We are seeing a nationwide surge in attempts to censor books in schools, libraries, and universities. I plan to talk about how librarians might deal with these challenges, but first, I think we should step back to look at the big picture to better understand this moment and the challengers themselves.
I’ll begin by stating the obvious. We are currently in a major information disruption. “Disruption,” of course, is a negative word. We could also say “transformation.” The way we communicate is being transformed.
Our current transformation is affecting book publishing. It’s affecting news reporting. It’s changing how we communicate. I opened my first social media account about 15 years ago so I could see what my kids were doing. I learned to send text messages when that turned out to be the only way I could communicate with my son.
It is worth pausing to appreciate the enormity of this moment.
In all of human history, there have only been a few major transformations in how we communicate, and each one has enabled (or created) major changes in how people live.
The development of writing, for example, allowed knowledge to be stored outside the brain, which allows for an accumulation of knowledge. Writing is more than a tool for recording speech. In his classic work Orality and Literacy, scholar Walter Ong classified writing as a new technology and argued that the development of writing changed the way people think. In his words, “writing restructures consciousness.”
Writing also transformed how people live. You can’t have a complex state or bureaucracy without written records, so—no surprise—the development of writing allowed for the emergence of states and bureaucracies. Laws could be codified.
Another major transformation was the invention of the printing press. Before the printing press, writing and disseminating information was difficult and expensive. As a result, written documents generally carried authority because they tended to be edicts from the king, or bureaucratic records, or church decrees.
Advances in technology often bring good things. The printing press, for example, made books and information available to more people. Literacy spread.
The printing press also flooded people with written material at a scale never before experienced—and people didn’t yet have tools to evaluate the sudden deluge of new sources.
While the printing press didn’t cause the Protestant Reformation, historians tell us the printing press was the most important driver of the Protestant Reformation by allowing reformist ideas to spread widely and quickly. The religious wars that resulted from the Reformation devastated much of Europe.
The internet, like the printing press, is bombarding people with written material from a proliferation of new, decentralized, and niche sources.
In my childhood and early adulthood, most people got their news once or twice daily, maybe from the morning newspaper or the evening news. There were a only a handful of major news outlets. Television network news was funded by advertisements and subsidized by the networks’ popular TV shows. Because network news broadcasts were reaching large audiences and were dependent on advertisers, these outlets strived for neutrality. A gallup poll In the 1960s showed that a whopping 85 percent of Americans got their news from one of three TV network news programs.
To my young ears, Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News sounded like blah blah blah. A neutral recitation of facts is often boring, but The CBS Evening News (which offered 22 minutes of actual news) routinely reached audiences of more than 30 million people each evening. When Cronkite saw the poll showing that 85 % of Americans got their news from one of the three major network news programs, he responded to what he understood was an enormous responsibility by tightening the broadcast to get more facts into his 22 minute presentation.
Among other things, this meant that the voting population generally started from the same set of facts. People might have different ideas about how to respond to the facts, but they started from the same facts.
Now, all that has changed.
The disruption to news reporting began with partisan cable news shows in the 1990s. Cable news also started us on a 24 hour news cycle. There are rarely enough facts to fill hour after hour of programming. To fill the time, these shows offer mostly opinion and analysis. A show might open with a few facts, but most of the show is spin, analysis, and opinion.
Because cable news programs are funded by subscribers, they need loyal viewers. So, instead of trying to reach a wide audience by striving for neutrality, cable news shows did the opposite. They became openly partisan. To hook their viewers they use all the ancient tricks. For example, they confirm the biases of the audiences. We know about confirmation of bias from psychology. Psychologists tell us that when people have their biases confirmed, they feel good. They keep watching. They hit the re-subscribe button.
To keep people watching, cable news producers create conflict and drama. T.V. lawyers became a thing in the late 1990s with the Clinton trials. Cable news shows often feature panels of “experts” including TV lawyers arguing about the news, offering their own value responses. These panels can be riveting. The panelists argue. They interrupt each other. They shake their fists. They pound the table. What sticks with viewers are the bias-confirming, emotionally charged eruptions.
It isn’t boring. In fact, it’s entertainment. Here is the problem. When news becomes entertainment, the facts get lost.
I asked someone once what she did after work, and she said “I watch Fox News.” She didn’t watch the news. She watched a particular brand of news. Someone else might watch Rachel Maddow and come away with an entirely different view of what is happening in the world.
Having different brands of the news should be an inherent contradiction.
The internet is further fragmenting audiences by allowing “news” sources to pop up everywhere. Anyone with a keyboard and access to the Internet can get into the game. These “news” sources, like so many cable news shows, do not break the news. They are not reporters. They read the news that someone else has broken and they offer summaries and commentary. To hook their audiences they use all the same tricks. They are often openly partisan. They confirm the biases of their audiences. They bait with rage.
The Facebook whistleblower Francis Haugen, in her testimony before Congress, testified that Facebook algorithms incentivized angry, polarizing, divisive content because doing so increased engagement. Getting people fighting was profitable.
Some people get their “news” from a few Facebook accounts. Others may get their “news” from a handful of Substack authors. Consider this: A Substack account with only 5,000 subscribers paying $5 a month can gross $300,000 in a year. Well, if all you need is 5,000 subscribers to make a killing, the way to go is to build trust by confirming biases and then bait with rage.
It is more profitable to be a rage merchant than a news reporter, and news reporters are the ones uncovering the facts.
Most people on the internet get their information by means of algorithms. As a result, two things happen: First, unless people opt out of news altogether, they find themselves constantly pummeled with rage-inducing, bias-confirming material. Second, social media algorithms allow groups to gather in what have been called partisan echo chambers.
This brings us to the rise of extremist thinking.
Neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod, author of The Ideological Brain, explains how people spiral into extremists thinking. She tells us that there are actual changes in a person’s brain if a person is continually pummeled with rage-inducing information. She describes what happens as a spiral. As people are continually pummeled with bias-confirming, rage-inducing material, the spiral becomes tighter, making it harder for the person to get out.
People who get their news from online sources, including social media tend to scroll through headlines. Unlike the old days, when you opened a paper newspaper and could see which headlines were on the news pages and which were on the Op Ed page, all headlines look alike on social media. Major news organizations may include the word “analysis” in small print, but that has very little effect next to an emotionally charged click-baity headline.
I was writing legal commentary for The Washington Post several years ago when I realized what was happening. When my piece appeared in the Sunday paper, you could see it was analysis. It was a value response. But on the internet, the headlines (which the writers don’t write) could easily be taken as news headlines.
Traditional book publishing is also in disruption. There was a time (that I remember well) when a handful of publishers and a few bookstore chains had almost complete control over which books the public had access to. You might say they had a monopoly on distribution. While this made it more difficult for bad actors to widely promulgate their material, the situation wasn’t always good for aspiring writers. Before the rise of the Internet, we had what has been called had bestseller domination. In 2002, just before the explosion of self-publishing, the titles on the New York Times bestseller list accounted for 84% of all hardcover fiction. During that era, 4 or 5 fictions writers often accounted for 70% of all fiction sales.
This was great if you were Tom Clancy or John Grisham or their publishers, but it wasn’t good for aspiring writers or serious writers. The monopoly on distribution gave gatekeepers enormous power—and people with power tend to abuse it. 23-year-old college graduates who landed jobs as assistant editors were often telling writers with years of publishing experience how they should revise their books.
We have now swung to the other extreme. Anyone with a keyboard and access to the internet can be a publisher. I often imagine the powerful, “we-know-everything” gatekeepers who I once resented wagging their fingers and saying, “You’re sure gonna miss us when we’re gone.”
I’d like to return to the distinction between facts and value responses. To take a hypothetical from a simpler time, suppose a band of early sapiens is out foraging for food. One communicates to the others that there are large predator cats up on the cliffs. The others can verify with their own eyes that they are indeed surrounded by predator cats. Different members of the group may have different ideas about how to respond, but everyone can see the cats.
Now, what happens when (1) you don’t personally know the source of your information and (2) the danger is something you can’t see, maybe because it’s on the other side of the planet, or maybe because seeing it requires complex laboratory equipment, or maybe because something as complex as globalism can’t be viewed with our own eyes.
This brings us to a central hypothesis of evolutionary psychology: What if, in evolutionary terms, we are still villagers, or maybe even foragers, with brains wired to respond to our immediate environment. What if, as evolutionary psychologists also suggest, the way our brains are wired makes it hard to comprehend something like globalism?
In the Disney movie, Coco, the boy, Miguel, says, “I thought it was one of those lies adults tell kids, like vitamins.” One of the adults says, “Vitamins are real, Miguel.” Vitamins sound like a good story for tricking kids. “You’d better be a good boy or Santa won’t come. You must eat vegetables and not ice cream because vegetables have vitamins.”
I recently read In Search of Memory, by a Nobel-prize winning scientist Eric Kandel, and I believe that neuroscientists are making discoveries that offer new answers to the ancient questions of, say, “Do we have a soul?” and “Is there a separation of mind and body?” I also believe that neurons, like vitamins, are real things, even though I’ve never seen one, but when neuroscientists tell me that the feeling I have that I have a mental existence apart from my body comes from electronic impulses in my brain, well, I can see why so many people find it easy to dismiss. How do you wrap your brain around the fact that what you think is happening in your brain isn’t what you think is happening?
We are asking people to believe in the existence of things they can’t see — like antigens, neurons, and greenhouse gases. What makes this particularly tricky is that the things we are asking them to believe are often directly contrary to what they are taught by other authorities in their lives, including religious leaders.
I want to pause by emphasizing that conspiracy theories happen on both sides of the political spectrum. After making that important point, I will quote from a piece you may be familiar with called “Reviving Library Neutrality in an Age of Activism” by Caleb Hall. Among other things, Mr. Hall accuses libraries of teaching children to “hate their country, hate capitalism” and “fear a climate change apocalypse.”
Notice that Mr. Hall wants librarians to return to a time of “neutrality.” He names the 1940s as the year neutrality began to dissolve. Indeed, the 1940s were a pivotal decade. In the first half of the 20th century, the voting population was almost entirely white, and almost all elected officials were white men. In fact, all of our institutions — news organizations, universities, governors’ mansions — were dominated by white men. There was less partisan strife in the early twentieth century because the parties were not that different: Neither party championed racial equality.
Then, in the 1940s, the NAACP began challenging racial segregation. It took a few more decades for the Democratic Party to make its full transition from the party of the Confederacy to the party of Civil Rights. About the time the Democratic Party embraced civil rights, women began acquiring political power, and, well, partisan “strife” increased, because now the parties were no longer homogeneous.
Now, I’d like to talk about the word “neutrality.” The UC Berkeley library has a piece on its website called “Flat Earths, Bigotry, and Bias: Should Libraries be Neutral.”
I believe the question, “should libraries be neutral?” is the wrong question because it sets up a trap. First, it assumes that verifiable facts and value responses should be treated the same way. Second, it sets librarians up to be called “not neutral” if they don’t please various groups.
I will now offer a roadmap around the trap.
Let’s start with verifiable facts. I understand that verifiable facts are often contested, but there are methods for verifying facts and methods for contesting them. The trick is to focus on the methods not the “facts.”
The way you handle challenges to books is you say: “Here are the methods we use for determining whether an assertion is a verifiable fact.” You then offer your methods. You show that you have a procedure. You remain neutral because you apply the same procedures to all factual assertions.
A person can challenge your methods but notice what is happening: The discussion is about methods. It’s not about whether climate change is real. You are not defending the book. You are not criticizing someone’s ideas. You are discussing the methods used for determining whether a fact is verifiable, and therefore, whether it belongs in the nonfiction section.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg loved procedures. In her words, procedures are the vehicle for fairness and justice because “the rules apply equally to your friends and your enemies.” It also means that the judge doesn’t have to say, “I think you’re a liar.” The judge says, “We followed our neutral fact-finding procedures, and under our fact-finding procedures, these are the facts.”
I assume that, under reasonable methods for verifying facts, the following facts are verifiable:
- The earth is round.
- Viruses exist.
- Antigens, neurons, and vitamins are real things.
- Global warming is real and poses a real threat to human existence.
- Global warming is primarily driven by excess carbon dioxide and methane, which comes from emissions and other human causes.
Neutrality does not mean giving equal time to flat-earthers. In fact, giving equal weight to flat-earthers is a propaganda technique that I discuss in Firehose of Falsehood known as “false balance.” This is when two opposing views are presented as if they are equal when one is a verifiable fact and the other is not. Putting unsupported ideas next to verifiable facts gives a false credability to unsupported ideas. This is not being neutral. This is facilitating propaganda and disinformation.
But you don’t have to call the ideas false. You show that they are not verifiable facts given the your methods and procedures. One day, with more research, they may be, but now they are not.
Will this make your angry patrons happy? No. But it shifts your role from litigant to facilitator. You’re not one of the fighters. You are applying neutral standards to both sides of the argument. You are a neutral facilitator. If you give your angry patron a copy of your procedures and ask the angry patron to show how the book they object to fails to meet the requirements, it is likely you will not hear from that person again.
I received a memorable letter once from a librarian in Tennessee (yes, she was a librarian) demanding to know how I could present local hero Andrew Jackson in a negative light. Well, okay, I did mention that Jackson was an unrepentant enslaver and that he was responsible for the Trail of Tears, so I can see why she didn’t like it. I wrote back and I asked her to please show me where my facts were inaccurate so I could ask my publisher to correct any factual errors. I never heard from her again.
I think it’s helpful to remember that most people who march into the library enraged by the selections available, are true believers. They are not the ones deploying disinformation to increase their own power or wealth. They are not the billionaire candy manufacturer spreading the lie that vitamins are a myth. They are the people who have spiraled into extremism. These are gameplayers who don’t even know they are in a game.
If someone isn’t angry, and they come in asking questions, like this, “Doesn’t this book go a little too far,” you do the same thing. Don’t defend the book. Explain your methods.
If someone wants to believe that universities, scientists, and librarians are involved in an elaborate hoax to make our lives miserable by telling us to jab ourselves with needles and eat food with vitamins, there really isn’t much you can do about that. The librarian’s job is to curate and protect collections.
Before I wrap up, a word about the other kind of information — value responses. Value responses on both sides should be included as long as they are responding to verifiable facts. Whether the economy would benefit from a return to the New Deal or embracing Trickle-Down economics is a value judgment. The measure is whether the book contains factual inaccuracies. If a patron objects to a particular value response, you can explain that the value response is responding to verifiable facts, and, while facts must verifiable, different responses are permitted.
So the answer to the question, “Should librarians be neutral,” should be, “Yes, but that doesn’t mean we include all books. It means we have neutral standards to determine which books present factual information, and we apply the same standards to all books. We allow an array of value responses as long as the value responses are responding to verifiable facts.”
I have disabled my comments. Because this is my own website and not a social media site, I feel I must monitor the comments, and monitoring them has become too time-consuming. Instead I have added share buttons for discussion on social media.