Artifacts of a Troubled and Troublesome Species by Peter McMillan - HTML preview
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Endnotes
(1) The political information that Carlson refers to is specific to the U.S. and focused on domestic issues of national scope. Hers is a very general study that excludes regional, urban/rural, gender, age, ethnocultural variation, socioeconomic status, etc. For the purpose of her studies as related here, there are only two groups in society: the actively informed and the casually informed, and it is unclear where the continuum is divided to distinuish one from the other.
(2) The following is an oversimplified account of Carlson’s telephone game experiments, but it captures their essence. In Carlson’s experiments, one person is given a news article from a nonpartisan publication and asked to read and summarize it for another person. Researchers then compare the news article and the text summary for completeness, accuracy, bias and call to action.
(3) An excellent read, The First Casualty by Phillip Knightley, documents media collusion with political and military leaders to distort the truth of what happens in war. It is aptly subtitled, The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq. An argument can be made that the same collaboration is at work in reporting domestic unrest. It doesn’t take a social scientist to figure out the motivation for sensational journalism.
(4) Just who should be allowed to participate in a democracy is a philosophical question that Italo Calvino explores in his 1953 short story, ‘The Watcher.’ My review of that story appears in my recently published book, Artifacts of a Troubled and Troublesome Species (2025).