense corrosive—to society, to personal health and safety, or to some other part of life. The path to these corrosive beliefs is tiled with true-but-misleading information. Although the American news landscape is marred by some wholly made-up stories (that the COVID vaccine includes trackers, for example), these falsities make up a relatively small set of corrosive beliefs. Most corrosive beliefs have some factual corroboration—some true anecdotes that undergird the beliefs. But the factually true anecdotes imply something larger that is not supported by more representative data.
