Yesterday Judson Berger wrote about the “disinformation racket” — a lucrative industry of policing so-called disinformation that sprang forth like a fetid bloom of poisonous mushrooms after the political squalls of the Trump era — with appropriate contempt. His disdain is directed at the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British entrant into the field of trendy grift for prestige and profit. Not wanting to be outdone, the Brookings Institution here in America is today seeking to gain attention with its newest academic study on yet another dangerous front in the ongoing War on Wrongness: podcasts. (The paper is titled “Audible Reckoning,” for an indication of just how serious the challenge is that America faces.)
I could bore you with the details of the paper, but the link is above, and since it’s Brookings, you have probably already assumed correctly that the problem as they see it is (1) there are too many influential morons out there saying bad things about Covid-19 and the 2020 election; (2) the government should probably get involved in some way. Instead, let me melt your eyes with this paragraph where the author explains her methodology.
The research relied on claims compiled in two different ways. The first was the text of claims or statements “fact-checked” as false by either PolitiFact or Snopes, two independent fact-checking organizations whose “fact checks” are widely relied upon by the public and members of the media and academia as credible and well-substantiated. The second was a dictionary of keywords developed using qualitative knowledge and news reports of misleading claims for two case studies focused on the 2020 elections and the coronavirus pandemic.
If you want to gag, read that once again. The author does not get specific about which claims were tested, only that they came from two websites whose partisan slants are so transparently biased that they themselves have become epitomes of the bankruptcy of the entire “fact-checking” industry. (Everyone is by now familiar with the pas-de-deux whereby partisan judgment gets laundered into a “fact-checked position” via the “mostly false” or “true but not really” ruse.) The study is thus immediately rendered worthless, because the data-set itself is worthless — as the old saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out.” Why is it garbage? Because once you drill down into what qualifies as “disinformation” using PolitiFact or Snopes as your guide, then a significant portion of the “disinformational claims” you are now tracking are actually true statements being repeated because they are correct.
To wit: a “fact-checked false” claim could be “Trump actually won Arizona” — that is reasonable; we would all agree that is 100 percent false. Or it could be “Covid-19 might have leaked from a Chinese lab,” and then congratulations: Your position was fact-checked as “false” countless times by every outlet available, and every single one of them turned out to be smugly, infuriatingly overconfident. These, our arbiters of truth, were chosen because (I quote the author) they are “widely relied upon” by “members of the media and academia.” Perchance that says more about the media and academia than it does about fact checks, most of which disintegrate into transparently partisan caviling once you read beyond the slugline.
This would concern me less were the mainstream media not also marching in step with these disinformation-industry profiteers and specialists. In fact, it’s fair to say that the media ride in the vanguard of the charge. Witness today’s New York Times article “Free Speech vs. Disinformation Comes to a Head.” The piece by Steven Lee Myers nominally concerns lawsuits filed by the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana against federal-government entities over alleged pressure on social-media companies to censor “Covid misinformation” during the pandemic. The controversy is an immensely important one (though the cases strike me as legally spurious), but far more telling is the Times‘ framing of the issue. The real stakes for them are clear enough:
The outcome could help decide whether the First Amendment has become, for better or worse, a barrier to virtually any government efforts to stifle a problem that, in the case of a pandemic, threatens public health and, in the case of the integrity of elections, even democracy itself.
That problem is, you guessed it, “disinformation.” In the showdown between the First Amendment’s right to free speech and government efforts to regulate and constrain that right, one might have thought the New York Times would land on the side of free speech, given its history. But it’s not 1964 anymore, and so alas even the one outlet you might expect to evince skepticism of government intervention on speech matters can instead barely restrain itself from pleading for the Feds to “stifle the problem” of people saying pernicious things.
Notice that the three examples I have addressed come from three separate, but closely related, professional ecosystems: (1) the private sector (with GDI and its ilk) (2) Academia and the think-tank world (with Brookings ginning up spurious new “literature” to provide additional “proof” to the accumulated argument); (3) the mainstream media itself (with the Times framing the case as “uncontrolled disinformation” vs. “sober government intervention”). This is the key point, and the most revolting one once its fullness has been revealed: Multiple coordinating powerful sectors of society are directly lobbying the government to engage in, spend on, and regulate “disinformation.” Curiously, each of them stands to directly benefit from it. And it is never acknowledged or discussed.
The media sees “disinformation” (and the proliferation of potent narratives they can neither control nor suppress) as a direct threat to their raison d’etre and sense of professional self-definition, to say nothing of the dignity of their industry. Academics despair at the loss of prestige and authority that the demotic age of social media (and the leveling within the academy) has brought them. Businessmen and grifters really just want to make a buck. Fair points all to the reader, perhaps, and yet no wonder these three immensely powerful interests have such an easy time working hand in glove with one another to build, reinforce, supplement, and extend outward a narrative built entirely upon rottenly partisan premises disguised as common-sense critique.
A colleague of mine noted this morning that, as far as progressives are concerned in the post-Trump era, “the First Amendment is the new Second Amendment.” It was a witty observation, but as I turned it over in my head, I was left pondering why it became so easy for all of these various long-standing institutions — the media and academia in particular — to heave it over the side as well. And the inescapable conclusion is that it isn’t just because of “wokeness” or a new generation of ill-formed American youth. It’s because it serves their interests.