Panelists on the final episode of the media-analysis show “Reliable Sources,” axed after three decades by CNN’s incoming management, gave voice to widespread angst about America’s news and information environment.
Rampant misinformation is among the top concerns these days. Social media have blocked COVID discussions regarded as misleading. The Biden Administration launched an Orwellian-sounding Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Homeland Security, but quickly shelved the effort.
By the way, “misinformation” means incorrect knowledge of any sort, whereas “disinformation” is false knowledge that’s spread deliberately.
One commentator recommends that we all chill.
Only sheer “arrogance” could create “confidence that we can accurately and productively root out misinformation,” contends Isaac Saul, who heads up www.ReadTangle.com, an online newsletter that offers non-partisan summaries of the best arguments from various sides of political issues. (Check it out.) He titled a July article “Misinformation Is Here To Stay (And That’s OK).”
The Guy does not necessarily embrace all of Saul but considers his contentions important for media toilers, critics and consumers to ponder. Thus this Memo condenses the essence as follows.
For starters, Saul cleverly notes that many things each of us believes right will prove “utterly wrong” and history proves it. As recently as a century ago, doctors believed in bloodletting cures using leeches or scalpels. U.S. women had just obtained the vote over against the common belief they were too emotional. The Milky Way was the outer limit of the universe.
Only two decades ago, experts were telling us mass opioid prescriptions were safe and that switching from paper to plastic bags would save trees and thus help the environment. More recently, Twitter and Facebook barred accurate New York Post reportage on Hunter Biden’s loaded (in several senses of that word) laptop, and established sources branded as a conspiracy theory COVID’s origin in a China lab leak, now regarded as possible or even likely. Add your own examples.