Jason Hartman hosts Stephen Davis, author of Truthteller: An Investigative Reporter’s Journey Through the World of Truth Prevention, Fake News, and Conspiracy Theories. The discussion centers around the growing prevalence of fake news not just online but in every form of media. They look at ways to fight the issues and what the average person can do to find out whether the news is fake or not. The two try to find ways to combat the issue head-on and what the average person can do today (and in the future) to avoid being fooled.
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Jason Hartman 0:59
It’s my pleasure to welcome Steven Davis. He is the author of truth teller and investigative reporters journey through the world of truth prevention, fake news and conspiracy theories. Steven, welcome. How are you? I’m very good. Thank you, Jason, good to have you on the show. So we live in a world of propaganda and misinformation, all sorts of tactics, that the bad apples out there use to hide the truth, shade the truth, spin the truth. In your book, you start off talking about character assassination. And then you talk about conspiracy theories. And it’s just a very interesting topic, how our minds are influenced by the media and such. Tell us more about that.
Stephen Davis 1:43
The first thing to say is that fake news and conspiracy theories and disinformation misinformation has always been with us. You know, the papers in colonial America and Victorian England were basically propaganda sheets. The differences now on social media is the volume and the speed with which it travels around the world. And my concern is that there is so much misinformation and disinformation out there, that beneath that it makes it easier now than ever before, for governments and corporations and dictators to lie to you and to get away with actual scandals. And of course, the group that you relied on to uncover these things, investigative reporters, such as myself, there are fewer of us around than they used to be.
Jason Hartman 2:28
Yeah, that’s definitely true. It’s interesting that we’ve seen this era of media fragmentation, as I call it, where there are fewer media outlets. And you you think on one hand, of course, that’s good, because a lot more people have a voice. I think you could certainly argue that the media is much more democratized than it’s ever been. But at the same time, you have the opposite trend, you have the major media companies that have consolidated like crazy. And then, as you see this fragmentation of the news media landscape, and so many media outlets, the big outlets have really almost done away with investigative reporting, investigative journalism, because the budgets have been cut, as they all vie for advertisers amongst you know, so much competition there. It’s really interesting. We’re talking about this today, because just yesterday, literally on my personal Facebook page, I posted that famous Mark Twain quote, that says, you know, a lie can travel halfway around the world, while the truth is still putting on its shoes. And I think Winston Churchill said it another way, but whatever, you get the idea, kind of help us understand the media landscape. And I don’t know, is it? Is it really worse than it has been? I mean, people are certainly more skeptical than they were in the past, aren’t they?
Stephen Davis 3:46
On the skeptical issue? Of course, it’s in the interests of liars and deceivers that there be so much fake information that we all just throw up our hands and say, Well, can we believe anything, and let’s get on with our lives. And let’s not take part in politics or civic life that makes it easier for people to lie and deceive. The Mark Twain quote is interesting, because now of course, the equivalent is his Twitter. And studies show that fake news travels faster on Twitter than the truth. And very often people we tweet things without even getting to the end of the hundred and 40 characters. So you have this disinformation traveling around the world at vast speed. The major media can’t keep up with it, somebody might put a lie on Twitter, and 5 million people have seen it. And an hour later, the BBC or the New York Times of a guardian might point out why it’s wrong. But by that stage, it’s too late and not enough people have with the real version of events. As far as the media landscape goes. The major issue with I have you call it the democratic kind of nature of things now, which is fine. But you know, I think the problem is a lot of people think they’re citizen journalists and don’t have the training to be proper journalists, but uh, treated as property. Journalists by the media so anybody can kind of tweet from the scene of someplace. You don’t even know if it’s a real person. That’s an issue for me. And of course, for investigative reporting, the issue is really resources, serious investigations take time and money. In truth teller, I tell the story about how I was sent to the Amazon, to investigate a tip that BP the world’s largest oil company was destroying part of the rain forest, you know, the mining company that was destroying the rainforest. Now, what I’ve just told you was all we knew about the story, when they sent me to Brazil, the London Sunday Times sent me to Brazil, literally a needle in a haystack, because the Amazon, as you know, is bigger than Western Europe. I spent weeks and weeks out there investigating it. I found the mine, I smuggled myself in, I got a photograph. It exposed BP, which at that stage was branding itself green, it was a big piece of investigative reporting. I can tell you absolutely. Now, Jason, that no major media company would fund an investigation like that and spin that amount of money on as little information as they had to start with. And what’s worse is, you remember, we were all reading stories about the importance of the Amazon rainforest to the environment. In the search for truth teller, I actually went back to contacts and the province that I’d been in all those years ago, and people are destroying the rainforest, they didn’t even greater rate than they were then. And it goes virtually unreported. Because these days, reporters don’t get out of the office, reporters don’t get sent to the you know, the deepest, darkest parts of the Amazon rain forest to get stories. So society is missing out.
Jason Hartman 6:46
Yeah, they are missing out. But what is the solution? If you agree that the problem is sort of as I outlined it, I’m sure you could do a better job being so deep in it, but we’ve got this fragmented environment. On the one hand, it should be good. On the other hand, it’s bad. We just don’t have I mean, 60 minutes is kind of the last bastion of big time investigative journalism, isn’t it? Okay, so
Stephen Davis 7:13
60 minutes is still very good, by the way? Well, the solution is I lecture journalism students all over the world. I’ve lectured several thousand journalism students in the last 10 years from about 30 different countries, including the United States. And I always say to them, if you want a future of good journalism, you have to pay for it. That’s the generation that’s interested used to getting stuff for free, free music freeness everything on the internet, I tell them, if you want free stuff, you’re liable to get propaganda and fake news. If you want real journalism, which is labor intensive, and which cost money, you have to pay for it. Now, it’s slightly encouraging that a few other people all over the world or a group of people have adopted that idea that a million people last year made voluntary contributions to the Guardian, that the New York Times has, you know, over two and a half million digital subscribers. Now, the simple truth of the matter is for the public, if you want good journalism to survive, you have to pay for it.
Jason Hartman 8:14
But I mean, just one moment on that, though, if we argue like 60 minutes, right? Nobody pays for 60 minutes, they just pay by watching ads. So what’s wrong with the advertising model? Was that broken because of the advertisers? So influencing the journalism, I certainly I think that’s true with the drug companies, because they don’t get
Stephen Davis 8:37
broken because, you know, newspapers and television programs were funded by advertising. And it used to be seen that for instance, in print, when the print advertising disappeared, it would be supplanted by digital advertising online. And that hasn’t happened. And the reason it hasn’t happened is because Facebook and Google have hoovered up all the advertising. So that model has been destroyed. And now the media I live to, I mean, act on digital subscriptions. And you know, you mentioned 60 minutes, it still does, well, it still rates, and advertisers still like it. But the simple fact is that the level of advertising on broadcast television is also falling because as you use quite correctly said, the audiences diffuse now and might be watching, you know, 200 different channels instead of three.
Jason Hartman 9:30
Okay, so so what do we do? I mean, okay, so people have to pay for it. And you’re saying that it can’t really be supported effectively by ads. Okay, so people pay 10 bucks a month to subscribe to their favorite news outlet. But you know, they’re just gonna get one opinion all this news has become so biased and so over editorialized, I mean, where’s the, you know, it’s not even news anymore. It’s just opinion most of it,
Stephen Davis 9:59
let alone would disagree with that. I mean, there is a lot of opinion crept in. And it’s actually, of course, you look at the TV channel, for instance, a cable news channel, it’s cheaper, much cheaper to have two blokes on giving their opinions and shouting at each other, and call it a TV show, then do actual investigative reporting, like 60 minutes does. But you know, for 10 or 12 bucks a month, you could subscribe to three different sources. And then you could look at the BBC, which is the national broadcaster in Britain, and you could, you could have access to the ABC online in Australia. And you could get yourself a collection of sources which would practice proper journalism and not cost you too much money. I mean, if you don’t want to pay as I see it, then serious journalism, which is incredibly expensive and time consuming, and employs people who spend years training to be good at it, that’s going to die off. But what you can do as an individual as well, alongside this, it’s you can take responsibility for the information you share and consume. It’s not good enough to say I just passed on something I didn’t really know it was fake, because then you’re just part of a long string of people around the world, passing on falsehoods and sharing falsehoods. You can’t claim like, you know, the getaway driver from the bank robbery, I didn’t know I
Jason Hartman 11:22
just robbed the bank.
Stephen Davis 11:24
So I believe what will happen Jason in the next decade, is that media literacy courses of the kind that I just designed for the University of Otago in New Zealand to be open source and available to students all over the world. media literacy courses will be seen as right up there. And as important as English history, geography and maths. And they’ll be widely taught at every level. And the aim will be to get people to become ethical consumers and shares of information if people have to share less Soviet if Facebook have to change their business model, because people share less and are more careful. So be it. I mean, personally, I think Facebook is acting with a great deal of social irresponsibility at the moment, I couldn’t agree more. It means outrageous. For instance, you have a video of fake video of Nancy Pelosi that they know is fake, and they refuse to take it down. I mean, the problem with Facebook, is that sort of surprising,
Jason Hartman 12:24
though, because Facebook leans to the left, you think they’d want to protect Nancy Pelosi? You know, I don’t know, it’s kind of odd.
Stephen Davis 12:34
Yeah. But they want to protect more Jason, the idea that they not be treated as a publisher or broadcaster. I mean, for years, they’ve convinced themselves of that. I’ve seen a lot of interviews on this book tour. I’ve been interviewed by the BBC, and media everywhere all over the world. And of course, everything we say, on that media. The media platform is responsible for what you say and do podcasts or publish, because they are a publisher will broadcast. Now Facebook, of course, is actually a publisher and a broadcaster there. Yes. But it’s somehow convinced us over the years that it not be treated as a party. It’s not
Jason Hartman 13:11
just that this is this is this is this is absolutely ridiculous. Same with Google. Same with every blog platform out there. Somehow, they get to escape the responsibility that a media outlet has let me give you an example. Okay, and I’m sure you’re gonna agree with this. If you write a defamatory, libelous article about someone or some things, some company or some person, and you get that somehow published in the New York Times, as an op ed, for example, right? The New York Times will be liable for that. But if you publish it on pretty much any internet site, they’re going to say, well, we’re just a platform, we’re protected by the communications decency Act, which nothing could be further from the truth. There’s nothing decent about that act at all. And so we can put up our hands and claim that we’re just a platform. And we don’t have any responsibility. That is ridiculous. The law has got to change. And you know what, thank God that the European Union is starting to change this. And I think ultimately it will change in the US, you know, when it changes is when the politicians get affected by it. That’s when it changes. They don’t care about us. But they they care. This is always
Stephen Davis 14:28
your side. Facebook has always fallen back on the idea that it’s kind of extraterritorial. Whenever somebody is trying to regulate. It says, well, we’re not really in your country. We’re kind of of the world. Yeah, but you’re quite right. I mean, a profound change needs to happen. And it needs to be that Facebook is responsible for everything it publishes and everything. It’s
Jason Hartman 14:48
not just Facebook.
Stephen Davis 14:50
Oh, yeah, I just use Facebook as an
Jason Hartman 14:52
example. Sure. Sure was Google it. Others got it. I think we got that point and you and I agree completely. Let’s take The other side of it, though, what about them shutting down the people they don’t like? Alex Jones comes to mind, not that I agree with or want to defend Alex Jones, but why is it that some non governmental entity that you have no recourse against can just destroy you? You know, Twitter, PayPal, even the payment platforms do the same sort of discrimination. They cut off Wikileaks, you know, they you build a whole life on their platform, and then they can just take it away. And they don’t have to explain it. They don’t have to answer to anybody. You know, that would be fine. In a world where there’s a whole lot of choice, where there’s a whole bunch of platforms out there, where, oh, look, if you don’t want to do business with me, fine. The company down the street will do business with me, you know, and it’ll be a free marketplace. But it’s not that way. These companies are bigger than most countries. I mean, it’s absolute, the scale that they’ve been able to benefit from on a platform that they use and did not build or pay for called the internet. They didn’t build that, you know, like to go back to Obama’s saying you didn’t build that, right? Well, I actually, I actually, actually agree with him here. Why do they get to be the arbiters of who gets to speak and who doesn’t?
Stephen Davis 16:19
I think this comes down to the classic and long standing debate between freedom of speech and speech, which tips over into harm, you know, the classic harms harm principle, as outlined by the philosopher john Stuart Mill, which he essentially said, just to sort of remind people that the villains of the age were the corn merchants who were putting up the price of bread for poor people. And he said, basically, you can make a speech saying, though, called merchants of villains, the corn merchants can go to jail, you can say all sorts of terrible things about them, what you can’t do is get a mob to go and burn down their house and kill them that tips over from free speech to hate speech. So we’re trying to work out a difficult line here. Now, the alex jones of this world, I mean, he’s an appalling individual who cause tremendous and unnecessary grief for the victims of Sandy Hook. Fair enough. But some
Jason Hartman 17:11
of his I think some of his writings are something that we should see, you know, it’s not
Stephen Davis 17:17
all I was about to say, personally, I think the man is laughable. But look, I think if you try and suppress his speech, you only help him. And I don’t think that what he says tips over into hate speech. Well, I do think they need to clamp down is the actual hate speech which circulates on the internet, which is actually urging people to commit violence. And we saw the terrible consequences of that in my home country recently, where disgruntled young men got guns and murdered a lot of people in a mosque in in Christchurch. So I agree with you absolutely. The
Jason Hartman 17:54
allegations of this? Well, let me tell you what’s interesting about that, though, and I’m sure you’ll think you’ll have an opinion about this one. Why is it that the movies and video games are never criticized? I mean, there’s almost zero criticism against them, and against the pharmaceutical companies that make these drugs that make people crazy. I mean, it’s like, you don’t even bring it up. There’s no discussion about this in the media anymore. There used to be I remember back in the 70s, they would discuss violence on TV constantly. But now, it’s like, almost just go through your Netflix queue, or not your queue, but just surf movies, online. IMDb, whatever. And you’ll see that almost every movie poster has a gun in it. Not every video game is a shooter game. What nobody talks about that it’s amazing.
Stephen Davis 18:45
Well, a lot of people used to talk about it, you’re right. And it seems to have kind of slightly become less of a story these days. I guess though, from my point of view, they may be entertainment I like or don’t like, but it’s clearly entertainment. I might not be entertained by somebody is, but there’s a world of difference between that and somebody broadcasting as they did a live shooting of actual people being killed. Same, but one is clearly realized, and one is not sure. And if it’s not real life, like a whole fantasy world or, you know, science fiction or whatever. I guess that that’s entertaining some people and they should be allowed to see it.
Jason Hartman 19:24
It’s just amazing that you know, they only run to the gun manufacturers. That’s all they talk about. And they never talk about any of these other issues that influence this kind of terrible tragic behavior, which is crazy. Okay, so since we did get a little conspiratorial, you’ve got a chapter had about conspiracy theories. It’s aptly titled My I think it says my conspiracy theories are better than your conspiracy theories. Tell us about that.
Stephen Davis 19:49
Yeah, in truth teller, I outlined various tools which governments and corporations use to deceive you actually quite sophisticated tools which they’re quite good at. And one particular one is The creation of conspiracy theories to hide an actual conspiracy theory. And in truth teller, I give an example when a former Russian intelligence officers called Skirball was poisoned in the United Kingdom, and the finger was pointed at the Russians, it seems pretty clear they were the only people with the motive to do it. And in fact, two of the officers happen to be in the same town at the time of the poisoning and were caught on cctv camera. But within 10 days of that story, I was tracking around the world for other conspiracy theories had been generated and circulated about what happened. So now if you look back at and if I ask my students to go and investigate it, and then come back and say, Well, Mr. Davis, there’s five different theories on this. How do we know what to believe? So what a very, a very effective way of obscuring the truth, simply create a conspiracy theory? floated online? Yeah.
Jason Hartman 21:00
Okay. So what are these other tools that these oppressive regimes whether they be government, corporations, anything tell us some of the tools they use?
Stephen Davis 21:10
Okay, one classic, which is used, in fact, by Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and others is the big lie. And it’s based on the way our brains work, our brains are wired to treat information that’s familiar that we hear often is trustworthy. That’s logical if you think about it. So you tell a big lie. And initially, a lot of people might not believe you. But you repeated again and again, month after month, year after year. And eventually, a lot of people will start to believe it. Because
Jason Hartman 21:40
Isn’t that like what Joseph gurbles said, or something?
Stephen Davis 21:45
Yeah, absolutely. No, it’s a theory that goes back quite a way in it, but it’s very effective. And I give examples of it in the book. Another really, and this is really kind of quite common now is the character assassination. I personally have had my character attacked by senior police officers by a senior minister in the British government. And also with the internet, as you know, it’s very, very easy to circulate false rumors and assassinate people’s character and then have them not believed. In the book, I tell the story about a my six agent called Richard Tomlinson, who was trying to blow the whistle on things the British government was doing. And they had him chased around the world. And they were deliberately trying to assassinate his character, so that nobody would believe and they told the Swiss place when he was living in Switzerland that he was a pedophile. It was a completely invented story. And
Jason Hartman 22:44
look at Ilan musk with the Thailand divers, or, you know, you remember the story anyway. Yeah. That guy sued him for saying that I, I don’t know what the outcome was, but I hope he wins. But
Stephen Davis 22:56
you know, it’s very effective, as you know, like this stuff, and you get it online. And then people are searching you a year or two later, and they come across that oh, well, okay, sometimes enough to make the allegation.
Jason Hartman 23:10
It’s a drive by shooting. It’s a hidden run, where the perpetrator can be anonymous. But just so you know, that’s not actually true. You can find them. We’ve hired cyber investigators. And it is fascinating. That is a fascinating world. It’s very hard to actually be totally anonymous online. may seem easier than it really is. But that’s a another show in and of itself. But yes, in cons in principle, you’re absolutely right. I think intelligence agencies are good at covering their tracks, though. Oh, well, if it’s the government, yes, that’s probably a lot harder to a lot harder to hold them accountable. Absolutely. But yes, it is a huge problem. I couldn’t agree with you more. And if you’re an investigative reporter, you’re going to have enemies because you’re, you know, one one side’s going to like you and the other is going to hate you. That’s just the unfortunate reality. Right?
Stephen Davis 24:03
It is an in truth teller. I described one particular memorable occasion I did an investigation into what happened to the human shields or the first Gulf War. There’s a whole lot of people, British, American, French, and many other countries who were taken hostage by Saddam Hussein and used as human shields. And there was a secret report into it which was covered up by the British government but which is explained in my book truth teller, at one stage of British Member of Parliament asked questions about this in Parliament, to the then labour defense minister, government Defense Minister jiophone. And at the end of it, whom says to the MP, I need a private word with you and this so they come in the office of private word, and Hoon says to the MP, you’ve got to be careful of that Steven Davis. I think he’s a bit of a fantasist. And when he told me that, yeah, when the MP told me this after I’d finished laughing about it, I thought How ironic that a member of a government That produced a totally fantastical weapons of mass destruction dorsia that took Britain into war and Iraq should turn around and make that accusation of me. But it’s very typical of things. And of course, they will say it privately, he never be caught dead saying this publicly, where I could challenge him. It’s the kind of private conversation the whispers by which they seek to undermine the journalists integrity, and therefore stop them being an effective investigative reporter.
Jason Hartman 25:29
Wow. Yeah. It’s just amazing how that works. Do you think human perception will change? Do you think humans are becoming skeptical of the the fake reviews? I mean, Take, for example, the website Yelp. You know, competitors write negative reviews about their competitors on their, I hope everybody knows that. And then they have their own people write fake positive reviews, right? You know, who do you believe that? Does this stuff have any credibility anymore?
Stephen Davis 25:58
I think people realize that a lot of it is not true. The problem is, we can’t have everybody switching off entirely and saying, I can’t believe anything anymore. Because that in itself is a gift for those who who lie to you, of course, and deceive you, because then they’ll get away with it more often. I was asked by another interviewer, whether I was an optimist or a pessimist after truth teller, and I said, I began as an optimist and ended as a pessimist. Because I think things are going to get worse before they get better because of deep fakes artificial intelligence, truly creating false worlds. But I also think alongside that, and you use the reviews thing, and the hotel reviews, and all these other things, I think people are learning to be more skeptical. So if we give them an alternative, if we give them education programs to help them, I think there is a chance that we can, you know, we can turn this around. One of my favorite ever quotes that the great author HG Wells said, history is a race between education and catastrophe. And I think that’s true. And I think education has got to win. Basically,
Jason Hartman 27:05
that’s a good quote HG Wells, good stuff, we’ll wrap it up with any closing thoughts, maybe address anything, I didn’t ask you, whatever you like. And please give out your website to
Stephen Davis 27:15
tweets Hello is available now I think in pretty much in all Barnes and Noble stores in the states and on Amazon. There were two reasons to buy one is because I think it’s a good book and spent two years researching about part two, I really think people should think seriously and take part in a good public debate about misinformation and disinformation and the sheer volumes of it which are damaging so many parts of society, politics, medicine, health. For more about this, you can go to my site, which is simply called Steven Davis writer.com.
Jason Hartman 27:50
Good stuff, Steven Davis, thank you for joining us and keep up the good work. Society really appreciates people like you doing the tough work and taking a lot of heat for it too. But it is very, very important. You’re keeping a lot of people honest out there, or at least preventing them from doing too much harm. So thank you very much.
Stephen Davis 28:12
Thank you, Jason. Great to chat to you.
Jason Hartman 28:15
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