mis·in·for·ma·tion
/ˌmisinfərˈmāSH(ə)n/
noun
- false information that is spread, regardless of intent to mislead.
dis·in·for·ma·tion
/ˌdisənfərˈmāSH(ə)n/
noun
- false information which is intended to mislead, especially knowingly spreading misinformation.
Misinformation:
- When you discuss the Jan. 5 insurrection;
- When you argue incorrectly, as did an acquaintance, that Bobby Thompson history home run in a pennant-clinching playoff game against the Brooklyn Dodgers was in 1952;
- When you write, as did a capable and reputable sportswriter; that Billy Cannon won the Heisman Trophy in 1958;
- When you voice your disgust with Barrack Obama when you find the post office is closed on Columbus Day (it was Eisenhower who made it a holiday);
- When you earnestly believe it’s unfair for Democrats to want to raise the tax rate on millionaires to 39.6 percent (again, under Eisenhower, the tax rate on the richest Americans was 91 percent);
- When you attempt to invoke your rights as an individual to resist the vaccine because you believe mandatory vaccines are unconstitutional or are unproven (the polio vaccine was unproven at the outset, but it eradicated the virus; vaccines for other diseases, such as smallpox, measles, etc., have been mandatory for decades)
Disinformation:
- When you claim the Jan. 6 insurrection was nothing more than a routine Capitol tour;
- When you claim forest fires in California were started by Israeli laser beams;
- When you insist the coronavirus vaccines can alter your DNA, that the door-to-door survey is to document unvaccinated Americans, that the vaccine is an “experimental gene therapy” that has killed thousands in the U.S., or that the vaccines insert tracking devices into your body (cell phones already do that and I don’t see anyone giving those up);
- When you claim that Biden is not really president but instead, he is actually an actor on a sound stage in Hollywood;
- When you forward the photo of Biden in the Oval Office with Trump staring in the window from outside;
- When you claim that federal office buildings in Washington are deserted and boarded up;
- When history lessons about race, slavery and women’s suffrage that make you uncomfortable, your answer is to literally alter history by banning their teaching;
- When you claim that military armaments are being moved into urban areas in preparation for a federal takeover, and
- When you claim that Trump will be reinstated on Aug. 13.
Louisiana, along with Arkansas and Florida, currently lead the nation in the surge in infections of the Delta variant and Alabama has the lowest vaccination rate in America. Mississippi has cited an “astounding” rise in Covid-19 cases. Those states are all, coincidentally, states that voted heavily for Trump.
What’s that got to do with anything? Well, first and foremost, Trump holds franchise rights on disinformation, claiming, among other things that (a) the virus will disappear in a few days and that (b) drinking bleach was a reasonable treatment for Covid.
The irony, the real oxymoron here, is that Trump wants to claim credit for developing the vaccine “in record time,” but refuses to encourage his base to take the shots. He doesn’t trust the scientists. That’s disinformation, just as it was disinformation to proclaim that he knew more about war than his generals, or that he accepted Putin’s word that there was no Russian interference in 2016 over that of U.S. intelligence agents.
It would be easy to dismiss his base as a pack of mouth-breathing redneck KKKers, but the truth is, many of his followers are highly-education individuals – including many of my own close friends and family members.
There can be no denying that there is a deliberate and concerted effort to distort facts by inundating us with lies and distortions so far-fetched that they would have been laughable 30 or even 15 years ago. The conspiracy whackos rule the day now. There are several reasons for that.
Like anyone with a computer, I have an easily-accessible platform from which to express my viewpoint. I know I’m more than a little biased on this, but I believe I attempt to examine issues from all sides before offering my opinion. There is little that I agree with Trump on, for example, but as I said recently, I agreed with him when he said we routinely orchestrate coups and insurrection in other countries and that we had no business in Afghanistan. (If we didn’t learn that the collapse of the Soviet Union was at least indirectly tied to its own frustrated efforts in that country, what made us think we could succeed, especially after our experience in Vietnam?)
And while I, in my less-than-objective opinion, believe I take a level-headed approach to issues, there are those who use social media as a launching pad for conspiracy theories that are so far out there as to make Jeff Bezos’ recent trip into space seem like a walk in the park.
These people don’t use misinformation, they deliberately use disinformation to try and get their nut-job ideas across.
Besides the popularity and accessibility of the internet, there are two other developments that have helped move the process along:
The sad decline of newspapers and news magazines like Time and Newsweek (a direct result of the internet) and the explosion of television news networks that depend far too heavily on sound bites and talking heads who really have little to say.
The Shreveport Times, Monroe News-Star (and its predecessor, the Monroe Morning World) and the New Orleans Times-Picayune once were proud newspapers that had full-time bureaus in Baton Rouge. Today, thanks to the internet, they are skeletons of their once proud selves. The Times-Picayune was swallowed up by The Baton Rouge Advocate while the Shreveport and Monroe papers, along with several other Louisiana publications, were absorbed by Gannett, aka McNewspapers.
Thankfully, The Advocate has committed itself to in-depth investigative reporting that can – and has – exposed and embarrassed public officials who desperately needed to be exposed and embarrassed. And thankfully, there are still publications like The New York Times, Boston Globe, and The Washington Post to keep the national power brokers in line.
But their job is made infinitely more difficult by the proliferation by the purveyors of disinformation and as a result, we’re now looking down the barrel of another national lockdown.
Louisiana Voice 
Another warped lib, by your article you twist and mold the truth to fit you political desires. Darts could be thrown the same way with a different spin. What happened to unbiased news allowing the reader to make their own logical decision.
Gee, you say lib like it’s a bad thing – while ignoring the poison of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the former guy, et al.
But obviously, you’re the only patriot at this table.
Well… I’ll see your self proclaimed “American Patriot” moniker and raise you more than 20 years in uniform… and I am not a liberal. There is nothing logical or truthful about the way YOU twist and mold your untruths to fit you(r) political desires. Your argument is a double edged sword and you will only escape it by engaging news objectively from both sides of the discussion. It would also help if you’d realize that people with different political opinions are not your enemy, regardless of what the orange monkey and his minions tell you.
To answer your question (?), unbiased news largely got lost in the sea of competition with each source appealing to the biases its ostensible audience for commercial success. The closest thing to sources of unbiased information are public radio and television and they get dismissed as “lib” by conservatives. C-Span attempts to provide unbiased coverage of government, but people tend to doze off trying to watch it.
It would be wonderful if we could all see the same things and draw our own conclusions – Sometimes we do but even that really doesn’t eliminate the problem. There has been extensive documentation of the January 6 events in D. C. and at the U.S. Capitol. It seems impossible to believe that any two people can view videos shot throughout the siege and come to different conclusions about what happened, but it is apparently not only possible, but actual.
Similarly, different people can see the 45th President of the United States doing and saying the exact same things and come away with entirely different impressions of him and his ostensible motives.
We experience different realities. That makes agreement on most anything of substance impossible.
To American Patriot: Another “banana republican” choosing to accept “facts” coinciding with his own prejudices, fears and warped perception of reality. Reliable, truthful, fact checked reporting exist, however, you wouldn’t recognize it if it slapped you in the face. Your head is so far up Trump’s rectum, if he expelled gas your brains would be destroyed. And by the way, the last sentence of your comment was a question, not a statement and should have ended in a question mark, “?”.
While the line is sometimes thin between the 2 kinds of harmful information you address, our greatest enemy is disinformation, simply because there is no counter for it. Attempts to disprove it result in further disinformation – and a never-ending stream of it, or worse, ceaseless repetition of it.
Joseph Goebbels said, “If you tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” [Hitler is also given attribution for the same thought with good reason – it reflects an important passage from Mein Kampf.]
P. S. I share with 45 the distinction of being banned (for 30 days, in my case) from posting on Facebook. Why? Because I posted essentially the above paragraph along with a graphic Tom sent. Apparently, their algorithm only picked up the graphic. I am willing to sacrifice my own largely ignored posts in furtherance of the continued banning of 45.