Sometimes, misinformation is a choice
An old acquaintance who handled PR for the New York Stock Exchange when I covered it years ago has become something of a troll on LinkedIn. A committed Trumper, he makes a point of sharing or “liking” often bizarre claims that reinforce the president’s narratives.
For instance, this fellow recently warmed to a meme that claimed that DOGE had found a Louisiana man with 34 names and addresses who was collecting $1.1 million a year in Social Security payments. Never mind that several other posters warned that this was bogus or that I had shared a Snopes fact-check tracing the post’s lineage and demonstrating how it was false.
My acquaintance’s response: “There’s a lot of truth out there that you are ignoring.” And he, like Trump, then invoked President Biden’s alleged flaws (never mind that Biden hasn’t been president since January).
Is the common practice in PR to not admit when one is wrong and, instead, to deflect, changing the subject when it’s unpleasant? Do they teach that in PR school or do people just learn that on the job, developing bad habits that perhaps their bosses love?
Similarly, a cousin often shares memes such as one that shouts: “OBAMA EXPOSED AS FOREIGN-BORN CIA ASSET — MILITARY CONFIRMS TREASON, ELITE TRAFFICKING TIES, AND FRAUDULENT PRESIDENCY.” Another, she drew from Breitbart, proclaims “100 DAYS OF GREATNESS,” citing the recent jobs report and arguing that the economy was defying doomsayers.
The nonsense about Obama is obvious, as is the fact that he left the presidency in January 2017 after two terms. For its part, the enthusiastic Breitbart link flies in the face of stock market plunges, the Commerce Department’s report of shrinkage in the gross domestic product and the flatness in the unemployment rate at 4.2 percent, up from as low as 3.4 percent in the spring of 2023. The post labels as “doomsayers” the responsible forecasters who have upped the chances of the recession, something even Fed Chair Jerome Powell acknowledges.
Such memes and the people who share them raise a host of questions. Among them: do the creators and the sharers pay attention to legitimate news sources? And, more troubling, how gullible are they? Have they lost — or never had — all sense of critical thinking?
Perhaps they live in a world – as Trump at least pretends to – where such sources as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Reuters, AP, etc., are outlets of “fake news,” all conspiring to embarrass him with false reports. Perhaps, as a result, they turn to a world of wacko memesters, swallowing whole each new bit of pabulum that flows by algorithm onto their phones or laptops.
Admittedly, mistrust in legitimate media abounds and has grown over the years. According to Gallup, as of this past February, Americans are divided into rough thirds with just 31 percent trusting the media a great deal or a fair amount, 33 percent saying they do “not [trust it] very much,” and 36 percent, up from 6 percent in 1972, saying they have no trust at all in it. The slide has been a long time in coming: About two-thirds of Americans in the 1970s trusted the “mass media — such as newspapers, TV and radio” either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to “[report] the news fully, accurately and fairly,” Gallup reported. “By the next measurement in 1997, confidence had fallen to 53 percent, and it has gradually trended downward since 2003.”
Trump rode such media distrust into successful elections in 2016 and again last fall. Give him credit: as a talented huckster, he knows how to get on board a train when his marks are coasting along on it. His charges against the media played into the hands and hearts of the 49.8 percent of voters who elected him last November and the 41 percent to 43 percent who approve of his job performance lately, though not most of us, the estimated 53 percent to 55 percent who disapprove of his work lately.
We also know that sources of responsible news coverage have been drying up or have been cowed by Trump. His browbeating has led to pullbacks on editorial comment at The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, for instance. Indeed, it’s passing rich that The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for cartoons by Ann Telnaes, who quit the paper in January when it refused to run a cartoon criticizing owner Jeff Bezos for his Trump obsequiousness.
Trump’s pursuit of CBS for “60 Minutes” already has driven a major producer to quit, citing a loss of journalistic independence. The network’s parent, Paramount, is eager to secure the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of the company to Skydance, run by the son of tech billionaire Larry Ellison. Recall that Trump sued over what he regarded as a deceptively edited interview in October with Vice President Kamala Harris, a suit most experts see as baseless and far-fetched.
Moreover, the numbers of newspapers publishing across the country have plummeted, depriving Americans of vital sources of independent information. More than one-third of print newspapers have disappeared in the last two decades and of the rewer than 5,600 papers remaining, some 80 percent are weeklies, according to Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative.
So, if Trumpers ever tapped sources of responsible journalism before, they will have fewer such opportunities going forward. Instead, they will have memesters and the likes of flaks such as White House spokesman Karoline Leavitt. Remember that in March Leavitt inadvertently spoke truthfully in saying that Trump’s Department of Justice would focus on “fighting law and order,” with more substantial misstatements following, such as her claim that tariffs constitute “a tax cut” for Americans.
Then there is Leavitt’s insistence that the Trump Administration is “complying with all court orders,” even as it has refused to bring home an immigrant it has admitted was wrongly deported. Remember that the Supreme Court ordered his return with no dissents.
Like Leavitt, my acquaintance who worked in PR may subscribe to the Trumpian notion that reality is whatever that president says it is. And my cousin may simply be misinformed by relying on random Netizens instead of turning to real news outlets. The tragedy for American democracy is that over the coming few years, if trends continue, the misinformation and deceit they accept may become institutionalized. We seem well on that way to that now.
On a personal note, this Substack will be on hiatus for about three weeks. My wife and I will go biking in Scandinavia, happily if temporarily distant from the Big Liar. Stay strong, dear readers, and stay well informed for us.