Hurricanes, Misinformation, and Truth

Our war over misinformation isn’t about technology, journalism, or politics. It’s something else.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene’s devastation, America is having yet another distressing disagreement over truth. Has our government handled the response to the devastation of Helene with baseline competence?

The official story of establishment leaders is state and federal authorities, including FEMA, made heroic efforts to help those who lost their homes and loved ones in the storm. Officials put out statements and reporters conducted interviews. On social media, on the other hand, other people have claimed government officials abandoned the people of North Carolina. They claim bodies were left to rot on roads, nobody is helping survivors, and no significant help will be coming to help rebuild. They claim in some cases FEMA officials actively blocked private aid from reaching survivors—grounding helicopters and confiscating goods in private conveys to inventory them without distributing them. Some on social media claim this as first-hand testimony.

The White House put out an indignant statement about the problems of misinformation getting in the way of the response. People on Twitter/X, as well as the Republican presidential candidate, cried out that the government was lying and covering up its failures, possibly with corrupt motive.

Which is it? How is anyone supposed to know? Unless you’re actually on the ground right now, you have no way to know for sure which story is the truth. You have to take other people’s word for it. There’s no question the United States government has awesome logistics capabilities. According to popular military lore, America can set up a working Burger King in any remote area in the world in less than forty-eight hours. On the other hand, this same government has a poor track record in handling disasters—its Katrina response was a tragic circus, and it’s not like it did a bang up job on Covid. It’s equally reasonable to believe a combination of bureaucracy, incompetence, and misplaced priorities might have once again had them totally blunder things up. Is one side lying? Is the other? Are both sides telling the partial truth? Is the truth somewhere in between?

It’s like this on issue after issue. Naturally, a lot of people are beyond frustrated with the situation. America never used to be like this. We had disagreements, but we generally agreed on the basic facts. These days, no matter how much you read and listen, it’s often impossible to know for sure what’s really going on. How can we have elections to hold government officials to account if we can’t even decide what it is they’ve done? Our collective inability to navigate fundamental facts in a superpower democracy is absurd. As democratic citizens in a competent nation, we all should know exactly how the response to Hurricane Helene is going without having to drive to North Carolina to investigate ourselves.

Which brings us to misinformation.

The solution many people are now pushing is to simply stamp out lies. They want to get the new technology of social media under control and marginalize anyone sharing “misinformation” or just make them shut up. The problem is their analysis of the situation is completely wrong. This isn’t a problem of liars, technology, or “misinformation.” The cause of our present absurdity is there’s no longer solid institutions we can trust.

JOURNALISM YELLOW AND GRAY

The idea that journalism in America has always been some noble, neutral, non-partisan priesthood is a myth. In reality, there has always been both neutral journalism and partisan sensationalism, with the partisan sensationalism being the norm. While a significant portion of professional journalism sought to follow a more neutral and dispassionate viewpoint during the later half of the twentieth century, that was mostly a peculiarity to the era and market choice. Before The New York Times ushered in the era of gray journalism, the leading model was the yellow journalism of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.

For most of American history, journalism and newspapers were sensational and partisan. They were aligned with political parties, if not outright party mouthpieces. They fought for readers the way modern websites fight for clicks and views. They battled with one another in a media war, with one paper in a city supporting one perspective while the other represented the other. Many early newspapers were official political party organs, growing out of the outlandish and vicious political pamphlets that came before them. One of America’s first political journalists was James Callender, whom Thomas Jefferson hired as a personal hatchetman to smear opponents for his Democratic-Republican party.

This style of journalism was perfected around the turn of the twentieth century by Hearst and Pulitzer’s model of newspaper-as-circus with screaming headlines, big illustrations and graphics, salacious stories, hordes of anonymous sources, and nasty investigations of prominent people. These newspapers’ sensationalist and questionable stories were rightfully blamed for inflaming national passions and manipulating national opinion to push the United States into a war with Spain, causing the Spanish-American War. There was finally national backlash against it when Hearst’s New York Journal ran an editorial in April of 1901 advocating for the assassination of President McKinley, who then was actually assassinated that September.

The gray journalism style of the middle-twentieth century was pioneered by The New York Times in the early twentieth century as a counter to this yellow style of journalism. It was meant to be more neutral and respectable, but not as a public service. It sought to reach a different market, one more upscale and mercantile. The establishment found the sensationalism of yellow journalism embarrassing and undignified, and businesspeople wanted accurate information they could act on. This model came to dominate the twentieth century as dueling multiple newspaper towns died out and the three networks of television rose. With only three networks of television news on offer, creating an effective three-way monopoly, television news would have to be respectable and play the middle aligned with the establishment.

That’s not to say the other model died, as anyone who remembers the rags in supermarket aisles knows well. Nor did this model die in political magazines, which did their share of muckracking and advocating and partisan propaganda. Nor did they die on the radio—recall Father Coughlin? Nor did they die in the newsletters ideologues subscribed to—remember the John Birch Society and Lyndon LaRouche? Grey journalism was always just a slice of a larger and more contentious market for information.

Social media isn’t the problem, because social media didn’t change anything. Social media is just another technology through which people communicate, and people haven’t changed. People write and speak with the same goals they have always had. Some are trying to serve a market. They supply information they think people want, or need, or hope to hear. Others are trying to change society. They say what they think will convince people to do the things they want. The technology we use to do it is just the tool—the printing press, the book, the magazine, the radio, the television program, and now social media. All that has changed is the platform on which we read what people have to say.

The one thing that has changed, however, is the society around which this media is playing out. Media is the same as ever, but our institutions are not. It isn’t the media we don’t trust. It’s our society we don’t trust. This is why enforcing standards against “misinformation” won’t make things better. It’s going to make them worse.

WHAT IS TRUTH?

How do we decide what is true and what is misinformation? There are two standards people use to evaluate information.

• When we want to believe something, we tend to ask whether we can believe it. This standard asks whether a thing can possibly be true. Can we present ourselves as a serious and reasonable person and still hold this belief?

• When we don’t want to believe something, we tend to ask whether we must believe it. This standard asks whether a thing cannot possibly be false. Can we present ourselves as a serious and reasonable person if we don’t hold this belief?

In between is the contested area of things we can believe but don’t have to believe. These are things that might be true, but might not be true. The majority of what we fight about falls into this contested area.

Most disagreements over truth aren’t disagreements about the truth, but over the standard we should apply for whether to accept something as true. The person who wants to believe something asks whether there’s enough facts and substance that they can plausibly believe it. Their opponent, who hates the belief and want it to be untrue, asks whether they have no choice but to accept it. If there’s any evidence to challenge or dispute the belief, they declare it false and “debunked.”

A great example of how this dynamic plays out—in a non-political context!—is the recent debate over whether human civilization might be a few thousand years older than we thought.

About two years ago, Netflix put out a documentary called Ancient Apocalypse hosted by the journalist Graham Hancock, which triggered intense backlash among professional archeologists. The documentary explored whether human civilization might be older than we long believed—not about 5,000 years old but perhaps over 13,000 years old. This earlier human civilization, it proposed, was destroyed by a comet impact on the North American ice sheet during the Younger Dryas, creating rapid climate change and raising sea levels that flooded coastal settlements. According to Hancock, the ancient civilizations we now know were likely built by the survivors of this ancient disaster.

Professional archeologists for some reason really hate Hancock’s theory. When the documentary launched to some attention, they flooded the zone with angry denunciations that it was debunked misinformation and Netflix had been irresponsible to even air it.

Neither side was actually arguing over the facts of what we know about ancient humanity. Hancock pointed to evidence that could support this theory, depending on how we interpret it. To archaeologists, this evidence that conflicted with the established timeline could all be explained away and therefore was not conclusive. Hancock hadn’t proved to them they had no choice but to accept his theory, and so to them it was disproven and debunked. To outsiders without a stake, the intensity of the debate seemed irrational. It’s an interesting theory because it could be true, but quite far from conclusively true. It’s a contested question.

We once believed dinosaurs looked like big scaly lizards, while now we think they could have had feathers. We once thought Neanderthals were ape-like cavemen without intelligence or art, and we now know they were about as advanced as homo sapiens—even interbreeding so we share their DNA. It was once medical fact that stress caused ulcers, but we now know bacteria is the cause. None of these things were ever facts. They were our best ideas at the time existing in the middle zone between the things that could be true and those that had to be.

That’s the problem with “misinformation.” Almost every political fight comes down to these dueling standards. Everyone holds their own beliefs to the standard of whether they can believe them. Their enemies push back under the standard they don’t have to believe them. What most people call misinformation are facts that other people believe could be true, but they themselves have chosen not to believe because they don’t have to be true. They are neither proven nor disproven conclusively, but exist in the contested middle area.

THE TRUE PROBLEM: WE DON’T TRUST INSTITUTIONS

Information in America used to work, despite everyone understanding that no one had all the facts. America has always been a spectacle of conflicting claims, stories, facts, and ideas competing for your attention. The reason this utter racket of hucksters, preachers, earnest teachers, malarky and hullaballoo worked is because there were institutions standing between the people and those voices that people felt they could trust to navigate through the noise.

When sorting through the truth, there were always a few solid institutions you trusted to play things straight. These were the lighthouses and buoys that helped you anchor yourself and navigate through the storm. In some cases, they would be a solid and boring government agency. They might be a certain newspaper or writer or newscaster. They might be a famed university or accomplished professor. They might a giant corporation you knew was careful because it had a lot at stake. You might not like them, you might not share their agenda, but you felt confident if they were saying something it probably was correct and honestly what they believed.

When a hurricane happened, there were trusted places you could go to understand the baseline of what happened. Government officials would put out statements. Media companies would send out journalists you trusted to report. A professor would go on television to tell you what they knew. The police would give terse statements about what they discovered on the ground. A television station would interview witnesses and vouch for their interviews on the nightly news. You knew all these people had agendas, but trusted they were conscientious and would do their jobs with integrity if only to preserve their reputations.

There’s no longer enough of these institution people trust. We’ve seen countless polls that show a complete collapse in trust across nearly every institution in America—government, the media, academia, corporations, the police, and so on. People like to read these polls to imply it’s a problem of a people too irrationally distrustful, when in reality they demonstrate that nearly every American institution over the last few decades has squandered their reputations. They’ve all proven in the right circumstance they’re perfectly willing to manipulate, shade the truth, and lie. People don’t trust these institutions because they’ve demonstrated they’re untrustworthy.

Across society, leaders and institutions have repeatedly gotten caught burning reputations that prior generations spent decades building to ram through short-term goals. From governments, to corporations, to media, to academia, to business—they all have brazenly and obviously manipulated the public, abused their authority, taken advantage of people, and ignored their stated missions to chase other goals. We can call it messaging, public relations, or perception management, but everyone recognizes these are just words for dishonest, corrupt, and lie. Now we all act surprised when no one trusts them.

Here's the problem with trust: you can’t burn it and expect people to forget about what you did when you go back to telling truths. Every good lawyer learns that only incompetent lawyers lie or misrepresent or hide things from the court because, as every law clerk knows, once a judge catches a lawyer saying something untrue one time they might as well never submit another document again. The judge will never listen to another word they say. Once credibility is lost, it takes years to regain, if it can ever be.

The reason we don’t do anything about the real cause of our information crisis is because it’s difficult and the people in the best position to change things don’t want to. Reforming the broken cultures of countless powerful institutions isn’t exactly easy. Getting powerful leaders across an entire nation’s establishment to hold one another to account isn’t likely. Nor do our leaders or institutions want to change. They like what they’re doing and feel justified doing it—it’s necessary to win other important goals or defeat perceived enemies. This is why we focus instead on rooting out so-called misinformation.

We do need a common basis for reality. The solution, however, isn’t giving any group authority to force everyone to accept their version of the truth. Giving the same people who caused this problem more power to fix it obviously will never work. It will just drive people to other channels to communicate while increasing the distrust already tearing us apart. We can’t have two different standards of proof for whether something can be believed—can it be true for the things people want us to believe, and must it be true for the things they don’t. Anything someone reasonably can believe, but need not believe, is a contested question and can’t be misinformation because the truth is still unresolved.

What we’re facing isn’t a technology problem, a journalism problem, or even a cultural problem. It’s a collapse in trust. The only solution is for enough of America’s national institutions to actively earn back the trust they squandered by consistently over time behaving with integrity, telling the truth, and keeping their promises and their word. This way, when they speak, people will once again take them at their word. Since that’s incredibly difficult, however, we prefer to fight over misinformation instead.

What do you think is the solution to our information crisis? Join the community in the comments.