A better editor would have looked at Taylor Lorenz’s story this morning, contending that the Department of Homeland Security shut down the Disinformation Governance Board because of intense criticism from “the right-wing Internet apparatus,” and told the reporter, “No, that’s not the story. Keep digging until you find an explanation that makes sense, checks out, and is less self-serving to those involved.”
Lorenz’s story asserts that “working groups within DHS focused on mis-, dis- and mal-information have been suspended” and executive director Nina Jankowicz resigned simply because of allegedly false things said about the board by conservatives. (Lorenz never specifies what part of Jankowicz’s work was misrepresented. She asserts that “within the small community of disinformation researchers, her work was well-regarded,” but the opposite is true. No conservative critic had to fake the video of Jankowicz appearing deranged while singing a parody version of a Mary Poppins song.)
As much as I would love to believe that conservative voices on the Internet have awesome and far-reaching power that makes cabinet secretaries quake in their boots, that is not the way the world has ever worked, that is not the way the world works now, and that is not the way the world will likely ever work. Federal agencies don’t shut down projects just because they’ve gotten a lot of critical coverage in the media, particularly conservative media.
If intense criticism from the Internet could get a federal agency to stop doing something, very few federal agencies would ever do anything. If intense criticism from the Internet could get a federal official to resign, then Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Antony Blinken, Alejandro Mayorkas, Merrick Garland, Janet Yellen and just about the entire Biden administration would all be cleaning out their desks.
But in Lorenz’s version of events, the Biden administration saw critical segments on Fox News and just . . . gave up. Quit, and went home. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably followed politics for a long time. When’s the last time you remember a federal agency suddenly waving a white flag and pulling the plug on a program less than a month after its announcement?
It’s extremely rare, and when it does happen, it means someone within the agency has decided the program just wasn’t worth the grief and aggravation. Bad publicity, by itself, is rarely enough to cancel a federal program, initiative, or project. But bad publicity, alongside internal doubts or dissent, or complaints from the administration’s congressional allies, or bureaucratic turf fights, or budget fights, or some combination of these are much more likely to derail a new project. It is plausible that someone in the administration’s hierarchy looked at the Disinformation Governance Board and saw a massive communications headache with little policy upside. As John Schindler observed, “The U.S. government already has an office dedicated to combating [foreign] disinformation, the Global Engagement Center at the Department of State.” The only reason to create a second group working on the same problem is to focus on disinformation from domestic sources, which inevitably gets into thorny questions of government censorship and the First Amendment.
The gist of the Lorenz piece is that the Disinformation Governance Board was always a good idea, there was never a legitimate criticism of having a U.S. law-enforcement agency establish a new effort to define and police “disinformation,” Jankowicz did nothing wrong, and all of the criticism of her and the board is based on lies . . . and yet the Biden administration pulled the plug anyway. That version of events doesn’t make a lick of sense. (You might even call it “disinformation.”)
The Washington Post, which prides itself on its in-depth and detailed coverage of how the federal government really works, should be embarrassed to have published this spectacularly implausible effort at spin.