With large amounts of conspiracy theories out there, we need to be selective about what we believe and also do research into the claims, writes George Claassen.
The installation of 5G mobile phone technology caused Covid-19 and is acting as an accelerator for Covid-19. It will cause an outbreak of cancer and should be stopped at all costs. 5G technology on school grounds will be responsible for a rapid rise in leukemia in children. Viruses can communicate with each other by means of electromagnetic signals.
These are just a few of the outrageous, non-evidenced based, if not laughable claims members of the public are exposed to with the introduction of 5G technology.
Campaigners against it are very actively trying to get journalists on board to spread the message about the alleged dangers of sophisticated electronic technology, often bombarding the media with unverified claims.
Since the lockdown in March, I have been flooded with readers accusing News24 of bias against "alternative" views on the pandemic - alternative meaning not the views of accepted and credible scientists.
Should the media merely ignore the thriving conspiracy theories and the insistence of pseudoscientific propagators that their claims are not getting a fair share of the news about the alleged potential dangers of 5G?
This phenomenon of Luddites spreading misinformation to the public, and widely shared on social media, is not new.
For years, claims have been made, despite a total lack of scientific evidence, that electrical power cables would cause cancer to people living close by.
Numerous scientific studies could find no evidence of that, in fact, this has been comprehensively analysed and dismantled by the physicist Robert Park in his excellent book on junk science, Voodoo science - The road from foolishness to fraud (Oxford University Press).
For public editors of news media who often deal with unscientific and unverified claims made by readers, viewers and listeners, uncritically believing everything they see on social media, this poses a big challenge.
Bias accusations
Over the past week, I was sent a series of links by a very prominent South African businessman accusing News24 of bias in our reporting, as we are allegedly not reflecting the alternative view about various issues around Covid-19. The links and the claims made in them were mostly suspect.
The claims have been thoroughly debunked by fact-checking organisations such as Snopes , NewsGuard, Politifact, FactCheck.org, Full Fact, Media Bias/Fact Check, and others.
One of the links the reader sent me, was to the blog by The Gateway Pundit, a notorious spreader of conspiracy theories and blatant fake news. Another one was a link to London Real, spreading arch-conspiracy theorist David Icke's nonsense, now banned by YouTube. And another a link to a site at Principia Scientific International (PSI), a site Media Bias/Fact Check described as "Overall, we rate Principia Scientific International (PSI) a strong conspiracy and Pseudoscience website that promotes anti-vaccine propaganda and frequent misinformation regarding climate change." PSI's Facebook page was also closed by Facebook in November 2019.
All of these conspiracy theorist sites have been the "evidence" of the reader that News24 is biased.
About the blog of The Gateway Pundit and its author and owner, Jim Hoft, NewsGuard writes: "A far-right political website that publishes false and misleading content." It gives various examples of the false claims made on its website, allegations widely spread across social media. NewsGuard gives a mark out of 100 to all sources it analyses, judged according to basic standards of credibility and transparency.
This includes the following marks allocated to evaluate a source, and how The Gateway Pundit fares: Does not repeatedly publish false content (0 out of 22); gathers and presents information responsibly (0/18); regularly corrects or clarifies errors (0/12.5); handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly (0/12.5); avoids deceptive headlines (0/10); website discloses ownership and financing (7.5/7.5); clearly labels advertising (7.5/7.5); reveals who's in charge, including any possible conflicts of interest (5/5); and the site provides names of content creators, along with either contact or biographical information (0/5); for a total mark of 20/100.
My question to the reader (it went unanswered): Would you be comfortable to take a flight on a plane piloted by a 20 percenter? So why trust a 20 percenter news source?
It is clear that The Gateway Pundit has no credibility as a source, yet the reader still contacting me virtually daily, wanted News24 to take notice of Hoft's analysis of a so-called admission by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) "that only 6% of the Covid deaths in the USA are due to Covid alone (no comorbidity)". He accused News24 of being one-sided in its reporting on Covid-19.
The alleged admission by the CDC has been debunked by Saranac Hale Spencer of FactCheck.org, a project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center to enable readers to distinguish and separate the wheat from the chaff floating around on social media platforms - and from the White House.
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn't drastically reduced the number of deaths attributable to Covid-19, but posts making that bogusclaim have been circulating widely - with the help of President Donald Trump, who retweeted one such claim on Aug. 30.
"Twitter has since removed the original tweet, which came from an account dedicated to the pro-Trump conspiracy theory QAnon. But the claim is still readily available on all the major socialmediaplatforms. In fact, the same QAnon account that posted the now-deleted tweet includes a screenshot version featuring the president's retweet," writes Spencer.
Health hazards debunked
It is interesting that the reader, clearly a highly intelligent man whose success in the world of business is proven, and whom I prefer not to name, loves sharing conspiracy theories on his LinkedIn account and uses these theories as his accusations against News24's reporting. How could he have fallen for such unreliable sources and wild allegations? As do so many readers contacting me who also use such sources to make a judgment call on News24's reporting?
To come back to the alleged false information about the health hazards of mobile technology and the 5G conspiracy theories. These have been dismantled and debunked in various excellent analyses, for example by the technology writer Jamie Davies as far back as April.
"These different 5G stories are often combined together with other Covid-19 conspiracy theories into a toxic cocktail of misinformation," the authors Marc Tuters and Peter Knight wrote in a comprehensive overview of the origins of these conspiracy theories on 5G.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media with experienced journalists who should be able to "winnow deep truths from deep nonsense", as astronomer Carl Sagan described it, often fall into the trap of giving conspiracy theories or plain junk science such as the scare-mongering about mobile technology and 5G a platform, thereby misleading media consumers.
One example: On 29 May, RSG, the national Afrikaans radio station of the SABC, in prime time on their Monitor news actuality programme, hosted two such conspiracy theorists against 5G technology. For nearly twenty minutes, two guests who have not published any peer reviewed studies on 5G, spouted nonsense about mobile technology dangers and 5G - without being critically questioned on the proven science by the journalist-presenter of RSG.
Be selective
The experience I had with the businessman is not unique. It teaches clear lessons: all of us, also and especially journalists, who receive often credible-sounding messages, should be very selective in what we choose to believe.
Not all news sites are equally reliable; in fact, in the age of social media, conspiracy theories thrive where blog writers and Twitterati take on the role of journalists without verifying information they share. One basic characteristic of these theories is that it is very seldom based on any evidence.
In this sense, journalists and scientists share and pursue the same aims, to find the evidence before making claims, to verify information before sharing it to the whole wide world. Claims should be tested by journalists, as scientists do.
As journalists we also have "to make the universe less strange, but only in the sense that it has become more predictable", as Robert Park emphasises. "And in that sense, the universe is not nearly as strange as it used to be. The message the public should take away is that it is not the psychics and fortune-tellers who can see into the future, it is the scientists."
- George Claassen is News24's public editor and a member of the board of the Organization of Newsombudsmen & Standards Editors.
