Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times and now a Harvard professor, is widely regarded as a heavyweight in media circles. She has a new book coming out next month called Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts which covers the changing media landscape by following the Times, the Washington Post, Vice, and Buzzfeed from the early 2010s to today.
From the 1950s into the 70s, a series of social psychological experiments caught the attention of the media, and their authors were catapulted to fame. Many people are familiar with Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience, which supposedly demonstrated the willingness of ordinary people to inflict torture on others when commanded to do so by an authority figure. There was Philip Zimbardo's so-called Stanford Prison Experiment, where participants in a simulated prison were randomly assigned to play prisoners or guards, in a study that purported to show the ease with which those in power could be induced to behave in repulsive and dehumanizing ways. Zimbardo's colleague David Rosenhan became famous for sending psychologically normal pseudo-patients to mental hospitals complaining of hearing voices that said things like “empty” and “thud”. The article that resulted from this study, “On Being Sane in Insane Places”, appeared in the august pages of the journal Science in 1973, and was one of the key factors in inducing the American Psychiatric Association to revise its diagnostic practices, something that hastened the demise of the psychoanalytic domination of American psychiatry, and shifted the profession to the more simplistic and reductionist, so-called “bio-bio-bio” model of mental illness. Just last year, the British film director Tim Wardle directed a remarkable documentary, Three Identical Strangers, about yet another deeply unethical psychological experiment involving identical siblings separated at birth.
