Truth decaySearching for Truth: Q&A with Jennifer Kavanagh
Senior RAND political scientist Jennifer Kavanagh helps lead RAND’s work on “Truth Decay,” the diminishing role of facts and analysis in American public life. Her research has helped set a national agenda to better understand and combat the problem, to explore its historical precedents, and to mitigate its consequences.
Senior RAND political scientist Jennifer Kavanagh helps lead RAND’s work on “Truth Decay,” the diminishing role of facts and analysis in American public life. Her research has helped set a national agenda to better understand and combat the problem, to explore its historical precedents, and to mitigate its consequences. Kavanagh also serves as director of the Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program within RAND Arroyo Center, the U.S. Army’s sole federally funded research and development center for studies and analysis.
Kavanagh discussed the sources and consequences of truth decay with RAND Review.
RAND Review: You recently looked at how journalism has changed over time. What did you find?
Jennifer Kavanagh: We looked at how print and broadcast journalism has changed since the 1980s, and then compared broadcast and cable since 2000, and print and online journalism since 2012. What we found overall was a shift away from the traditional ‘who, what, when, where, and why’ to something that is much more subjective. It depends on which platform you’re talking about, but there’s more argumentation, more personal perspective, more advocacy, more conversation. It has the same basic information, just presented in a very different way.
Those changes are biggest when we compare across platforms—broadcast to cable, print to online. The changes for newspapers have been pretty small; for broadcast, a little bigger but still small compared with these cross-platform changes.
RR: Is journalism today less factual than it was in the past?
Kavanagh: If you’re considering the full range of journalism options that we have, we have more choices and different types of information. And some of those forms do tend to have less fact-based information and more opinions and arguments. If you’re choosing to read only online journalism, then you’re getting something that looks different than newspapers, for example. So is journalism less fact-based? Maybe overall, but only because we’re looking at these many different types of platforms, which vary in how they present information. But sources like newspapers and broadcast television haven’t changed much and have essentially the same amount of facts as ever.
