News Journal: Memory faults, mind tricks and ‘gotcha’ journalism

Gotcha!

Back a few years ago that was just a punch line after someone fell for a practical joke. But it has become something far more serious, and an insidious part of our culture, in the form of gotcha journalism.

Rather than doing the hard work of reporting on and illuminating the serious issues we face, too often today’s media –newspapers, radio, TV, and Internet sites – lead with sensationalized stories about the latest “mistake” made by some prominent person or organization. They then bat the story around like a piñata for as many news cycles as their audiences will stomach.

In many cases the gotcha victim is a government agency or an elected or appointed government employee. They are all easy targets. All government agencies have inspector generals who regularly report on what’s gone wrong. Jumping on items that can be sensationalized from these reports is a lot cheaper and easier than doing real investigative journalism.

More often than not, the media doesn’t even have to do that much work. They can rely on gotcha-savvy elected officials who love to get in front of a television camera and expose the dastardly deeds of someone in the other party.

It is rare to see the media play the gotcha game with one of their own. That’s why I was fascinated by the recent attacks on media superstars Brian Williams and Bill O’Reilly. Clearly, their audiences expect them to tell the truth and they should be held to a higher standard than most of us. But, truth be told, very few of us could avoid questions about stories we tell if we had said as much on tape and in print as Williams or O’ Reilly.

I have always believed that one should never underestimate the ability of the human mind to rationalize. Many, many times when someone has told me something that has turned out to be inaccurate or exaggerated, the person has not consciously lied. What has happened is that over time their mind has rationalized a fact or story to comport with the way they would like things to have been.

I’ve been reading a book by Kathryn Schulz entitled “Being Wrong” that convincingly explains this phenomenon. One of her chapters, “Our Minds: Knowing, Not Knowing, and Making It Up,” focuses on how careful we have to be in telling stories based on our experiences, because our memory systems can play tricks on us. Most people believe they have a very accurate “flashbulb” memory of where they were and what they were doing on the dates of a famous event. For folks my age it is probably President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963; for those a bit younger the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986; for just about all of us the tragedy of 9/11/2001.

Actually, the book points out, our recollections nearly always change over time. In a study by memory researchers of the Challenger event, students were asked to write down what they remembered the day after the event and then had them come back three years later and do the same thing. Only seven percent perfectly matched their earlier memories, 50 percent were wrong on 50 percent of their assertions, and 25 percent were wrong on every major detail. When the researchers showed one of the students her written memory of the day after, she said, “I know that’s my handwriting, but I couldn’t possibly have written that.”

To err is human. I’m not excusing Williams or O’Reilly for what seem to me to be egregious stretching of the truth, but I do think we should cut some slack when a politician or a celebrity fumbles some facts or is caught in some minor case of inaccurate recollection. I know better than to believe gotcha journalism is going to go away, but I can hope that people begin to see it for what it is and demand better from the media we depend on to make intelligent choices on important issues.

Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. Senator from Delaware.