EverydaySpy Podcast - How to Dissect a News Article to Tell if it's Real News

Episode Date: October 7, 2020

The 24 hour news cycle is a constant grind on your senses, emotions, and patience. Every headline tries to grab your attention, but what happens when they do? What value is really in the article itself, and is it even real news? In this episode, Andrew will dissect a current headline news article and show you exactly how to tell if what you are reading is worth reading at all... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. For today's sit-rep, I want to go ahead and jump into a skill that I use every single day, and I'm really excited to share it with you. A big part of why I've had to shape this information season in the order that I've been giving it to you, from cognitive bias to logical fallacy, to how to hack a headline, all the way through to exactly how presidential debates are going to use logical fallacies against us, is because I've been excited to get you to the point where we start using all of these tools on a regular basis almost without thinking about them because that's exactly what it's like

to be an intelligence officer. You start leveraging the tools almost instinctively so that you can find the information that matters most in the least amount of time and move forward with total confidence in the information that you have. So today what I want to do is show you how we use all the skills that we've been learning over the last few weeks, and we apply them to a specific process I use when I look at an article. So sometimes I call this hacking an article. Sometimes I call this dissecting an article. Either way, what we're going to do is we're going to look at a current article in the press right now that I opened up this morning. And we're going to read that article, not word for word. I already read the article. But I want to show you how I process the information in

the article, how I then go on to do my own independent research into that article, into the source content for that article, and reach my own conclusions. Because if there's one thing that the press, that the media, that advertisers, that politicians are not expecting you to do right now, what they don't expect you to do is reach your own conclusion. They all expect you to jump on to whatever popular opinion is being given to you through your preferred method. of engagement, whether that's social media, whether that's a specific news source, whether that's a specific political party. Right now we live in a world where the default expectation is that you are going to fit into a popular chunk and you're basically only going to live in that popular chunk.

You're going to get your information from the same sources that the people around you get their information from and you're going to believe what you hear. So there's just not a lot of expectation from the people who are trying to take your money in exchange for goods, the people who are trying to win your votes, or the people who are really trying to get your eyes to watch their shows, they all expect you to follow suit with whatever prevailing attitude is common in the streams of information that you choose to swim in. So here's how I swim outside of my streams to try to find meaningful information.

And then when I find new sources of information, how I actually determine whether or not I can trust that information. So to start this exercise, what I did was I went to my trusty cell phone, and I just looked at the headlines for today. You can either do that just by typing into like a Google or Yahoo search engine, today's headlines, or current headlines or news headlines, whatever you want. There's a thousand apps out there that will pop up a whole list of headlines. and then right away I jumped in.

And for this exercise, I wanted specifically to find a headline that aligned with what you and I learned earlier when we started learning about hacking headlines and decoding those headlines and finding the emotional words inside of a headline. And it didn't take me long before I found this awesome headline, right? So here it is. How QAnon and other dark forces are radicalizing Americans as the COVID-19 pandemic rages and election looms. That's a hell of a headline, right? Now, there's a subheadline here, too. I'm going to save you that pain. If you want to really look into this yourself,

it's the, you'll be able to find the article with your own search. It won't be very difficult. It's hosted by USA Today. Now, I often find myself laughing whenever I tell people that USA Today comes across my feed. But there's a reason. And the reason is because USA Today, as old school as it seems, is actually still considered to be a center media biased news source. It's not left or right. It's center and it's largely considered to be accurate. So when it comes to the world of vetted news sources, as silly as that little blue circle of USA Today is, as old school as it is, it is considered to be fact-based and it is considered to be center, non-partisan. So that's why I like seeing USA Today pop up across my feed. So here we are.

How Q&On and other dark forces are radicalizing Americans as the COVID-19 pandemic rages and election looms right away from the headline. Anybody who's been following my podcast, anyone who knows me, who's met me, who's learned from me, you know that I do not expect this article to be fair and unbiased. Why? Because right in the headline it's. I can tell it's trying to manipulate my emotions. It's using words like dark forces, radicalizing Americans, pandemic rages, election looms.

Everything about this headline is doom and gloom and emotional and it's just, it is a doozy. This is the kind of thing that's for sure, clickbait. Who doesn't want to read about radicalizing Americans and a raging pandemic in dark forces? It feels like it's straight out of Hollywood. it feels like you're a Jedi going on a mission just by seeing this headline. So, of course, people want to click on it. And when I see a headline that makes you want to click on it, that's the first sign to me that it's not going to be fair and unbiased.

So when I jump into this headline, I'm immediately greeted to an opening set of paragraphs that are biased, right? So right out of the gates, it's clear to me that the people who are writing this article, because every article is written by a journalist or a reporter of some sort. This one happens to be reported by two, and I'll get to them later on. But right out of the gates, what I'm seeing is that there is a strong sentiment here that conspiracy theory is dangerous. Now, I, having come from the world of actual intelligence, I don't find conspiracy theory

to be dangerous. Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's laughable. Sometimes it's pretty close to the truth. and it's a little bit less conspiracy and more theory. But we know that there's multiple instances in history where conspiracy theory has proven to be more accurate than inaccurate, just like we've seen situations where conspiracy theory has been pretty far out there.

But what we're talking about in this article specifically is conspiracy theory as it comes from QAnon. And Q&N is largely accepted to be an online network of users. It used to be kind of thought that Q was just one user. but it's essentially a group of networked users that exist both in the dark web and in the open public web, but they all kind of focus on the idea of conspiracy theories that are heavily seated in the far right, ideas of the deep state and, you know, democratic leaders being conspiratorial and manipulative. So we're talking about that this article is already addressing a theory that is kind of right-leaning, far-right fringe beliefs.

And the article is talking about how this QAnon and other dark forces are basically radicalizing Americans. Now, the reason that I get really passionate whenever I see the word radicalization is because I have actually worked with radicalized people. I have targeted, I have worked against, I have tried to protect Americans from actual radical extremists. And when you get close to your enemy, when you get close to radical extremism, you start to realize that it's not this difficult concept to understand. You start realizing the people who are radicalized are much closer to normal people than you would have ever imagined. but you don't see that in headlines. In headlines, you see them using the word radical, radicalization, extremism, terrorism. You see them using terminology like that, essentially to draw this big, strong divide between

everyday people and extremists. And that's exactly what they're doing with this headline and what they're doing in these first few paragraphs. Now, here's, as I dig through this article, what I'm finding is paragraph after paragraph has quotation. It has examples. It has some allegorical story. But it's not telling me where any of the quotes came from specifically. It'll say so-and-so said this. So-and-so said that. Here's a story of a man named Hawkins. He said this. You know, Q&On is known to have said that. But it's not telling me where the source of information came from. Did it come from an article? Did it come from a report on TV? Did it come from a

newspaper? Did it come from social media? Where did the actual information come from? In fact, it's not until I get a few hundred words into the article that I actually start getting any kind of link that takes me to source data. And the first link that I get is actually a link to another article talking about what far right conspiracy theory is. That's not a helpful link. That's not telling me anything about this story. That's telling me background information. And then the second link is a link to another story, a story where they're also talking about Q and on. Again, this is not helping me understand anything about this story. And this story is making the claim that dark forces like Q&N are radicalizing Americans in the middle of COVID-19. If that's the claim in the

headline, I want to see links, I want to see source data inside the article that back up that claim. and here I am crossing 300, 400, 500 words in the article, plenty of text, but no demonstrable source data. Finally, I come across a line. Now, I'm going to read this to your verbatim because I think it's important. The article says, political scientists call this effective polarization, a tendency to personally loathe people who believe the opposite of what you believe. So they're presenting this idea of effective polarization in the article itself. They're giving it to me in quotes. It's an actual thing.

It's a term. And then as soon as they introduce the idea of effective polarization, this tendency for people to hate people opposite of them, they then give me a link. And in that link, it says this. One survey, for example, found that one in five people, whether they're Republican or Democrat, view the other side as evil. So here, my first source. link, I'm very excited, tells me that one survey, not multiple surveys, just one survey. And it doesn't

even tell me who that survey is. So the article is just saying one survey. It's not telling me it's a professional survey. It's an official survey. It's not telling me that it was funded by, you know, some major institute for accuracy of civil information. It's just telling me literally one survey. And then it links on the word survey. So when I dig into a headline, I have to, to follow every reference to source data. So I click on the link to one survey. And where does it take me? It takes me to an Axios page, an Axios blog post, basically, that says this.

This exclusive poll shows that most Democrats see Republicans as racist and sexist. That's the headline of the blog that is the link back to our original story about Q&On. And in this blog post by Axios, they're basically saying that they ran a pole using a third-party software called SurveyMonkey. Anybody who's been on the internet has most likely come across SurveyMonkey. It's not very professional. It's not formal. It's not official. It's really just the kind of thing that any entrepreneur, any bootstrapping student can use SurveyMonkey to basically ask any number of people survey questions. So in this case, it is literally a Survey Monkey survey that became the source data that was referenced in this Q&N article for USA Today.

So this is why it's so important to me to dig into information. Because if you just read the article, it makes it sound like there's a survey out there that shows that one in five people, Republican and Democrat alike, view the other as evil. Well, it's not until you dig into what that survey is that you realize, actually, it's an informal poll run by a free software called SurveyMonkey. And then as I dig in further as to where that survey came from, the survey was a three-day survey that aired on HBO that was launched on a Sunday night. So again, now we're basically finding out that this survey was targeted to reach people

who were watching HBO at a certain time on a certain Sunday night. That's it. If you weren't watching HBO that Sunday night, you weren't part of their target audience. Now, when I see audiences that targeted, it makes me wonder, what are they looking for? What was the purpose of this poll? Who were they trying to reach when they launched a survey that was asking whether Republicans and Democrats basically saw each other as evil, right? That's what the survey was about. Are you a Republican? If you are, do you see? Democrats as racist, ignorant, spiteful, evil, etc. Or are you a Republican? And if you are a Republican, do you see Democrats as racist, ignorance, spiteful, evil?

Like, that's essentially what this survey was. And it went live on an HBO. It was aired on HBO on a Sunday night. So I had to then follow, because this is one of the things I like about survey monkey, it's all public source information. So I actually pulled up the results of that survey. So a link inside the Axios presentation or inside the Axios blog took me to the actual data results. And here are the raw data results.

And I know spreadsheets aren't everybody's thing. I get excited about spreadsheets sometime, especially when I'm having a spreadsheet that backs up something like this. So here's the group of people that were reached that Sunday night on HBO. And here's how they responded to that survey, basically asking if they thought the other side was evil. So first of all, there were only 3,700 people that were reached through that survey. Now, that sounds like a lot. I understand that sounds like a lot to most people. But in the world of meaningful survey results, 3,700 isn't much. In fact, if you look at survey monkeys' own recommendations for how they run data, they actually say that if it's less than 10,000 people,

they have to start manipulating the data themselves just so that they can have some reasonable or reasonably low margin of error. So if it's less than 10,000 people, even survey monkeys like, I don't know if we trust this information. So the fact that this survey only had 3,700 respondents. Now, let's take a look at who these 3,700 respondents are. All right.

So as I scroll through the information from left to right, I find very excitedly that it's a pretty even split between male and female. It's about 1,900 men, 1,700 female. So there's 200 people different. but that's not that big of a difference when you consider how many people total were part of the survey. Now, here's where it starts to get interesting to me, because I start to look at age. Now, in the Axios article, it says that the survey respondents were 18 years of age and older. So when you see something that says 18 plus, essentially you and I are going to assume, oh, it's a survey of people 18 years or older.

That must mean it's a pretty fair balance. It's a pretty even spread of people between 18 and say, 88, right? What's going to be an even spread? Not really, because this is where the whole HBO Sunday night focus effort really came in. Because here's what you actually had. Between the ages of 18 and 34, you had less than 700 people participate in that survey. But between the ages of 35 and 64, you had more than 2,000 people participate. And then of those people between 18 and 64, you had two 2771 white respondents. Again, we're talking about it was only aired on HBO, right?

So who's going to be watching HBO? White confirmed here in their own data set, 2,700 white people who are in a suburban urban location and who are between the ages of 35 and 64. So we're not really counting many people who are 1925-year-olds. counting many people who are 70-year-olds. We're not counting many people who are African-American or Hispanic. We're basically looking at people who live in the suburbs who are white between the ages of of 35 and 64. That's who was reached. That's who was targeted by this survey. That's who was reached as a part of this survey. And then this survey itself was used as a source piece of data

for this article by USA Today talking about the deep state and how there's is an inherent hatred, basically. That's what they're saying here. Effective polarization is the tendency to personally loathe people who believe the opposite of what you believe. So here's our article telling us. It's telling you and it's telling me that this effective polarization is happening all around us, that Republicans hate Democrats and Democrats hate Republicans, and that's effective polarization. And here's a survey to back up our conclusion, except that when you and I dig into the survey, we realize that the survey, that the survey was targeting a small group of people very specifically on a platform that really only reached

white suburbanites between the ages of 35 and 64. That is not reliable data. And if you're going to tell me that there are conspiracy theories, radicalizing Americans in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis, please give me some data that's actually meaningful because this is not meaningful data. And it's the first source data they provide. Okay, so now I've gone off the deep end about the survey. I am reading this article, and right away, I don't like that they don't have many source data references.

I don't like that they're quoting people, but they're not telling me if those people were being quoted from a professional journal or being quoted from a TV interview or being quoted from a paper, which tells me that they're not really giving me the context to what all these quotes are actually saying. So I move forward a little bit further, and the next link that I see is a link that says that the FBI declared Q&ONA a domestic terrorism threat in a May 2019 intelligence briefing. Okay. The FBI declared QAnon a domestic terrorism threat. That's a hell of an accusation, right? Like right here they're saying in the article, QAnon is a domestic terrorism threat, and there's an FBI intelligence briefing from 2008. 19 that says it. What do you think I do right away? Exactly. I look at that link. I look for that FBI intelligence briefing. And here's what I find when I pull it up. The FBI intelligence

briefing is actually talking in general about conspiracy theories that are online. And it's saying specifically from the FBI Phoenix, Arizona field office. Okay. So this is one field office, one city and one state. They stay in 2019 that conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists are a growing threat. So they're not saying anything about Q&ONC specifically, and this isn't the FBI saying in a national intelligence report. It's the Phoenix Field Office saying that conspiracy theory-driven extremism is a growing threat. It goes on to say this.

The FBI assesses that these conspiracy theories will likely emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving groups and individuals to carry out criminal or violent acts. There's nothing committal here coming from FBI. They're saying that conspiracy theories could emerge, spread, and evolve into occasional group or individual extremist activity. That is exactly the kind of government I remember working for. That's a very measured, very quantitative, focused conclusion. It is most definitely not what you get when you read the article in USA Today that says, quote, the FBI declared Q&ON a domestic terrorism threat in May 2019. That is completely different from what the FBI actually said.

But if you just read an article, if you just follow the threat, read, especially if you follow this thread. We're now a thousand or so words into this presentation by USA Today. They had two sources. When we dig into their sources, both of those sources don't really hold any water. But the narrative that they're telling in the story actually makes people afraid. They are making people afraid that far-right conspiracy groups are radicalizing Americans to violence. When in fact, that's not what FBI is saying.

that's not even what your HBO suburban survey was saying. So how on earth is this article going to be giving me conclusive, demonstrable, like meaningful analysis of current events? It's not. But that's not what the article's designed to do. The people who wrote this article weren't intending you to do your own research. They were intending to tell a story. Tell a narrative.

They are picking and pulling specific, examples that benefit or boost their story and they're taking them out of context and then putting them into a long structured article so that as you read from top to bottom, you're essentially believing each new step of the story so that you come to the conclusion that they put in the headline. This is how media works. It's not that media is evil. It's that media needs you to jump into this story and they need you to read the entire thing. Why? because a third of the way down the page, there's an ad. They need you to see that ad.

And then after about 300 words, there's another ad. In this article, the first ad I see is for Erie Metal Roofs. The next ad I see is for Mattel and a new learning app for kids. And as I scroll down, it's just more ads. More ads after that. And that's why they need you to continue to read this long article, even though they don't have source data to back up the conclusion that they're saying, they know that if you're reading this article,

they can assume you have specific beliefs about right-wing conspiracy theorists. They can assume that you don't like QAnon. They can assume that you're afraid of COVID-19. And they're going to put ads into this article that are in line with other psychographic determinants that they know will make you susceptible to the ads in the article. this is the world we live in, where the article itself is no longer supposed to be giving you meaningful information, even from a news source that's considered to be center and fact-based, they still need to sell you on ads. That's what they do to make money. So the reason that you have an article

like this with a headline so glaringly emotional and the reason that they go on to have thousands of words making a case that can't be backed up by the source data itself, the reason they do it is because they need to make money. They need those advertisers to provide payment to USA Today to back the expense that it takes to have two authors, two journalists, write this article. So I promised you we would go back and look at these two journalists. So Nathan Bomey and Jessica Gunn or Jessica Guyin. I'm not quite sure how to say their names. So I know what it's like to be a professional dedicated to finding the truth and finding hidden secrets and making them public. So I've always kind of felt a certain kinship with journalists who try to do the same thing.

So I had to look these two up because I would like to know what the face is of the journalist who's trying to tell me that dark forces are radicalizing Americans, the face of the journalist who wants me to fear for myself and my family's health and well-being and safety. among this raging COVID-19 pandemic and a new election that is looming. Like, these are their words. They wanted me to feel emotional. I would like to know who these two journalists are. So I did a quick search. And here's what I found out about Nathan.

So first, I have no idea how old Nathan is, but he looks like a kid. It looks like from from muckrack.com and from USA Today's own bio. So the guy looks like he's got a pretty polished reputation. He's been a journalist for a while. He's won a couple of awards in 2015 and 2016. He's written some scripts. He's written articles. He was a free press journalist in Michigan for a while.

It looks like he's a pretty stand-up person. I don't know why a stand-up journalist would write an article piece like they did about Q and on unless they have some sort of political agenda. And then when I start to look at Nathan's background and what he has been providing, what he's been publishing, especially with USA Today, that's when I start to see a very consistent series of left-leaning articles. So it's clear that while USA Today is center, it maintains that center position by producing basically equal amounts of left-leaning and right-leaning information. And it just so happens that this Q&on piece is left-leaning, even though it's technically consistent. considered in the technology part of the paper. And Nathan, this apparently award-winning journalist, has, you know, volunteered his skills to be

part of creating this argument that is based on very little evidence. So if anybody knows Nathan Bowie or if Nathan's listening, he's got a whole heck of a lot more Twitter followers than I do. But I'm really curious as to why he wrote this. Did he think that this was a fair case? does he want my wife to be going to bed scared at night? Or was he just kind of given an assignment and told that as long as he delivered on the assignment, he would get a paycheck on time?

I'm not sure. So then that drove me to look at the second journalist, Jessica Gein or Jessica Gunn. Now, Jessica has very little out there. She doesn't have much of a profile. She doesn't have much of a bio that I could find anywhere doing a very cursory check, at least. She also has a Twitter account. and her Twitter account also has more followers than me.

So, you know, good on her. But what I'm not seeing is anything about what her background or what qualifies her to be telling me about the threat that's coming from right-wing, right-wing conspiracy theorists or the radicalization of Americans. So if you really want to learn about how people are radicalized, if you really want to understand how radicalization works, I want to actually recommend that you look up something called the staircase model. So the staircase model is a model that I was taught at CIA.

It's a model that I've worked on with DIA and with FBI. It's a very specific process that extremists use to radicalize recruits. And it's not an easy process. There's an actual, he's an excellent piece out there written by the U.S. Department of Justice. And it's called How Radicalization to Terrorism Occurs in the United States. So let me just give that to you again. It's dated June 2018, written by a PhD named Allison Smith. And the title is How Radicalization to Terrorism Occurs in the United States.

And inside this Department of Justice paper, they actually walk you through the entire stair stepping process that it takes to radicalize an American. And the first step in radicalizing an American is identifying people who have what's known as searching behavior. And this searching behavior is indicative of what we call a cognitive opening or some sort of cognitive flaw where they believe that they are in some kind of personal crisis. Some kind of personal crisis that's brought on by an event of a personal nature, a family crisis, some kind of drug addiction. maybe they went to jail, maybe they were the victim of a crime or some sort of injustice. But my point here is that pre-radicalization, the very first actual step to building a terrorist, requires that you find individuals who feel like they have gone through a personal injustice.

When I look at conspiracy theorists, conspiracy theorists are a group of people, but they don't feel like they have gone through a personal injustice. They feel like injustice is out there. They feel like they're being lied to. They feel like there are people out there who know the truth and are hiding the truth. But it's not personal. It's not of an individual nature. When you radicalize a Muslim, it's because that Muslim has been suffering through individual hardship. They have no money. Their family is sick. The grounds for radicalization have to be so desperate that there is no other option. So that's why, this idea that a group or a network or even an individual like QAnon, no matter where they exist on the internet, I am not worried about conspiracy theorists becoming large radicalized groups because there aren't enough individuals who have gone through some kind of personal injustice to even begin the stair step model of radicalization. And that pre-radicalization is just the first of like five steps.

So my own personal experience made me doubt this headline from the beginning. When I went into the headline, I saw what you and I have already talked about in the emotion that's in the headline itself. And then as I read the headline and I read the article and followed the source data for myself, it quickly became apparent that there was no foundation. There was no support for the conclusion or the argument being made in this article. That's important. That's something I, any one of you can do this from your own cell phone, from your own computer.

It took me less than 20 minutes on the, on this episode with you right now to basically debunk the entire article. But that article is being shared by tens of thousands of people. And USA Today has it aired on their on their home page, their front page right now. So there are people who are reading articles like this and other articles that you're seeing all over the place. And they're believing that what they're. reading is true. When, in fact, when you understand how information works and when you learn how to master information, you see very quickly that you have to protect yourself from the wrong information because people out there are using any information they can just to create a narrative,

to create a story, not to enrich or educate or fulfill their responsibility as a professional journalist, they are creating stories for the sole purpose of getting you to scroll further and further down so you can be exposed to an ad again and again so that they can get the click they need to boost their advertising budget. This is the hard, dirty truth behind so much of media right now. And this is exactly what I have been teaching you in this information mastery series. And it's what we are going to continue to teach you as you continue to tune in to the everyday espionage podcast because understanding how information is used against you and understanding how information is created not to serve you is a huge advantage over everything else and everyone else

around you and that is everyday espionage everyday espionage is dedicated to one thing educating everyday people i know that not everyone will listen but those who listen will learn if you learn something new today, click subscribe, review, and share the podcast with a friend. Find me on social media at Everydayspy or on my website, Everydayspy.com. If you are up for a special challenge, visit Everydayspy.com forward slash operations and join me for an authentic spy training mission. And above all else, remember that knowledge is freedom.