Remember when President Biden created a “Disinformation Governance Board” to counter what the administration considered as misinformation being spread about the Department of Homeland Security?
After much hooting and howling from the public, Biden canceled that effort three weeks later. But when it comes to sources of misinformation and disinformation, our own government is one of the worst offenders.
First, let’s distinguish between misinformation and disinformation. According to the American Psychological Association, “Misinformation is false or inaccurate information — getting the facts wrong. Disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead — intentionally misstating the facts.”
That’s an important distinction. While all of us may be guilty of spreading misinformation from time to time — that is, getting facts wrong — there may be no ill intent. We think we’re disseminating correct information, even though we may be wrong.
But what we’ve seen over the past several years is our government purveying disinformation — deliberately misleading the public. We’ve also seen disinformation coming from other countries, especially Russia, China and Iran.
But when our government peddles disinformation, it undermines the public trust. That’s why only 22 percent of Americans say they trust the government.
For example, the Wall Street Journal recently published a story highlighting efforts by Biden’s handlers to deceive the media, the public, and influential Democrats about Biden’s physical and mental health. According to the Journal, “Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll.”
Except for Biden’s family, the “yea-sayers” are mostly employees paid with our tax dollars. It’s one thing to exaggerate or put a positive spin on events; it’s another to intentionally deceive the public, which is apparently what the handlers have been doing.
Another example: Hillary Clinton’s campaign made and paid for the Russian collusion hoax, which asserted that Donald Trump had “worked with the Russians to try to rig the 2016 election,” to quote then-House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.). It was one of the most blatant and egregious disinformation efforts we have ever seen.
Although Clinton and her campaign were not part of the government at the time, they were working behind the scenes with government agents — including the FBI and elected Democrats — to spread disinformation. Several operatives within the FBI were promoting the hoax and giving it the appearance of fact, which allowed the media to cover the issue ad infinitum. One FBI agent, Kevin Clinesmith, even lied to the FISA Court so the government could continue monitoring the phone calls of U.S. citizens.
The hoax cost taxpayers millions of dollars, first with the Mueller Report and then the Durham Report. Yet no collusion was found, just disinformation.
A third example has to do with COVID. Retired Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, is out with his new book “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service.” In it he writes, “We are living in an era in which information that is patently untrue gets repeated enough times that it becomes part of our everyday dialogue and starts to sound true.” Yes, and there may be no one more guilty than Fauci.
At best, Fauci disseminated misinformation, along with a whole lot of hubris. At the beginning of the pandemic, he ridiculed the idea of the public wearing face masks. Some three months later, he was urging everyone to wear a mask, even two masks, regardless of age or health status. One of those pieces of advice was misinformation — maybe both.
But even if much of his advice was misinformation, there is at least one instance where he was almost certainly guilty of disinformation: his assertion of the natural origin of the COVID-19 virus.
Today, several years later, there is a widespread assumption that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Virility Institute in China. Fauci did not want people to believe the lab-leak theory, perhaps because he and others had worked with and provided federal funds to that laboratory.
I could provide several more examples of government disinformation, especially with regard to immigration and the government’s response. But the widespread distrust of government because of its disinformation efforts leads us to its response to the attempted assassination of Trump.
The FBI will oversee the investigation, and we all hope it does a thorough job. But given the FBI’s checkered past with Trump, can the public trust the agency? The FBI is under the Department of Justice. Considering DOJ’s many legal attacks on Trump, can the public trust it? Given the administration’s willingness to spread disinformation about the president’s health, can the public trust what it claims?
There is no small irony in that the same government that tried to establish a disinformation governance board has lost so much of the public’s trust because of its own disinformation.
Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas.