Plague Journal, Day 71: Misinformation, Disinformation

One of my Los Angeles friends texts, “I officially have no idea what’s going on. If I had to give a press conference I’d say, I have no idea what’s going on. It makes my head hurt, and my eyes squint.” 

I haven’t heard from L.A. Friend in days; her message mentions nothing specific. But it weirdly corresponds to my train of thought; her text interrupts my compilation of a list of distractions created by the president and his minions over the past few days. He: 

— threatened to withhold federal dollars to states expanding voting by mail; 

— accused election officials in Nevada and Michigan, without proof, of law violations;

— lied about voter fraud; 

— accused China of meddling in the 2020 election, without proof; 

— accused President Obama, without proof, of orchestrating a “deep state” conspiracy against him; 

— said he was taking hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic treatment against Covid-19; 

—said Fox News is doing too little to help him win the 2020 election; 

— retweeted criticism of his FBI director; 

— endorsed false allegations of jury misconduct in the Roger Stone trial; 

— violated public health guidelines about wearing masks; 

— said he would force governors to open houses of worship as “essential,” a power presidents do not possess. 

Until today I had never heard of the debating technique “Gish gallop,” knowing only the Trumpian variant described by ally Steve Bannon as “flooding the zone with shit.” Consider my and my friend’s zones well flooded. 

I’ve read nothing smarter — certainly nothing more succinct — about the president’s public health and re-election strategies than a post written by NYU’s Jay Rosen: “The plan is to have no plan. …  to default on public problem solving and then prevent the public from understanding the consequences of that default. To succeed will require one of the biggest propaganda and freedom of information fights in U.S. history.”

The president governs not the nation but to seek benefits for him and his circle. He plays not 12-dimensional chess but the 24-hour news cycle. His every flaw and foible is known, or knowable. (This was true in 2016.) His misdeeds, missteps — such as forcing a crush of travelers through U.S. airports in the middle of a pandemic — succeed not by remaining unexposed but by burial in a relentless pile of confusion.

Will it work? It did, with fewer resources, in 2016. It did in England, where Brexit’s political engineers ran a similar campaign, unsullied by quaint notions of decency and truth. I confess ignorance until this week of Dominic Cummings, whose 260-mile trip with Covid-19 symptoms to stash his kids with relatives with the U.K. under lockdown has incited calls for his resignation (which Prime Minister Boris Johnson, grateful for Cummings’ services, will almost certainly ignore). 

Photo courtesy of BBC

Last year The New Statesman ran a Cummings profile, in which Harry Lambert penned a paragraph that remains apt on multiple continents: “Yes … you should try to win an election, but first you must be decent, and fair, and tell the truth. Winning an election is the game, but there are rules. The problem for those outraged by Cummings is that they may be wrong. What appear to be rules are in fact only conventions, and cannot be enforced. If voters want to elect liars, democracy empowers them to.”

Liars have used mass media to influence voters for more than a century. A University of Pittsburgh economist has published a paper on Father Charles Coughlin, the 1930s radio priest whose anti-Semitic, populist, and fascist messages spoke to millions of Americans (including my grandfather, who considered him essential listening). The article concludes that exposure to Father Coughlin's radio program: reduced Franklin Roosevelt’s vote share in the 1936 election; boosted creation of local pro-Nazi chapters; depressed sales of World War II bonds; increased negative feelings toward Jews.

In the digital age, disinformation (spread intentionally, as by Putin and the president) and misinformation (spread by the credulous) are simpler, ubiquitous. Prospect Magazine writes about the circulation of Covid-19 conspiracy theories, boosted by everyone from fascists to anti-vaxxers to Luddites fearing 5G technology. (I recently tracked one such lie.) Our information infection will persist long after Covid-19; as the article notes, “It is far from clear that democracies can survive the longer-term destabilisation of objective truth.”

The article’s worth reading in full. I’ll cite one section, exploring why the anti-vaccination message often dominates online discussion despite its speciousness: “It tends to get spread not, like its contrary, with a careful presentation of the facts, but with more engaging emotive content (‘Do you love your children? Then why would you hurt them?’). And it is more diverse: in contrast to the stark medical facts, there are a host of anti-vax 'narratives' to draw you in. 

“‘It’s like going into an ice cream shop,’ says Neil Johnson, a complexity theorist at George Washington University. ‘You’ll always find a flavour that appeals to you, and online it’s only one step away.’”

Meanwhile, the worst predictions of Covid-19 case spikes following the nation’s earliest reopenings, in Georgia and Florida, have yet to come to pass. Montgomery, Ala., is seeing a spike threaten to overwhelm its hospitals, but so far that’s true of few other cities. On the other hand, remove from national trend lines New York state (where cases and deaths have been declining for weeks; in the city, emergency rooms are seeing half their normal Before CoronaWorld caseloads) and you see a plateauing of cases (around 20,000 a day) since early April. We’ve ramped up testing in that stretch; but European countries testing at similar rates have seen average daily cases drop by as much as 90 percent. 

As with so much with Covid-19, we’re flying mostly blind. The upshot? Waves of viral infections will likely roll across the country for months. Deaths, now more than 90,000, will continue to pile up. Will voters care enough to cast out the person most responsible? 

(New York state numbers on Friday: 359,926 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.5 percent; 287 dead, to a total of 23,282, up 0.4 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,262, to a total of 89,732, up 1.4 percent.)