The ‘misinformation’ label is just an excuse to censor conservatives
Timothy P. Carney
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Normal political debate involves one side making a claim or argument and the other side using facts, logic, and argumentation in order to rebut the first side.
Likewise, the 20th century self-image of the American news media includes that of a neutral reporter that conveys the arguments and claims of the competing sides in a political debate.
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A significant part of the Democratic Party and the liberal media, though, decided in the last couple of decades that they didn’t want to play this game. They wanted to disqualify the other side’s arguments and claims in one way or another. In some cultures, this is easy — just accuse the other side of “hate speech” or blasphemy.
Americans, however, hold dearly to the notions of free speech and pluralism. For that reason, the would-be censors need to cast their opponents’ views and claims as something besides ordinary speech and opinions.
Hence the rise of the words “disinformation” and “misinformation” since President Barack Obama’s second term.
iFrame Object
Misinformation or disinformation is a knowingly false claim that causes harm. If something is an outright lie and is harmful, then it could be claimed to fall outside the safe harbor of free speech. Thus, the would-be censors on the Left like to brand the claims and arguments of the Right as misinformation and disinformation.
Some of the folks throwing this term around actually believe that they are witnessing conservatives telling harmful lies. Some folks using this term are just trying to work the refs and come up with excuses to censor their opponents — say, by getting Facebook, Twitter, and Google to throttle access, or getting news reporters to treat one side as simply flat wrong.
Political scientist Brendan Nyhan accused Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) of peddling “misinformation” on the origins of the coronavirus. The Washington Post news pages flatly stated, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.”
Got it? Tom Cotton isn’t simply saying something we experts and reporters disagree with — it is objectively false and harmful.
Cotton, you see, had gone on Fox Business on Feb. 16 and said that he rejected the story that the virus originated from Wuhan’s seafood market. “The virus went into that food market before it came out of that food market,” Cotton said, adding that “we don’t know where it originated.”
He said that “we have to get to the bottom of” where it came from.
In that context, Cotton mentioned something very relevant:
“A few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 superlaboratory that researches human infectious diseases. Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says.”
This wasn’t misinformation, this wasn’t a conspiracy theory, and this hadn’t been debunked.
These days, it’s clear that the U.S. intelligence community was divided on whether it believed the virus came out of a lab or not. It also appears that government officials talked scientists into publicly discrediting the idea of a lab leak — for political reasons.
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This happens on all sorts of issues.
https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607386380325326853
So remember this the next time some reporter, academic, or politician calls an argument or claim “misinformation” or “disinformation” — the “misinformation” may be true, but the person using the word would rather not have to argue against it, and would like Big Tech and Big Media to dismiss this competing argument out of hand.