At the Exceptional Women Alliance (EWA), we enable high level women to mentor each other to enable each leader to achieve personal and professional happiness through sisterhood. As the nonprofit organization’s founder, chair, and CEO, I am honored to interview and share insights from some of the thought leaders who are part of our peer-to-peer mentoring. 

This month I introduce to you the Honorable Ellen McCarthy, former assistant secretary of state. She has bridged from a senior leadership position in our federal government and intelligence community into the private sector, bringing with her a passion for restoring trust.

Q: Tell me about some of the highlights of your career so far.

Ellen McCarthy: What a ride. From small town newspaper reporter to a 30-year career in intelligence, both government and private sector, culminating in serving as the assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research. During this time, I tracked Soviet submarines (thank you Sean Connery and The Hunt for Red October), supported military operations in Bosnia, evacuated refugees from Rwanda, tracked go-fasts carrying drugs out of Latin America to U.S. shores, fought the war on terrorism, and led operations for the nation’s premier imagery analysis and mapping organization. 

In all of these different positions, there was one element that remained constant, the amazing men and women of the intelligence community and I, would produce and share intelligence findings with policymakers, military, and law enforcement leaders to help them make well-informed decisions. But who is doing that for the American people?

Q: Can you expand on “who is doing that for the American people?”

McCarthy: It used to be traditional media, and despite our historical love-hate relationship with the press, even when we didn’t like what we heard or read, we were confident that the content was based on credible sources and adhered to shared journalistic standards. And with that trust, our information environment was resilient to foreign or extreme content. 

But it soon became easy, and it is getting easier, to exploit social media and artificial intelligence to saturate the information environment with misleading, polarizing, deceptive, and inaccurate content. We now live in a world where it is harder and more expensive than ever to secure the quality information that we need to help us make decisions.

As Dr. Michio Kaku, physicist and futurologist said, “The greatest threat to our future is not artificial intelligence, it’s our dependence on unreliable sources of information.” 

Q: What did you do about that?

McCarthy: I created the Trust in Media Cooperative (TIM), a network of experts on information security and tech policy from media, research, education, and technology organizations all united in the goal of enabling demand for quality information. Our mission is to ensure consumers have a greater understanding of the nature and quality of the information they choose to use and share.

TIM is focused on serving Americans who rely on digital and synthetic information to make decisions. Our engagements with media, academia, and tech policy experts have highlighted that the absence of quality information is in large part the reason our information environment is so polluted. It also means there is much pent-up demand for reliable, timely, and transparent content. This is why our mission is to make quality information accessible and scalable.

Q: What are some of the challenges TIM faces?

McCarthy: How do you fuel demand for quality information when unreliable content is just too inviting? I think you need to treat information and data like food. We all know what saturated fats, sugar, and GMOs are when making food choices. We should have the same understanding of the information and data we consume. 

At TIM we are researching the standards and measurements for information quality and socializing and harmonizing them across the TIM community to include media organizations, academia and educational groups and the developers of technology. We are also developing algorithms and tools that will enable us to measure these standards against large volumes of data to gain a better understanding of exactly which characteristics drive the most demand or what do consumers care more about? The sources of their information or timeliness?

Q: What is TIM focusing on?

McCarthy: While there are many organizations and individuals that require quality data to make decisions, we chose elections as our first line of effort to start to scale information quality. We know that the majority of Americans are worried about inaccurate or misleading information about elections, as well as the threat of violence or civil unrest on election day and attempts to overturn the results of a fair election. 

Moreover, with more than 50 countries holding national elections, and millions of voters heading to the polls, combined with the growing availability of sophisticated AI technology, the increased flow of misinformation and cyber threats is greater than it has ever been before.

We created the Trusted Election Analysis and AI team, a group of experts on information quality from academia, technology, media, education, and other non-profits, to identify the standards and measurements for quality election information. We are now integrating these standards into a user-friendly AI-enabled dashboard, modeled off of the COVID-19 dashboard that was created at Johns Hopkins during the pandemic. The TIM Election Information Dashboard will easily direct voters and election officials towards high-quality content and outlets. For example, voters who want to know more about election logistics such as polling hours or how votes are tallied will be able to access reliable, transparent and accurate information about these or any other election procedures.

The dashboard will be launched this summer and its impact will be resounding. Not only will it provide voters and election officials with decision advantage, but it will set the foundation for restoring trust in election procedures and processes and ultimately move us one step closer to restoring confidence in elections. 

And this is only the beginning. Once consumers see the benefits of quality information as it relates to elections, they will demand it in all aspects of their lives. With demand comes content monetization, technological innovation, and regulatory frameworks that will lead to improved public discourse, better decision making and increased trust in quality information sources. TIM believes that this is a goal worth pursuing!

Q: And so do all of us at EWA who believe in non-biased fact-based journalism.

Larraine Segil is founder, chair, and CEO of The Exceptional Women Alliance.