DeceptionDetection

Keywords

* Drupal Modules
* New Media Ecosystem
* Electronic Knowledge Repository

* Community of Practice
* Intelligence Analysis
* Knowledge Management

* Deception Detection Techniques
* Critical Thinking Skills
* Decision Making Transparency

Context

* The documentary is primarily focused on how the media served as an uncritical Echo Chamber to the White House's public relations campaign to sell the war in Iraq to the American people. The concensus in Congress trumped International and domestic dissent. These are politically contentious statements. This phase is designed to aggregate and analyze the confirming and disconfirming evidence concerning the larger contentious political issues.

The New Media Ecosystem that I propose here is pretty abstract, but to me this model is a lot closer to being real than theoretical. I'm going to do the best that I can to succinctly convey how close I am to actually applying this ecosystem to the post-production of my documentary.

This model will be applicable to the for large mainstream news organizations as well as for other hyperlocal and national citizen journalist outlets. But it can also be implemented for the collaborative post-production process for my investigative documentary. Before this theory can be applied on a larger scale, there needs to be a "proof-of-concept" with The Echo Chamber.

Johnson et. al. provides a taxonomy for deception tactics and suggests heuristics to counter each of the tactics. I've only briefly summarized or pointed to Johnson et al's deception detection technique. I thought that it'd be useful if I provided a rough map to some of the insights from their article, and how they could be used in a citizen journalistic context -- or any other domain with the potential for human deception. All references can be found in Johnson et al's article.

I'll just give an overview of the technique and you can go and read the details more in their paper -- the juicy stuff starts on page #359 with the section called "A theory of detecting deception in financial information."

I gained a lot of insight about the problems with American journalism from a lot of different expert perspectives throughout the production of The Echo Chamber documentary.

The media's objectivity standards limit the framing of issues to a very narrow spectrum of perspectives.

One way to overcome this limitation is for journalists to use much more sophisticated analytical techniques that have been developed by the Central Intelligence Agency. These techniques take a more scientific approach for weighing the available evidence against as set of possible explanations for the behavior and motivations of political leaders. These techniques provide very effective techniques for detecting political deception, and would be very beneficial investigative and analytical tool for journalism.

By combing this type of standardized analytical framework with the Internet, then it will be easier to harness the collective wisdom of a decentralized force of volunteer citizen journalists. By collaborating with these civically-engaged citizens, then the press should be able to challenge deceptive partisan framing and defy traditional media logic by investigating complex issues.