JFK, disinformation, and the death of expertise

“In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason – or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality, and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem…There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternative, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable…But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense.”

Those words are in a speech President John F. Kennedy was to give the night of his assassination November 22, 1963.

Unfortunately, nearly 60 years later, we find ourselves being bombarded with dangerous nonsense in the form of misinformation or disinformation. Misinformation is unintended or accidental mistakes, such as inaccurate captions, dates, statistics, translations, or when satire is taken seriously. Misinformation results from errors in reporting including misquotation, improper citation of sources, and misrepresented data or facts due to lack of training.

Although the information is false, it is not created with the intention of causing harm.

Disinformation – or more accurately, lies – is untrue or intentionally manipulated information. Disinformation includes conspiracy theories or rumors, fake news, propaganda, false statements (e.g. Trump’s Big Lie), evidence tampering, and malicious historical revisionism. Fake news isn’t news at all; it is intended to fool readers into thinking it’s for real. It appeals to the tendency of many people to accept false information presented to them in a news format as if it were real news. Fake news now reaches more people more quickly through social media – Facebook, Twitter – and right-wing cable TV channels than old-fashioned e-mails.

In a 2018 report from the RAND Corporation, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life; the authors wrote, “Increasingly, it seems that important policy debates, both within the federal government and across the electorate, are as likely to hinge on opinion or anecdote as they are on objective facts or rigorous analysis. However, policy decisions made primarily on the basis of opinion or anecdote can have deleterious effects on American democracy and might impose significant costs on the public.”

The RAND researchers identified four interrelated trends that are driving Truth Decay: disagreement about facts and the interpretations of facts and data; blurring of the line between opinion and fact; increase the volume (and resulting influence) of opinion and personal experience over fact; and Less trust in formerly respected sources of factual information.

Since the mid-1990s, the web site Snopes.com has been exposing false claims, fabricated messages, distortions containing bits of truth, and everything in between. But its founder David Mikkelson cautions us not to lump everything into the fake news category. “The fictions and fabrications that comprise fake news are but a subset of the larger bad news phenomenon, which

also encompasses many forms of shoddy, unresearched, error-filled, and deliberately misleading reporting that do a disservice to everyone,” he warns.

Which brings us to the death of expertise. Tom Nichols, a professor at the Naval War College at the Harvard Extension School who once worked for Republican Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania, wrote a book titled The Death of Expertise. In it, Nichols condemns what he describes as the many forces trying to undermine the authority of experts in the U.S. “Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious ‘appeals to authority,’ sure signs of dreadful ‘elitism,’ and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a ‘real’ democracy.” Democracy, he insists, is a system of government, not an actual state of equality, which means we enjoy equal rights in regard to the government and in relation to each other. Having equal rights does not mean having equal talents, equal abilities, or equal knowledge. “It assuredly does not mean that ‘everyone’s opinion about anything is as good as anyone else’s.’ And yet, this is now enshrined as the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense.”

He blames higher education, the internet, and the explosion of media options for the anti-expertise and anti-intellectual sentiment which he thinks is on the rise. While conceding that experts do sometimes fail, he believes the best answer to this is the self-correcting presence of other experts to recognize and rectify systemic failures.

Wide-spread disinformation and the death of expertise are preventing us from taking action on gun violence, climate change, energy and the environment, crumbling infrastructure, the availability of health care and affordable housing, income and wealth inequality, dark money in politics, clean energy – a long list of problems that need our attention now.

Mark Berg is a community activist in Adams County and a proud liberal. His email address is MABerg175@Comcast.net.

This post originally appeared in the Gettysburg Times.