Alexander Howard is an advocate for freedom of information, but that doesn’t mean he thinks people are free to create their own fabricated facts and declare them truthful, trustworthy information.
Trust is one of the most scarcest things in the world, he says. For research, there’s a scientific method, a way of verifying something is true and can be repeated, a precise way of recording data and building upon it.
Take COVID, for example.
“There’s a new variant in the wind. People are breathing it in. What we’re seeing is interesting. There’s a delta. We’re seeing test positivity go up, we’re seeing sewage water (COVID rates) going up, we’re seeing people coming into the ER going up, we’re seeing a bump in hospitalizations, but we’re not seeing a bump in death,” Howard says. “That means these vaccines, the extraordinary achievement of government and industry, the thing we can feel proud of our government doing, putting $10 billion into the (National Institutes of Health) to create six different approaches to vaccines,” but during the early days of the pandemic, people said it was a hoax. The vaccines themselves were the subject of scrutiny and controversy and people chose to ignore and not trust the science.
“COVID itself became politicized, public health became politicized,” Howard says.
Even at the start of “the Trump era, when he came down that escalator, we were already an incredibly polarized society. We were already living in some level of bespoke reality with alternative facts.”
In the past several years, another benchmark of American society, the belief and trust in the democratic and electoral process, has become something in which people are losing trust.
“The myth of widespread election fraud is not new,” he says. “The second Bush administration Justice Department studied and found it to be vanishingly small. And there’s another public fact that is contested, that there was widespread election fraud and conspiracies that the last election was not fair, free, open and secure as all of our officials told us and journalists checked. We’re living with two really big public facts that are contested and politicized.”
The election is taking place very soon, once again believed to be the most important presidential election of our time, and people aren’t sure what to believe.
“I was under the impression this president (Trump) was going to be prosecuted and held accountable for the many different crimes he committed before and during his time in office when the Justice Department informed us that sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted while in office,” Howard says. “OK, well, that seems problematic. Let’s see what happens when he leaves office. We’re seeing those court cases work their way through. It’s really extraordinary to see such institutional collapse paired with the face that the Supreme Court decided to give Trump immunity for official acts.”
Howard has a great deal of sympathy for reporters trying to stay on top and accurately share the facts of the day’s events, especially in this climate.
“Reporting on this accurately is incredibly difficult,” he says. “Just stating the facts sounds partisan. It’s really bad.”
Alexander Howard, a self-described earnest advocate for freedom of information, open governance, and digital democracy, talks about his concerns and hopes for journalism and America’s future.
