It’s always nice when a member of the establishment media actually gets it. Columnist Megan McArdle wrote an op-ed taking the misinformation/disinformation industry to task for a series of sins that explain why they have not been able to accomplish their objectives.
And what are those objectives?
Attacking former President Donald Trump and the right, of course.
In the piece, McArdle, who is no fan of Trump, expertly breaks down why the “fact checkers” have failed to not only damage the former president but also managed to discredit themselves in the process.
McArdle begins by recounting how “the aghast Western establishment decided that [Trump’s] ascendancy had to be a mistake or a foreign trick” when he won the 2016 election. “Enter the disinformation specialists: the journalists and academics who devote themselves to checking the internet for bad facts and bad actors — and especially for the malevolent impulses of Trump,” she writes.
The author then outlines the utter hysteria that followed Trump’s victory and the myriad of false narratives and hoaxes that followed, thanks to the activist media, fact-checkers, and other self-appointed purveyors of truth.
Think back to the years the American public spent on the verge of finding out that Trump was a Russian plant. Recall when it was “misinformation” to suggest the pandemic might have started in a Wuhan lab. Recollect how a bevy of putative experts assured us that Hunter Biden’s laptop was probably a “Russian information operation” rather than … Hunter Biden’s laptop. If these memories have faded, remember that just a couple months ago, we were hearing that videos of President Joe Biden’s obvious decline were actually expert-certified “cheap fakes.”
After each embarrassment, I thought, “Aha, this will teach the disinformation experts some humility.” And each time, they have reemerged, unchastened. Most recently, when Elon Musk announced that he would interview Donald Trump on an X live stream. European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton sent and then published (on X, no less) a huffily worded and, as it turned out, unapproved letter warning that X might face consequences in Europe unless Musk took “effective mitigation measures” to ensure against “the amplification of harmful content.”
The episode sums up all the ways in which the “disinformation” specialty has gone wrong with Trump: the arrogance, the confusion of opinion with legal or empirical fact, the destroy-the-village-in-order-to-save-it attempts to shore up democracy by clamping down on political speech.
Not to mention the bumbling ineffectiveness of it all.
Mcardle describes how the misinformation industry “made too many errors” and that these “errors showed a suspicious tendency to all run in the same political direction, giving credibility to conservative complaints that this was less about altruistic truth-telling than about insiders borrowing the credibility of their institutions — news outlets, universities, the European Commission — to undercut a politician they didn’t like.”
The author is spot on, except for one quibble I have with how she frames this point. These were not “errors,” as she suggests. Sure, perhaps there were some mistakes that were made. But overall, these were damned lies aimed at attacking a political opponent.
The reason the misinformation/disinformation industry failed to harm Trump is because it was so obvious that this was their entire mission. Even though they tried to disguise their aims under a veneer of a desire for accuracy, it was evident that they were motivated more by politics than a desire to make sure people are properly informed on the issues.
As McArdle highlighted – the bulk of their “fact-checking” went in only one political direction. It was rare for these intrepid seekers of truth to correct any of the long list of falsehoods coming from the left. It was as if they weren’t even trying to hide their bias.
The problem with this strategy is that it appeals primarily to people who would never vote for Trump in the first place. For those who either support Trump or are on the fence, it is hard to trust these entities because their political agenda is on full display.
Members of the misinformation industry would have been smart to at least pretend to care about debunking false narratives on both sides by also going after folks on the left who propagated falsehoods in public spaces.
But they didn’t. This is why they continue to fail.
