3.1. Michael Jackson’s son, abused by Nicolas Sarkozy

It is May 22nd 2003 and on the 8 o’clock news on TF1 a young man, Djamel, is making serious accusations against Dominique Baudis. He claims he has witnessed sex parties, held by prominent citizens of Toulouse, in which children were sexually abused and even murdered. The “Toulouse affair” is in full swing and the whole of France is buzzing with the rumor that the ex-mayor of that town has protected a serial killer, Patrice Allègre, and has engaged with him and other city notables in orgies involving prostitutes and children.

That night, the news desk of TF1 (the France 2 news desk would follow suit on the 24th) decided to give Djamel the floor during peak viewing time. For those who did not see this in real time, it is evident that these accounts resemble all those urban myths that accuse the middle class of the worst abuses. However, at the time commentators did not find this blatant at all. Rather than showing some circumspection, as such circumstances should require, and verifying the most trivial piece of information before making it public, the French media, with few exceptions, gave in to this affair without any deontological consideration.

Is there any need to recall that Djamel also claimed, off the record, that he was Michael Jackson’s secret son and that he had been sexually abused by several French ministers, not least Nicolas Sarkozy, and show business personalities? How could we give such a character the floor during peak viewing time? And what blindness led people to cut from the interview the most implausible moments, which would have stripped this young man of his credibility and openly shown that he was a compulsive liar¹?

The Baudis/Allègre affair is the French textbook case of media deterioration. Quite a complex affair, it starts at the beginning of the 2000s with the zeal of a policeman called Roussel, who was convinced that not all of the crimes committed by Patrice Allègre, a French serial killer, had been discovered, especially because of the 7 year gap in his criminal biography. This blank period led chief warrant officer Roussel to believe that there might be unsolved murders or disappearances, maybe at the hand of a serial killer. With the help of a computer program, he tried to link a whole series of mysterious crimes to the serial killer’s record and, due to the testimony of several prostitutes, he thought he was about to discover a horrifying plot, which would soon afterward delight the French media. I will not explain this affair, which lasted several years, in detail here², but we can recall that numerous pieces of pseudo evidence and cognitive prejudices have led to the creation of this myth. It would also be easy to identify in this affair the consequences of the Fortian effect, since even after all the ex-prostitutes’ accusations had been invalidated, some kept stating that: “there must be a grain of truth in it”. This is exactly what happened to policeman Roussel in January 2004. Once again, it is fascinating to see how, despite every element of the case being poorly backed up, the general impression still favored the conspiracy hypothesis on the sole basis that the main accusation was supported by a large number of wild imaginings passed off as facts. In Tolouse, there was even an association which attempted to uncover this plot, evocatively called: There’s no smoke without fire.

What is striking, apart from this Fortean effect, is the behavior of the media. For this reason, this example makes the perfect introduction to this chapter. In France, very few managed not be affected by the conspiracy-related hypotheses or by the actual accusations. The main reason is that none of us was wise enough to seriously verify the information they provided. Once an affair has become this important and once it provokes such a demand from public opinion, journalists may be seriously verify the information they provided. Once an affair has become this important and once it provokes such a demand from public opinion, journalists may be tempted, being in a condition of extremely fierce competition, to publish according to their feelings and inmost convictions. They start betting on the truth. Subsequently, journalists become like everyone else: confined to the boundaries of their rationality and vulnerable to the appeal of adulterated products on the cognitive market. It must also be added that it is in their interest to publish saucy or scandalous affairs, which is demonstrated by the testimony of Florence Bouquillat, who had recorded Djamel’s declarations for France 2 and who had been asked by his superiors, upset about being beaten to it by TF1, to broadcast those images³. The journalist, when asked about Djamel’s credibility, claims that she had noticed the prostitute’s unreliability but that this did not imply that everything he said was untruthful. Besides, she also maintains that her superiors believed it was not her job to settle the question of how truthful or false a testimony might be.

Competition among information sources, which is a fundamental condition of democratic life, sometimes reveals its drawbacks when it becomes too fierce: it automatically entails a decreased amount of time dedicated to the verification of information⁴. This drop, in turn, increases the possibility that journalists may walk into every sort of mind trap: stereotypes, urban myths, cognitive prejudices, etc. But, I want to insist here on the fact that, despite the condemnatory nature of the examples I recall to put forward my thesis, journalists are not incriminated as a professional category: they react as most of us would in a similar situation. The crux of the matter is represented by the new conditions of the information market. As it happens, the distributors of information are caught in a sociocognitive trap that theorists of the trade know well. This trap has been tested experimentally in many ways and the average global answer corresponds more or less to the temptation.

3.2. A “prisoner’s dilemma” kind of situation

The liberalization of the main media and their competition are natural and positive tendencies of democratic societies. Positive indeed since how could a democrat wish for anything different? These are the consequences of the receding of political power before the media. We may think that these two still go hand-in-hand and debate this point over and over, but we may never seriously support the idea that this situation can be compared to what happens in a dictatorship. This media competition is inherently democratic, yet this does not prevent the creation of pernicious effects, especially the way this competition favors a rhythm of information dissemination not always compatible with that of knowledge.

The idea which I will support in this section is that this situation of competition, together with the temporality of the dissemination of information it promotes, or more precisely the reduction in the amount of time dedicated to the verification of information, provokes a sharing of errors which will pass off as common sense. In other terms, these conditions will allow the dark side of our rationality to dominate the public space in relation to certain topics.

The traditional media (newspapers, radio and television), already in competition with each other, have been highly subjected to the competition introduced by the Internet. Thus, according to an Orange/Terra Femina survey carried out in 2011, 62% of respondents claim they resort to digital media to find information “as fast as possible”, whereas another survey conducted by Ericsson in the same year reveals that 35% of Americans who own a smartphone start searching for information even before getting out of bed. This may seem anecdotal but it reveals quite well how all of those professions involved in the dissemination of information are part of this cutthroat competition. The key to their career success has to do, among other things, with how quickly they can share a piece of information. This has always been a cause of possible deterioration for this profession (finding a scoop at any cost, being tempted by sensationalism, etc.), but the modern conditions of the cognitive market force it to show sometimes the worst of itself. The resulting situation closely resembles the prisoner’s dilemma.

3.3. Presidential unfaithfulness and the burnt Koran

On February 24th 2010, a freelance journalist and BFM Radio presenter posts a tweet that says out loud what everyone is thinking in Parisian newsrooms: “Here it is. The Biolay-Carla rumor has landed on Twitter. We’ve got a nice bullshit bingo ahead of us⁵”. A few days later, hundreds of tweets will mention an affair that the whole world will soon hear about. Carla Bruni, then the French first lady, has left Nicolas Sarkozy for singer Benjamin Biolay. As for the President, he is finding comfort in the arms of the karateka Chantal Jouanno, none other than the State Secretary for the Environment. The thrills and spills of this affair, involving partner-exchanges between four well-known figures of the political and artistic world, make it the perfect media product. Except for the fact that to mention this officially would constitute a breach of the tacit agreement between the traditional media, which establishes that politicians’ private lives cannot be discussed. At the same time, the tweets that mention the affair are often posted by journalists, which will seem paradoxical if we recall that social networks are supposed to be semi-private, allowing information to be treated very differently from the way the traditional media deal with it. Besides, this affair is mentioned in an ironic and humorous way, and only very rarely in explicit tones. This buzz becomes obsessive and some people soon get their hands on it on Websites or blogs. Thus, on March 5th, 2010, Arnauld Champremier-Trigano writes on blogact.com: “It runs, it runs, the love disease… it smells, it smells, the current news… It smells like the end between the President and Carla Bruni, who is going after a new love. So, why did I publish such a shitty rumor on my blog??? First of all because, if it’s true that I couldn’t verify the information, I’ve made a point of confirming that this rumor was circulating in many newsrooms and it was indeed. So at least it must be taken for what it is: a talking point and a concern for journalists”. It is a new tweet, posted by Johann Hufnagel, which will amplify this trend. This journalist is deemed trustworthy, having worked for Libération, 20minutes.fr, and having been chief editor for the information Website Slate.fr. However, his tweet is enigmatic to say the least – “Benjamin Biolay is the guy who…” – and this is all it takes for another Website, Suchablog.com, to consider this enough evidence to start mentioning the rumor quite explicitly on March 8th 2010. The webmaster even believes he knows why journalists are not officially mentioning this “important” affair: “Several newsrooms are clearly aware of a little change in the dynamics of the presidential couple but will not publish this information before the regional elections… By now Carla Bruni is in love with singer Benjamin Biolay, nominated twice on Saturday night for the music awards, and has already moved in with him…”.

The credibility of this rumor reaches a turning point on March 9th 2010 when a blog hosted by the Website Journal du Dimanche explicitly mentions the affair. The paper format of the famous weekly magazine does not give any room to the rumor, but the damage is done. The mere association with the name of the magazine seems to give this gossip enough credit and a wide enough audience to turn it into an international affair over the following days. The Sun, the Daily Mail, La Nacion, the Irish Independent, La Stampa and tens of other newspapers will mention the crisis of the French presidential couple. They are thoughtless enough to disregard the possibly conjectural nature of the information and do not point out that if the Journal du dimanche was indeed involved with this affair, it was because of a blog it hosted rather than its official format. Either way, the pressure is now too strong for the tacit agreement, which regulates the treatment of private matters, to be applied. The prisoner’s dilemma is the prevailing way of thinking: no one wants to run the risk of not publishing this saucy piece of information if the competitors do. This strange affair, which would later turn out to be completely untruthful, was then mentioned on the pages of nearly all the French newspapers, radio and television. Naturally, people talked about it in very ironic terms and, most of the time, by bringing up the analysis of society and trying to find out why French politics, which had until then guarded against it, was about to be “mediatized”. As historian Robert Zarestsky, professor at the University of Houston, remarks, it is not merely a matter of national culture since, even in the United States, until recently: “No one cared if Roosevelt or Eisenhower cheated on their wives. John F. Kennedy’s affaires never caused a scandal. There were rumors on President George H.W. Bush that were never verified (…) If the situation in the United States has become like this, after Bill Clinton, it is in large part thanks to the Internet (…) and cable channels like Fox News…”⁶.

Returning to France, every newsroom knew that François Mitterrand, President of the Republic, had a secret daughter but they kept the secret for ethical reasons. It is the same country where now it is enough for a tabloid to publish a picture of the President (François Hollande) on a scooter, on his way to see his mistress (Julie Gayet, a well-known actress in France), for the press to seize upon it.

On January 14th, 2014 during François Hollande’s press conference, the head of the Presidential Press Association asks the first question about his private life in the very first few minutes: “Is Valérie Trierweiler still the first lady of France?”. He will apologize immediately afterward with an explicit tweet: “Albert Londres, forgive me!”. Subsequently, more than 20% of the questions asked by journalists will revolve around the alleged relationship between the President and the actress. The fierce competition, together with the lack of dialogue it entails, prevented the development of the common good. It even led the traditional media to associate themselves with themes they had refused to deal with in the past. In my opinion, we need to look no further than this “prisoner’s dilemma” for the reasons of the “mediatization” of politics. It only takes one to get involved for the rest to get sucked in. Now, the advent of the Internet and the revolution of cognitive supply it entails allows everyone to set the process in motion and the official media to mention facts while pointing out that it is, of course, only rumors. The vicious circle is then complete. There is now an extreme permeability between the conventional information market and the heterodox market of the Internet. This is particularly noticeable on news Websites, including those belonging to newspapers of the traditional press. Whereas formerly the press was not very sensible to public demand, it has moved on, over the course of a few years, to a strong type of indexation of the readership’s demand. So, sociologist Angèle Christin, whose doctoral thesis⁷ at Princeton revolved around this topic, underlines how programs such as Chartbeat, Visual revenue and XiTi (used to gauge the audience on the Internet) have become a sort of second editor in chief for these formats. Audience figures can, in fact, alter the editorial treatment of a topic. Even the titles of articles or their positions are modified in order to attract the regular customer. Unsurprisingly, the sociologist shows that most of the time it is the trashiest or most sensational topics, besides those having to do with sex or violence, which appeal the most. But there is more to it than that: due to the scrolling patterns analysis, we know that readers often go no further than the first two paragraphs, which promotes the writing of shorter and shorter articles.

Like the two inmates facing their judge, journalists know well that it would be better, in terms of information quality, not to spew out rumors, even the sauciest, on the cognitive market. They can see the common good but they cannot make it compatible with their personal interest. This is not impossible to do since some journalists and some media, depending on the matter, manage remarkably well and can certainly keep their job. However, they seem on average to be increasingly ensnared by the prisoner’s dilemma.

To give another example, journalists all over the world must have known that it was absurd to pay so much attention to an unknown minister coming from Gainesville, who had been a nobody up to then and who owned all of his global “fame” to his clearly stated intention to burn some Korans. In 2010, minister Terry Jones asks anyone willing to listen to him (at first, there was only a handful of them) to send him some Korans, so that he can perform a purifying act of book burning on the symbolic date of 9/11 from 6 pm to 9 pm, as he points out. He is an odd character who was at the head of a Christian community in Germany at the end of the 1980s. During the years he spent in Germany, he was guilty of many financial irregularities and appropriated the title of “doctor”. He already seemed an extremist to those who met him during this period but the name of the Pentecostal community he founded in Florida, the Dove World Outreach Center, does not actually reveal his aggressive disposition. He opened a Facebook account to celebrate his future pyromaniac feat, which soon reached 11,000 fans. This character is incendiary and provocative, evidently a suitable subject for a short report, but did that mean that he had to be shown on a loop on the screens of American televisions? In fact, everyone is well aware of how illogical it is to mediatize such a character, who can usually only rely on the support of his 30 odd followers. This fact is quite inconsequential but once again, if people talk about it, then everyone may be tempted to do it, predicting the demand. General Petraeus, who was leader of the NATO troops and commander of the ISAF in Afghanistan when this incident took place, even officially voiced his concerns about Terry Jones’s project. The French media were no exception to this process of contamination, sometimes dealing with the matter in terms of society analysis and some others in figurative terms but, whichever the case, always facilitating the dissemination of a piece of information that everyone knew to be potentially dangerous as well as completely uninteresting. From a journalistic perspective, this piece of information could only become interesting if it led to consequences resulting from the fact that it had been mediatized illegitimately. This is exactly what almost happened, since not only did this minister and his community receive several death threats but, in Afghanistan, some violent demonstrations broke out to protest against this book-burning project. If we have a look at the Internet searches for “Terry Jones” carried out on Google at the time, we can see, unsurprisingly, that the largest demand comes from Indonesia, a major Muslim country, rather than Europe or the United States.

To give minister Jones such prominence was not only absurd, but also frankly reprehensible in terms of moral responsibility. Everyone was clearly aware that the dissemination of such a microscopic piece of information was disadvantageous to the common good, but only few were willing to counter the “prisoner’s dilemma” logic in this matter. Clearly, the pressure of competition, whether it comes from the Internet, from the proliferation of channels due to cable television or from any other format, adds to the pressure that has always been exerted on professional distributors of information.

What the Terry Jones affair reveals is the bonus on which every agitator can now rely. Thus, we have reason to fear exaggerations in this field: what kind of tweet could I post to make it circulate? What kind of idea can I support on my blog to make sure that it will be promoted? What status on my Facebook account could help me make people talk about me? Without blaming those who communicate with a systematic cynicism, we can suppose that, ceteris paribus, the fierce competition around which the contemporary cognitive market pivots does not always favor moderation.

Some do not hesitate to employ this dilemma, which characterizes the media, to promote results that claim to be scientific and yet want to cut loose from the temporality necessary to rational examination. So, on September 19th 2012, Gilles-Eric Séralini, who had been trying to show the dangers posed by GMOs for several years, really exploited the press to give his results a stunning amount of publicity. We will return to what the scientific community thinks of this research, whose conclusions were presented as “revolutionary”, but let us first recall the facts. Séralini had secretly conducted a study on rats supposed to demonstrate the dangers posed by a GMO: the NK 603. Rather than waiting for his published article to occasion second opinions and to become, or not become, a point of reference for his peers’ community, he preferred to entrust the scientific text only to those journalists who would agree to sign a non-disclosure agreement, which prevented them from having it assessed by experts (which is actually the norm). He employed the prisoner’s dilemma against journalism. In fact, they could either give in to the coercion or run the risk of missing out on an allegedly significant piece of scientific information. It goes without saying that, given the circumstances, a good percentage of them gave in to the coercion, which sometimes came with a warning. In the press and on the radio, one declaration followed the other: a major weekly magazine wrote “GMOs are poison”, whereas a public radio station broadcasted “There’s no doubt about it now, GMOs are dangerous”. It was not a time for hypotheticals. By then, the dilemma already seemed to dominate every kind of commentator, since several politicians had made sensational declarations on the same day in favor of a request for a ban on GMOs. These intemperate commentators should have waited a little longer since, as we will see, the scientific community immediately reacted all over the world to express its suspicions and point out the unacceptable gaps in the experimental procedure, something Gilles-Eric Séralini had already been reproached for.

The situations that I have just described engage people in processes that are disadvantageous to the common good. These people are well aware of it but the prisoner’s dilemma leads them to illustrate Ovid’s famous sentence (Metamorphoses, VII, 20) – “Video meliora proboque, deterio sequor” (“I see better things, and approve, but I follow worse”). When it is only a matter of publicizing real or imaginary facts that are simply not worth it, the consequences are not significant, but the situation is completely different when the urgency with which information is disseminated provokes collective fears.

3.4. The IRC curve (information reliability/competition)

Were the Mayans right? Was the end of the world really about to come? It is a question that commentators loved asking semi-ironically until December 2012. However, it took quite a strange turn when the media, social networks and blogs all over the world reported the worrying news that a “supervolcano”, until then inactive, had been discovered in Germany. This volcano threatened to wake up and spew out billions of tons of magma, thus burying a part of Europe and simultaneously changing the world as we know it. This giant volcano, called Laacher See (its name derives from its crater lake), is located in the land of Rhineland-Palatinate and its surface measures 1,605 km². It is supposed to wake up every other 10,000 years and the alarmist press claimed that experts thought a new eruption was imminent. Exactly what experts? In any case, it is certainly not geologists, who noticed no particular seismic activity in Germany. However, those made up for fun by the Daily Mail, which came up with this hoax, were unanimous: we are in great danger. This is then another example of how an adulterated piece of news can be disseminated breathtakingly fast on the cognitive market, without any authority or form of control being able to curb it. But this time, the case is particularly funny since the whole matter was a simple joke.

I want to state again clearly that if journalists are indeed often involved in the aforementioned examples, it is not because they are less virtuous than others. My intentions would be oddly misread if all of what I have said should be compared with those practices of “media criticism” that nondescript prosecutors delight in. If the part played by journalists is so significant in this section, it is because they are more than any other profession faced with the ambiguity regulating the relationships between information reliability and competition.

In fact, any other kind of profession, if similarly coerced, would be subjected to the same type of deterioration. Journalists do not constitute, in contemporary societies, the only profession injured by the urgency with which information is delivered; scientists do not always escape this constraint either, as the ill-fated story of a society called IntegraGen illustrates.

The topic of autism and its origins has given rise to much debate. This disease has long been considered as a psychological or psychoanalytic condition. According to traditional psychoanalysis, the mother was to blame since a lack of affection on her part could have led to the development of autism in some children. Progress in biology has allowed us to weaken this theory significantly. Step-by-step, the notion that this condition is in large part genetic has won over most experts [JAM 03]. In this context, when French company Integragen declared on July 19th, 2005 that it had developed the first diagnostic test for autism, it was a complete shock. This test claimed to be based on the presence of four genes, including the PRKCB1, directly involved in the etiology of this condition. However, several years after this declaration was made, no new results have been published. The 2005 statements have disappeared from the company’s Website and, in general, everything shows that they were largely premature, as Jourdan underlines [JOU 07]. Why such haste? The fact is that IntraGen is a biotechnology start-up. These companies are in most cases recently founded, small-sized and financed by “venture capitalists”. Thus, they are expected to produce convincing results in the short run since, at the beginning, they lose considerable amounts of money. These companies effectively employ this latency period by carrying on research and come up with a molecule, a measuring device or a test, as is the case here, which will open up lucrative markets. Those who have invested in these companies desire a quick return on investment and the latter are pressurized into announcing results they have not yet obtained. They are then put in a situation characterized by the urgency with which information is disseminated, which, as is the case here, may lead to unfortunate consequences.

Similarly, was it really necessary to announce on September 23rd, 2011, as the 200 physicists involved in the “Opera” experiment did, that neutrinos were faster than the speed of light? The experiment consisted of measuring the time these particles took to travel the 730 km that separate the CERN from an Italian detector set up for this purpose. Over the course of these experiments, neutrinos arrived 60 billionths of a second sooner than it was theoretically predicted, since the “journey” was supposed to last 3 ms. It was not then a trivial announcement since, had it been confirmed, it would have shaken the whole system of Einsteinian theoretical physics. We may hope that the more significant the theoretical or practical consequences of a declaration, the more prudent the statement itself. In fact, this revolution expected in the field of physics, as people would learn a few months later, was not a revolution at all. These remarkable, yet false, results were the consequence of a GPS that was not properly connected. In the meantime, obviously, the news spread all over the world. In France, Le Monde published, for the occasion, an editorial by Hervé Morin [MOR 11], who thought that the CNRS and CERN researches were a nice example of ethicality: “Faced with results that upset the comfortable routine of certainties, the physicists involved in this experiment could have kept their works to themselves. They have instead chosen to do the opposite”. Science is not spared by the consequences we can expect from the prisoner’s dilemma, that regulate the relationships between information reliability and degree of competition. Besides, the article about the superluminal neutrinos was first published by a Website called ArXiv.org, which was certainly not on par with peer-review journals. Thus, only the inflexible norms regulating the relationships between those involved in the same social space can counter the tendency prevailing on the other cognitive markets, on their way to deregulation. So far, the scientific field has held out against it but, as this example shows, its defenses are getting weaker. When competition reaches a certain degree, the pressure exerted on the dissemination of information is such that the likeliness of information reliability tends to decrease. This does not mean that the amount of adulterated pieces of information is more substantial, but that these pieces of information are more easily disseminated.

I have specifically pointed out that this happens when a certain degree of competition is reached, as it is a common knowledge that the cognitive monopoly that any dictatorship in the world has ever tried to establish never favored the promotion of truth. A certain degree of competition on the cognitive market is actually necessary to information reliability but, as the general title of this section points out: competition serves the truth, excessive competition harms it. The following graph broadly outlines the relationship between information reliability and degree of competition.

As we can see, the degree of competition on the cognitive market, by assumption, augments the average reliability of information but, at a certain degree, it tends to occasion its drop for two main reasons, which I am going to recall as a conclusion to this section.

On the one hand, the pressure exerted by competition decreases the average time devoted to the verification of information, which is especially problematic when the matter in question possesses a technical dimension that should encourage us to dedicate time to its analysis (this is especially the case for those topics – environment or health-related subjects – on which now the orthodoxy of science has often lost its grip in the public space).

On the other hand – this is the most important point – the pressure exerted by competition, as we have seen in several examples, encourages people to give in more easily to the least honorable inclinations of the human mind, a phenomenon we might call cognitive demagogy. Thus, these are the perfect conditions for a sort of generalized sharing of mistakes about crucial matters. I do not think that this sharing happened accidentally in our history. It was not coincidental that we welcomed the premature claim that neutrinos were faster than the speed of light. We gave our approval while demanding that other professions follow the lead of these virtuous scientists, who were not afraid to revolutionize with such claims the intellectual program that had, up to then, enabled us to understand the world. Hervé Morin, in his editorial published on Le Monde, argues that: “Healthcare scandals, incompetent experts, corruption and conflicts of interests have been tarnishing the scientists’ reputation with the general public for several years. What is currently happening in the physicists’ community is, on the contrary, a remarkable display of the integrity of the scientific method”.

Many of these commentators admired how it was possible to express such mistrust and found it profoundly democratic. Taking into account what happened afterward, these commentators may be astonished to know that I agree with them. Not because I deem this premature declaration admirable, but because I find it extremely democratic. I think that the best political system man has ever been able to envisage carried with it something potentially harmful – the technical conditions of its expression – which was only biding its time before revealing itself. That time has now come.