Secret Trump-Biden Tryst!

You knew it all along, didn't you.

Diary of the Late Republic, #23

If the ad is pro-Biden, you know it has to be fake.

Yesterday’s New York Times reported on Russian disinformation efforts in American elections, which by now is an old story. But I was arrested by the opening anecdote. I typically imagine disinformation as a matter of planting fabricated negative stories about candidates. But in this case, there’s a twist: a video of a Russian operative explaining that it was her job to craft positive stories about President Biden—and, not coincidentally, to be caught doing so—with the goal of reinforcing rejection of anything they might hear that could lead them to re-evaluate their opinions. (Not that this likely for a Biden or a Trump voter at this point.) In any case, the real goal here is less about a person or party than undermining trust in media generally so as to sow doubt among the discerning and preach to the converted. It’s a dangerous combination.

It has been an axiom of civic education that we need to evaluate information critically in terms of source, consistency, and the like. We all know that’s become harder to do. The day may be approaching when it will be impossible to judge the veracity of a video we watch or a story that we hear.

The New York Times that was founded in 1851 was generally understood to be a Republican newspaper (or at least Whiggish until the Republicans became a national organization mid-decade). In that regard, it was like every other American newspaper dating back to the founding of the New York Post in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton as a way of attacking the Jefferson administration. (Did you know the president had a secret love child with one of his slaves? It’s true! It was in the papers!) When the Times was bought by the Ochs family in 1896, the paper moved toward what most of us have known it to be: a media organization that strived for even-toned objectivity in reporting (though I’m among those whose confidence in the Times has ebbed in recent years). As such the paper was part of a mainstream media infrastructure of print, radio, and television that at least nominally committed to such principles. The founding of FOX in 1986 was the first step away from this, as was the 1987 expiration of the Fairness Doctrine in which media outlets were formally required to air alternative points of view. The cultural change that followed was gradual at first but accelerated rapidly after Donald Trump’s election in 2017.

This development, along with other ones like Artificial Intelligence and the return of Great Power (as opposed to Cold War) rivalry, means the world is now reverting to an old common sense of partisan media even as it enters uncharted waters. I don’t think we have to be paralyzed. But we may be forced by our lights to rely more on principle rather than fact, faith rather than empiricism. Education will have to change. It’s time to start getting serious about that. To begin imagining what that looks like. One way to begin, a return to the study of ethics.