Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Journalists
It is fashionable for intellectuals and politicians to point a finger at the media
and blame them for not reporting the truth. Maybe it even seemed like I was
doing that myself in earlier chapters.
Instead of pointing our fingers at journalists, we should be asking: Why
does the media present such a distorted picture of the world? Do journalists
really mean to give us a distorted picture? Or could there be another
explanation?
(I am not getting into the debate about deliberately manufactured fake
news. That is something else altogether and nothing to do with journalism.
And by the way, I do not believe that fake news is the major culprit for our
distorted worldview: we haven’t only just started to get the world wrong, I
think we have always gotten it wrong.)
In 2013, we posted results from Gapminder’s Ignorance Project online. The
findings quickly became top stories on both BBC and CNN. The two channels
posted our questions on their websites so people could test themselves and
they got thousands of comments trying to analyze why the heck people were
getting such worse-than-random bad results.
One comment caught our attention: “I bet no member of the media passed
the test.”
We got excited by this idea and decided to try to test it, but the polling
companies said it was impossible to get access to groups of journalists. Their

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employers refused to let them be tested. Of course, I understood. No one likes
their authority to be questioned and it would be very embarrassing for a
serious news outlet to be shown to be employing journalists who knew no
more than chimpanzees.
When people tell me things are impossible, that’s when I get really excited
to try. In my calendar for that year were two media conferences, so I took our
polling devices along. A 20-minute lecture is too short for all my questions,
but I could ask some. Here are the results. I also include in the table the
results from a conference of leading documentary film producers—people
from the BBC, PBS, National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, and so on.
It seems that these journalists and filmmakers know no more than the
general public, i.e., less than chimpanzees.
If this is the case for journalists and documentarians in general—and I have
no reason to believe knowledge levels would be higher among other groups of
reporters, or that they would have done better with other questions—then they
are not guilty. Journalists and documentarians are not lying—i.e., not
deliberately misleading us—when they produce dramatic reports of a divided
world, or of “nature striking back,” or of a population crisis, discussed in
serious tones with wistful piano music in the background. They do not
necessarily have bad intentions, and blaming them is pointless. Because most
of the journalists and filmmakers who inform us about the world are
themselves misled. Do not demonize journalists: they have the same mega
misconceptions as everyone else.
Our press may be free, and professional, and truth-seeking, but independent
is not the same as representative: even if every report is itself completely true,
we can still get a misleading picture through the sum of true stories reporters
choose to tell. The media is not and cannot be neutral, and we shouldn’t
expect it to be.

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The journalists’ poll results are pretty disastrous. They are the knowledge
equivalent of a plane crash. But it is no more helpful to blame the journalists
than it is to blame a sleepy pilot. Instead, we have to seek to understand why
journalists have a distorted worldview (answer: because they are human
beings, with dramatic instincts) and what systemic factors encourage them to
produce skewed and overdramatic news (at least part of the answer: they must
compete for their consumers’ attention or lose their jobs).
When we understand this we will realize that it is completely unrealistic
and unfair to call for the media to change in this way or that so that it can
provide us with a better reflection of reality. Reflecting reality is not
something the media can be expected to do. You should not expect the media
to provide you with a fact-based worldview any more than you would think it
reasonable to use a set of holiday snaps of Berlin as your GPS system to help
you navigate around the city.