Share the correct information first, before the wrong information

The definition of truth is: “that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.” We’re calling this Truth First rather than Facts First because facts can be presented out of context and result in misinformation. Truth is bigger and more accurate than just facts on their own. Truth is basically facts with accurate context that combine to convey reality.

This website is part of an initiative to address a major problem in the journalism field / news industry, which is that when various people lie or give misinformation (politicians, businesspeople, celebrities etc.), news outlets nearly always publish the false information in the headline, in the news summary (the sentence that is shown under the headline on the front pages of websites) and in the first paragraph of the story itself. Likewise, they usually wait until between the 5th and 10th paragraph to: a) point out that it is false; and b) provide the correct information (aka the truth).

The two big problems are:

1) Prior to the Internet, the first 10 or more paragraphs were usually printed under the headline on the same page, so a lot of people read far enough to get to the truth. People also had longer attention spans and very few distractions. In the Internet age, the majority of people only read the headlines and summaries and don’t taken the action to click to go to the story. Of those who click, the majority of them only read the first few paragraphs due to our modern, shorter attention spans. The result is that most people only get the false information and don’t ever even see the truth.

2) Even for the small portion of people who read far enough down to see the truth, studies have found that a few weeks later, they’re more likely to remember the falsehoods because: a) they read the falsehoods first, and our brains tend to remember what we hear first. and b) they read the falsehoods 2 to 3 times via the headline, summary and opening paragraphs, but only read the truth once. People are far more likely to remember what they see 2 or 3 times than what they saw only once.

People in the public spotlight including politicians figured these things out many years ago. Thus they have a big incentive (and reward) to lie in ways that benefit their selfish interests, and no disincentive to avoid lying because few people ever realize they’re lying. The news field hasn’t figured this out, and adjusted their approach by consistently publishing the truth first and the falsehoods lower down. Even CNN, which often uses a tagline of Facts First, most of the time publishes the falsehoods first (headline), second (summary) and third (opening sentence), and waits to give the facts until somewhere between the 3rd and 10th paragraph.

As a result, there are massive levels of misinformation that are hurting our countries and societies, as well as individual people. During the last 20 years, the problem has continued to get worse and worse. While the above things are not the only causes of misinformation, they are significant contributors and they are ones that journalists can control and improve.