"Misinformation" is just the same as "fake news"
"Misinformation" and "disinformation" are thrown around quite liberally nowadays by everyone who wants to discredit their ideological opponents without actually looking into what they have to say.
"Misinformation" and "disinformation" are thrown around quite liberally nowadays by everyone who wants to discredit their ideological opponents without actually looking into what they have to say.
When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States he immediately set about making his press conferences very interesting. Over and over he would have public spats with journalists from news and media outlets that we might very well identify as “left-leaning”. Members of the corporate media establishment like The Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, and the New York Times were all very disliked by the President who soon started labeling them “fake news”.
Very quickly the media started making themselves victims of the President’s “regime” by overblowing legitimate worries over press freedom into full-on martyrdom tales. From Jim Acosta’s press pass being revoked by the White House (which was restored the following week) to Trump’s threat to expand libel laws (which didn’t happen), the media presented itself as if they were Venezuelan or Brazilian journalists who feared for their lives and were fighting the good fight with each piece about Trump’s hair. This self-victimization, which might have started with “fake news” or Trump’s labeling of the press as “truly the enemy of the people”, quickly gained them a lot of followers and new subscribers but little by little also exposed an ugly side. Mainly that a lot of these outlets liked to exaggerate or even just make things up.
Of course, they didn’t just sit around, they went on the offensive too. Most famously, a lot of media outlets began peddling the idea that Trump had collaborated with Russia, or that Russia had stolen the election for Trump. Even after Robert Mueller’s famous report failed to find evidence of a Trump conspiracy with Russia, the news media continued to claim that Russia had stolen the election and that Trump knew about it. Then in October of 2020, the New York Post broke a story on emails found on a laptop allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.
The NY Post’s story was quickly attacked. Twitter quickly suspended the Post’s account on its platform and then proceeded to block the sharing of links to the story, tagging them as “unsafe”. Journalists began claiming that Hunter’s laptop, which hosted emails appearing to show him benefitting from business deals in Ukraine thanks to his father’s position as Vice-President in 2015, was simply the result of a Russian “misinformation” campaign. More recently, many articles have been published about the FBI’s alleged findings that Russia was using Rudy Giuliani to spread “misinformation” before the 2020 US Presidential elections.
When half of the media claim something as true, and the other half call them liars, well, it’s easy to feel like we’re going a little bit bananas. Take, for example, Israel and Palestine. Do you know what’s happening in Sheik Jarrah? Do you really? Who did you hear it from, conservatives or liberals? What over-simplified posts did you retweet or add to your stories? What are the hashtags and vacuous slogans you added to your take on the matter?
Take this from National Review:
How about this Instagram post from Slow Factory:
Just from the titles alone, you can probably figure out who’s on what side.
So, how do we actually cut through false narratives? Read more, read from sources you dislike and from those with different political positions. If you cover enough ground over both sides you’ll start to notice holes in someone’s story. You’ll see if they stick to a convenient political narrative or if they admit and account for problems with their stance. Check sources, many outlets and writers stick to the publications that support their political positions. Don’t fall for the “fake news” and “misinformation” traps.
And, of course, demand better from our media. It’s vital to hold them accountable, no matter if they’re on our “side” or not, if anything, be even more suspicious of the outlets that reflect your ideology, it’s easy to fall for propaganda if you already kind of agree with whomever is spreading it.
Luis Gonzalez is a lawyer from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (Caracas, Venezuela) currently working in private practice and is founder and co-editor of The Explorer. You can find him on Twitter at @lagm96.