Yesterday we touched on Chuckie Koch’s attempt to rebrand as a bipartisan deal-maker, after decades of funding a massive multi-arm partisan lobbying machine. Today we’ll be looking more closely at his life’s work, as captured in a new book on The Disinformation Age.
Edited by W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston, the Cambridge University Press-published book, with a free-to-read-online version, is broken down into 10 chapters by a variety of experts. It details the history of disinformation and origins of “asymmetric propaganda in American media” (more lies on the right), and how bad actors successfully “flooded the zone” online with misinformation.
It then moves into the issue of organized denial, with a chapter by Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway and Charlie Tyson that looks at the National Association of Manufacturer’s public persuasion campaign all the way back in 1935-1940. Its propaganda championing “free enterprise” and demonizing the government laid the groundwork for the later campaigns by tobacco, fossil fuels, and other industries to deny the obvious public costs to their private profits.
Nancy MacLean builds on the findings in her book Democracy in Chains, using the push for privatization of social security as a case study in how the Kochs and other Libertarians built an entire pseudo-intellectual infrastructure to oppose regulations -- and how that ideology was so successfully deployed during the Trump era. She also goes over the early research connecting the Kochs with Big Tobacco, by creating in the early 1990’s what would eventually become the Tea Party, which Chuckie Koch is apparently attempting to wash his hands of.
In addition, MacLean provides evidence that the Koch network was active in opposing the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, as well as other anti-democracy measures, to entrench the rule of their economic interests over the popular will of voters who would prefer not to be polluted on and otherwise exploited by Koch and other corporate interest. In The Disinformation Age the title of the chapter, “since we are greatly outnumbered” speaks to the thesis: that the Kochs and others used libertarian ideology as a cover for entrenching a rich-white-man’s minority rule in the U.S. to prevent losing power to the millions of Black, brown and working class voters who would otherwise enact popular policies to expand the social safety net and reduce pollution.
From there, the next section of Disinformation Age deals with how disinformation has blossomed online, why it’s so hard to regulate, and what past examples of propaganda have to teach us. The first lesson, Heidi Tworek writes, is that “disinformation is an international relations problem,” given that it’s often used to build or diffuse power internally and internationally.
Next is that the physical infrastructure is an important piece of how disinformation works, is spread, and can be cut off, which is often overlooked because of its simplicity and physicality in an otherwise digital world. Then there’s primacy of business relations, which again is a sort of nuts-and-bolts look at how the business of the media can shape its news. As a result of these issues, we come to lesson four, on the need for new regulatory institutions and solutions that are somehow insulated from politicization and otherwise careful enough not to backfire or be exploited.
The last lesson is that solutions need to address the societal divisions if it’s to heal the divide on social media. Disinformation often preys on discord, and a well-functioning and fact-checked media requires mutual trust between readers and publishers.
Finally, the book continues the solutions theme with a policy-fix-oriented section, which suggests public broadcasting could be “a bulwark against disinformation,” and cautions that if that is to be the case, the media system as a whole must first confront its own “policy failure in an age of misinformation.”
And those failures have been many, which is why we’re now in the position we’re in. Though the book only deals with Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, and not the 2020 defeat he denies with the help of the media ecosystem Koch et. al fostered, the lessons couldn’t stand out more clearly now.
“Above all,” Bennett and Livingston conclude, the goal of decades of disinformation from Kochs and so many other billionaires funding pundits claiming to care about Freedom and The Constitution and Our Rights “is not to strengthen and improve democratic governance, but to destroy it.”
Lucky for us, we get to watch in real time to see if they will be successful (again) or if Trump and his millions of rabid supporters immersed in disinformation and denial will begrudgingly acknowledge the reality of his loss and the legitimacy of the Biden administration.
Which sort of gives this book a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure ending, except instead of finding out the fate of junior detectives or something, it’s the survival of democracy in the U.S.!
How fun!
