Stop ‘Truth Decay’ Before It Consumes The World
In these perilous times, truth decay is spreading so fast that we’re all going to need a worldwide, massive root canal to avoid terminal putrification.
There was a time when fact checking was not a routine facet of news gathering. But it has become required as intentional misinformation and conspiracy theories rapidly spread through social media and into mainstream media. In today’s digital world, a lie spreads like a pandemic virus and it is difficult if not impossible to put the toothpaste back into the truth tube. And that is multiplied one hundred fold with the use of artificial intelligence which can quickly and skillfully create false images,misleading millions.
As the adage goes, truth is the first casualty of war. But lies compound lies and when the truth comes out, the damage will be infinitely worse and do irreparable harm to those people and nations who lie.
The abundance of false information, and a general lack of consensus on shared facts is another way of describing propaganda or what the RAND Corp. calls “Truth Decay.”
In 2018, the RAND Corp., a non-profit, non-partisan think tank, examined what it termed “Truth Decay,” in the context of media literacy, individual resistance and vaccine hesitancy.
In August, two RAND researchers, Heather J. Williams and Caitlin McCulloch, wrote that “The line between fact and opinion in public discourse has been eroding, and with it the public’s ability to have arguments and find common ground based in fact.”
“Everyone can feel how it affects their day-to-day lives — the family member who has fallen down a QAnon rabbit hole, avoiding discussing current affairs with a neighbor, or the fractious discourse on a television program. But this phenomenon is also degrading U.S. national security, in ways more difficult to observe,” said the RAND report.
RAND concluded that the two primary causes of Truth Decay are political polarization and the spread of misinformation.
“Exposure to misinformation leads to increased polarization, and increased polarization decreases the impact of factual information. Individuals, institutions, and the nation as a whole are vulnerable to this vicious cycle,” the report said.
The report said that leaders gain power because of the polarization that results from Truth Decay.
“And politicians are, by tradition, if not by nature, selective in the information they present. Put more bluntly, politicians lie,” the report said.
It noted that it is hard to discern when politicians are knowingly lying and when they are deceiving themselves. The result is the same.
“Put all of this into the blender with social media and the 24-hour news cycle, and leaders can spread shameless lies rapidly across the globe,” the report said.
The report noted that domestic accountability is key to the credibility of leadership in foreign policy. The report singled out former president trump who was seen with little confidence around the world because he relied heavily on opinion rather than fact.
It is an indisputable fact that Hamas militants committed untold atrocities when they attacked Israel last month. Israel quickly labeled the day as the nation’s equivalent of 9/11, and has responded with a counter attack with virtually no bounds aimed at totally destroying Hamas. Israel has the impossible task of retaliating without drawing the anger of the Muslim world and beyond.
Destroying a Palestinian hospital would not be a good thing for Israel.
So, a hospital is destroyed in Gaza and Hamas blames the Israelis and the Israelis blame Hamas. Neither side can be expected to tell the truth. Whoever gets the story out first wins. The wise person would be reading everything carefully with skeptical eyes and a focus on reputable sources and ignoring the disreputable. But who is who?
Who to believe? To buttress its claims, Israel released a video purporting to prove the strike was a result of a malfunctioning Palestinian rocket. The New York Times later discredited the video based on analysis of the video’s time stamp. The jury is out over who is responsible although most of the known facts point to Hamas and the failed rocket.
Or should Hamas be believed with the photos it released on the hospital and the grieving survivors of the victims. Skeptics have suggested that the list of casualties noted by Hamas may be fabricated.
The Gaza Ministry of Health has published a list of names of 6,747 who had died as of October 26 since the bombing campaign began, including 2,664 children. The Intercept, however, found that one 14-year-old boy was listed twice, bringing the total down to 6,746.
President Joe Biden’s National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, John Kirby, was among the skeptics and said the Gaza Ministry is “a front for Hamas” and that “we can’t take anything coming out of Hamas, including the so-called Ministry of Health at face value.”
A report in HuffPost found that nearly 20 State Department reports have cited the ministry, and one even said the ministry may have undercounted.
“The numbers are likely much higher, according to the UN and NGOs reporting on the situation,” the State Department report read.
The White House cannot have it both ways; either the Gaza ministry is giving legitimate reports on casualties or not. Israel has responded to the reports from the Gaza ministry by imposing a total communications blackout on Gaza.
The Associated Press has reported that the Ministry of Health’s figures from previous conflicts have broadly matched the numbers arrived at by both the Israeli government and the United Nations. The State Department also has long considered the numbers reliable.
Neither Israel nor Hamas can be trusted to report accurate numbers of killed and wounded. One particularly gruesome report has claimed that Hamas beheaded young Israeli victims. Israel says it happened, and it further supports the Israeli claims of Hamas’ inhumanity. Hamas denies the report, claiming it plays into Israel’s strategy to exaggerate and lie about Hamas actions.
At first blush, a social network post apparently repudiated published reports about babies that were allegedly beheaded by Hamas. The post was liked more than 10,000 times in three days and the original post in X was shared more than 50,000 times in three days. The post claimed “that an Israeli newspaper investigation found no babies were beheaded during Oct. 7 Hamas attack.”
“Haaretz investigation EXPOSES all the ISRAELI LIES from October 7th just like I predicated (sic),” reads text included in the post, referring to the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.
The post says the paper concluded “No beheaded babies.”
However, the newspaper’s website had no reports describing the so-called investigation or detailing any of the purported findings. Haaretz responded to the post with an X post of its own that called out what it described as “blatant lies” and said it had “absolutely no basis in Haaretz’s reporting.”
Haaretz reported the decapitated bodies of babies had been found following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. An international group of forensic pathologists have confirmed babies were found decapitated, though it’s unclear if that happened before or after death.
Al Jazeera spoke to a number of Palestinian journalists in Gaza, the West Bank and beyond. The credibility of those interviewed has to be questioned given the years of hostility and anger between Palestine and Israel.
Majd Said, Abu Dhabi TV anchor, West Bank, said he covered the Al-Aqsa Intifada, the second Intifada from 2000–2005.
“It was cruel and difficult back then, but it’s nothing like what we’re witnessing now. The level of oppression we experience both as citizens and journalists is unmatched — oppressed because of the feelings of helplessness on all fronts, politically, on the ground and on the human level. We are unable to offer anything to our people in Gaza,” Said said.
Said said he was venting because “the amount of destruction, killing, and displacement is nothing we have ever experienced before. I witnessed the first Intifada and was a journalist covering the second Intifada, but never have I seen such atrocities.”
Another reporter interviewed was Aseel Mafarjeh, freelance reporter, West Bank. Mafarjeh said that interviewing “the families of martyrs” after the burial is more difficult than the funeral itself.
“Some wish they had died in their place, while others remain steadfast. You can never forget what a mother or father say about their martyred son,” Mafarjeh said.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s embattled prime minister, would be committing political suicide by admitting that Israel had any part in the Palestinian hospital bombing. Netanyahu has decided that to remain in power, he had to enlist far right politicians in his cabinet who are bent on destroying the Palestinians, regardless of the cost.
Hamas’s reputation does not make for credible reporting. Hamas has vowed to destroy Israel and all Jews and will do all it can to immolate Israel’s reputation as a democracy. Recently, Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’ political bureau and a spokesman for the Iran-backed terror organization, justified and reinforced the organization’s goals.
“We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again,” Hamad said. “[The Oct. 7 massacre] is just the first time and there will be a second, a third, a fourth … the occupation must come to an end. The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears. It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On Oct. 7 … everything we do is justified.”
Comments by U.S. authorities also are suspect as politicians twist scenarios to meet their political positions. A recent example involved Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., who was misleading when she conflated the number of hostages taken by Hamas with the number of Americans stuck in Gaza.
On Oct. 31, Blackburn posted on X, “The White House admitted Hamas is holding nearly 500 Americans hostage in Gaza.”
White House officials actually said that fewer than 10 Americans were among the more than 200 people who had been kidnapped during the Hamas assault on Israel that left more than 1,400 dead. Apparently, Blackburn was referring to estimates of the 500 to 600 Americans who have been unable to leave Gaza since the war broke out. Officials have relayed the estimate for weeks.
Whether Blackburn’s misinformation was intentional or not, right wing politicians and personalities, believed her post as a new development, and were quick to accuse the White House of “covering up” the information.
In 2020, while still president, trump reportedly kicked around a plan to shoot “missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs.” His then- defense secretary, Mark Esper, raised serious objections about attacking a sovereign nation and trump responded by saying the bombing could be done “quietly” and “No one would know it was us.” Trump had repeatedly claimed that the U.S. had to act because Mexico was doing little to halt the flow of illegal drugs, and fentanyl in particular.
The truth is that the Mexican government is in fact cooperating with the United States to limit the export of fentanyl. The country recently passed legislation limiting the import of chemicals required for production of fentanyl and has boosted prosecution of fentanyl producers.
Truth had no place in trump’s thinking.
A successful lie begins slowly and gains traction as it is repeated enough times. In 2022, during his successful run for Ohio’s Senate seat, J.D. Vance raised the right wing conspiracy, without anything remotely factual, that the government may be targeting children in the MAGA heartland with fentanyl.
“If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl? And it does look intentional,” said Vance, whose poll numbers reflected growing support for Vance while other Republicans in House and Senate races also made connections between fentanyl deaths to White House policies on border security and crime.
Elected officials occasionally take a principled stand against government lies and the lies repeated by their political parties. One recent example was Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., who announced he won’t seek reelection to his sixth term in Congress, accusing his fellow Republicans of too often “lying to America” and being “fixated on retribution and vengeance.”
“Too many Republican leaders are lying to America, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, describing January 6 as an unguided tour of the Capitol, and asserting that the ensuing prosecutions are a weaponization of our justice system,” Buck said in the video. “It is impossible for the Republican Party to confront our problems and offer a course correction for the future, while being obsessively fixated on retribution and vengeance for contrived injustices of the past.”
Political courage in the face of the government’s propaganda machine was in short supply in after the deadly, Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. After the attacks, the nation was gripped by a tsunami of patriotism coupled with an overarching anger and demand for revenge against the Muslim world.
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif. was the only member of Congress who voted against authorizing military force after the attacks. The vote cleared the way for President George W. Bush to order military attacks against Afghanistan and then Iraq.
The international Peace Abby honored Lee with the International Courage of Conscience Award. But the congresswoman was quickly vilified and deluged with insults and death threats after her prescient warning to the nation to “let us not become the evil that we deplore.”
“Our country is in a state of mourning,” Lee said in a speech at the time. “Some of us must say, let’s step back for a moment. Let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.”
Lies and cover-ups in the name of politics are not new. The most dramatic example in recent years involved the war in Iraq and the government’s false claim that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. The claims were the basis of the U.S. invasion of Iraq but no weapons of destruction were ever found.
President George W. Bush told the world that “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” This was later proven to be a total fabrication.
Secretary of State Colin Powell repeated the administration’s false case at the U.N. Security Council meeting on Feb. 5, 2001, declaring that “Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. He is so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes.”
The Bush administration’s longstanding claim of “intelligence failure” infers an unintentional gap in intelligence but it obscures the truth that the government lied by making claims without evidence to manufacture consent for the war.
“There was no such ‘intelligence failure,’” wrote independent journalist Jeremy R. Hammond in the Sept. 8, 2012, edition of Politics. “On the contrary, there was an extremely successful disinformation campaign coordinated by the CIA in furtherance of the government’s policy of seeking regime change in Iraq.”
The war in Vietnam, likewise, was a compendium of lies upon lies upon lies as illustrated by the Pentagon Papers, a top secret report about the history of the war in Vitenam, published on Sunday, June 13, 1971, by the N.Y. Times.
By the time the U.S. was forced to withdraw from Vietnam, more than 3 million people were dead, 58,000 of them American.
The primary rationale for U.S. involvement was the claim that North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, was a tool of Soviet expansionism. The papers, however, showed that the Vietnamese nationalists were winning their fight for independence under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, a Communist. Ho had worked with the United States against Japan in World War II.
President Kennedy increased U.S. involvement along with approval of a clandestine effort to replace South Vietnam’s president, Ngô Đình Diệm, with a regime more friendly with the U.S. Diệm was arrested and assassinated on Nov. 2, 1963. The CIA-backed coup d’état was a success.
And after Kennedy’s assassination, the government created the necessary, mini-Pearl Harbor to give President Lyndon B. Johnson a plausible reason for full scale invasion. The rational came on Aug. 4, 1964, when the White House announced that the North Vietnamese had attacked the U.S.S. Maddox in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. Later investigations showed the attack never happened.