The New York Times has a story that will probably get lost in the news over Kamala Harris getting the VP nod, but it’s still worth bringing up.
A story about protesters burning Bibles drew condemnation from conservatives. It now appears to have been wildly exaggerated — and the first viral hit in Russia’s 2020 disinformation campaign.
Matthew Rosenberg and Julian E. Barnes start with a look at the video that went viral. From modest beginnings it blew up into a story about Black Lives Matter protestors in Portland, OR burning a stack of bibles in a fire, and topping it off with American flags.
The story was a near-perfect fit for a central Trump campaign talking point — that with liberals and Democrats comes godless disorder — and it went viral among Republicans within hours of appearing earlier this month. The New York Post wrote about it, as did The Federalist, saying that the protesters had shown “their true colors.” Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, said of the protesters, “This is who they are.” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, tweeted that antifa had moved to “the book burning phase.”
The truth was far more mundane. A few protesters among the many thousands appear to have burned a single Bible — and possibly a second — for kindling to start a bigger fire. None of the other protesters seemed to notice or care.
Yet in the rush to paint all the protesters as Bible-burning zealots, few of the politicians or commentators who weighed in on the incident took the time to look into the story’s veracity, or to figure out that it had originated with a Kremlin-backed video news agency. And now, days later, the Portland Bible burnings appear to be one of the first viral Russian disinformation hits of the 2020 presidential campaign.
Rosenberg and Barnes get into the nuts and bolts of Russian disinformation 2020. They’re getting better at putting stuff out that will get picked up by others. Rosenberg and Barnes describe it as “information laundering”. Like money laundering, it’s a way of taking material that would be tainted by its origins and running it through intermediaries to ‘sanitize’ it. Some of the stories are outright fiction, but the most insidious have just enough truth to make them harder to dismiss. They are selected for material most likely to generate a strong reaction and packaged accordingly. Rosenberg and Barnes describe the pathways the finished products take.
Not to dismiss this as trivial, but there’s a bigger problem here.
Picking stories designed to attract attention and reinforce desired talking points, discredit targets, leaving out context or putting them in a false context, working in just enough truth to add some plausibility, outright lies, and all intended to advance a political agenda…
This may work for Russia, but it also describes the business model of Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, One America News Network, right wing talk radio, and so on.
Russian interference (and that by other foreign actors) still provokes a response that this is a bad thing from the mainstream media. The others named above? Not so much. They’ve been normalized, yet what they do is even more pernicious. (The call is coming from inside the house!) If Russian disinformation is so persuasive, so pervasive, it’s because decades of right wing messaging has paved the way for it.
And while they’ve been doing that, they’ve also done their best to neuter the mainstream media — with the mainstream media’s complaisance. Reflex both-siderism, false equivalence — the playing field is tilted to the point where “it’s always good news for Republicans” and an acronym: IOKIYAR — It’s okay if you’re a Republican. ‘Working the refs’ by accusing the mainstream media of liberal bias has them bending over backwards to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt while giving none to the left. (Not to mention a corporate media bias that seems to fear the ‘far’ left more than the hard right.)
Eric Boehlert at Press Run Media has been documenting the atrocities. His mission statement spells out what he sees as his task:
...In an era when too many newsroom standards seem to have dwindled, and when the loudest GOP voices are rewarded with attention, Press Run helps makes sense of today's media landscape. Determined to hold the news outlets accountable with smart, incisive analysis and commentary that calls out bad practices and raises up voices of sanity.
...I'm a veteran media critic who has been monitoring right-wing misinformation for years, first as a staff writer for Salon, for ten years as a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, and most recently as a media critic at Daily Kos. (In my previous life professionally, I wrote about the music industry as a staff writer at Billboard and Rolling Stone. )
I've documented how GOP propaganda infects the so-called liberal media culture inside the Beltway, which thrives on false equivalencies while normalizing atrocious Republican behavior.
Speaking of which, the elephant in the room…
Russian and right wing media efforts pale in comparison to the biggest single source of disinformation in America today: Donald Trump, his administration, and the Republican Party. Trump lies constantly — yet the press goes out of their way to soften it, just as they do their best to try to summarize his more deranged statements into something approaching sanity. Even before Trump took office he was spouting massive amounts of disinformation, and he has not gotten better.
The reluctance of the mainstream media to call him out on this is their biggest failure. Boehlert has been on this from the start of Press Run. He explains why giving Trump a debate with Biden would be a mistake.
..."If you ask the president of the United States a question about coronavirus and air his answer, you are helping to misinform the nation about a public health emergency," noted New York University journalism professor, Jay Rosen. "In fact, the single most potent force for misinforming the American public is the current president."
Here's Trump lying during a 2016 debate about being audited by the IRS every year for 15 years, and lying about Hillary Clinton having "deleted" "33,000" emails:
Those two gargantuan lies were told within the span of 45 seconds. Why go through this again under the prestigious auspices of presidential debates? Why invite tens of millions of Americans to tune in so Trump can lie without pause for two hours, while his Democratic opponent does his best to adhere to a factual argument? The sponsors of the debate clearly aren't going to do anything to prevent Trump from making stuff up nonstop. And odds are the Trump campaign will take clips from a Biden debate and use them dishonestly, perhaps even altering video, in the form of attack advertising.
The press, when it does its postmortem fact checks, will likely present the debates through a Both Sides lens where each candidate is depicted as being loose with the facts. That’s how they handled the 2016 debates between Trump and Clinton. "In a wild 90-minute debate, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton brought up dozens of inaccuracies, half truths, and a few surprising truths," NBC reported after the final debate in 2016, highlight 36 fact checks from the evening telecast, leaving the distinct impression that Trump and Clinton were equally factual. Virtually none of the debate news coverage in 2016 focused on the fact that Trump's a pathological liar who showed no hesitation about lying about any topic raised during the forums.
Boehlert requires a subscription for continued access, but it’s well worth it.
Bottom Line:
Disinformation efforts by foreign actors are nothing to dismiss unless, like Trump and the GOP, you are counting on them to keep your grip on power. However, they wouldn’t be half so effective if public debate in this country hadn’t been systematically debased for years by the right wing and their media. Alternative facts, ‘fake news’, bubbles… it’s all of a piece. One of the ways con men manipulate their victims is by creating confusion, stimulating fears, and making big promises. When people no longer know who or what to trust, smiling liars have an edge. Democracy dies when no one can tell what the truth is any more.
84 days. Biden-Harris!