“In war, truth is the first casualty,” Aeschylus, 525-456 BC.
When I began a career in journalism in the 1980s, Americans agreed on what news sources they could trust. Paradoxically, as sources of information have exploded over the past decades of tech transformation, our ability to process and evaluate that information has suffered. A brief episode around the emergence of fake news in the early internet era lends some insight into this phenomenon.
On July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 crashed soon after takeoff at 8:31 p.m. from JFK Airport in New York, taking 230 lives. It remains the third-worst fatal accident in U.S. aviation history. It took the National Transportation Safety Board over four years to conclusively determine that a spark in the 747’s fuel tank caused the crash. By this time, conspiracy theories had gained traction, including one that an errant U.S. Navy missile had struck the plane. This theory was bolstered by ABC News correspondent Pierre Salinger, who claimed he had been sent a document from an intelligence operative that confirmed U.S. military involvement. The document proved to be a hoax. Salinger stuck by his story, stating that he had seen the document “on the internet.” Apparently, the former White House press secretary and journalist believed that every story posted on a website was fact-checked. For many years, someone claiming that everything found on the internet was true was said to be suffering from “Pierre Salinger Syndrome.”
Fast forward to the recent White House visit by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who was subject to President Donald Trump’s display of video clips and copies of photographs that purported to show the murder of South African white farmers at the hands of Black residents, thus justifying the administration’s welcoming several dozen Afrikaners to the U.S. as refugees at a time when others have been shut out and are being expelled without due process. Despite analysis showing that the video clips and photos shown in the Oval Office were either distorted, took place in a different country or were out of context, Trump refused to entertain any question of the accuracy of his “evidence.”
In an April 30 televised interview with ABC’s Terry Moran, Trump had insisted that a photograph proved that deported El Salvadoran Kilmar Abrego Garcia had visible MS-13 gang letters tattooed on his knuckles. Trump showed Moran the photograph several times in the interview and refused to accept Moran’s assertion that the photo had been digitally altered to show the “MS-13” letters on Garcia’s left hand. Verified photographs after Garcia’s deportation don’t show the letters. Even Fox News admitted that the symbols were not visible on other photos of Garcia’s hand. It doesn’t matter. The administration has stuck to its version of the truthfulness of the altered photo.
After its electoral victory in July of 1932, the Nazi government created a new “Propaganda Ministry,” to be headed by 35-year-old party official and campaign manager Joseph Goebbels. The new regime required press members to register with the Reich Press Organization and to comply with a new law that banned any article seen as “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home.” Journalists who defied this and other directives eventually were fired or sent to concentration camps. As Goebbels noted in his diary: “Any man who still has a residue of honor will be very careful not to become a journalist.”
It’s no secret to any news consumer in this moment of American history that we are witnessing a war over facts, not simply the best way to interpret facts. The discredited online operation run by Alex Jones was named “InfoWars” for the precise reason that it declared war on well-established facts, such as the tragedy of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre that claimed 26 lives, including 20 young children. Television commentators are no longer shamed or embarrassed, as was Pierre Salinger in 1996, when a document they tout as genuine is established to be part of a false narrative.
History is a guide to the course of future events. Regimes that come to power and deprive people of their civil and human rights have consistently justified their actions to be in the service of a higher truth, supported by carefully cultivated facts. We are witnessing the assembly and distribution of a new factual narrative today. The question remains as to whether the people leading the institutions of our society — academics, business leaders, elected officials, civil servants and even the members of the press — are strong enough to withstand the surging tidal wave of disinformation.
To begin to reverse the disinformation trend that has been growing for decades, we will all need to become more educated news consumers who filter everything that we watch, hear and read. We need to question the sources and motivations of “news” stories, even from trusted sources that have become part of our daily habits. Editors should transparently fact-check news stories for their audiences. Media education should be fostered at the earliest appropriate grade level, when students begin to absorb and sort through information, and this effort should continue through high school and college. It might take decades to unwind the toxic discourse we are now experiencing, but diagnosing the disease is at least a start.
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