How bad is the misinformation crisis?
Bad enough for us to get sucked into an excitement over it. Yet sometimes the excitement over something in media turns out to be a moral panic—itself an odd term. Moral panics often turn out to be things proclaimed to be worrisome and growing negative trends that turn out to be a lot of wind over nothing. Past moral panics have included some late-20th century fears of child sex abuse in private daycare, poisonings of Halloween candy, and scares of strangers abducting children—all examples off the top of my head that happen to involve children. Hmm.
At any rate, trying to decide whether something current is worthy of the popular excitement it generates involves looking for contrary evidence, which is to say, evidence suggesting an imagined trend isn’t really a trend at all. Or, better still, that the trend line actually runs in the opposite direction.
Philosopher Dan Williams (via Arnold Kling) embarked on a series of essays exploring contrary evidence beginning with a post Debunking Disinformation Myths, Part 1: This is not the "disinformation age" at his Substack newsletter. His introductory essay contains this passage:
To begin with, the idea that mainstream media is or ever was characterised by a high degree of objectivity is absurd. In the United Kingdom, the most popular newspaper has long been The Sun, although it is closely rivalled by The Daily Mail. Both are highly biased and propagandistic, and often extremely nasty. In these respects, they are similar to many other mainstream media outlets. Moreover, even much higher-quality sources (e.g., the BBC, the Financial Times, the New York Times, etc.) have been guilty of incredibly biased and misleadingreporting, including burying politically inconvenient stories about Soviet genocides and famines and grossly exaggerating the evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The rest of the essay contains several morsels of food for thought. I’m not quite sure what to conclude from it, or if there are any easy conclusions. I just hope to avoid getting swept up in another moral panic, which is something social media seems particularly given to.
Hi. Won't be dropping in much before Tuesday because work schedule. But I did happen to comment on one of Jonah's podcasts, "Our Ancient Faith," which is about Lincoln, and is getting raves from listeners because the guest is top-notch. Another commenter asked Jonah if he could clarify some things about Whiggishness, and I chimed in with a related question. Jonah himself replied: "𝗜'𝗹𝗹 𝗮𝗱𝗱𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝗼." So that's a preview of Saturday's Ruminant, which I'm looking forward to.
If you want to avoid a morel panic, simply choose not to hunt mushrooms, and refuse to those found by others.
I'm sorry, was that in spore taste? 🙄