America's "Untouchable" Problem...

There was a story in the New York Times this week that didn’t get a lot of attention. No morning show round tables or interviews with the writers. In fact, my own attention was scattered as I scanned the first few paragraphs before hitting this quote:

“I think we’re in a really bleak situation here in this country. It’s hard to imagine how we get back from this…”

At that point, I went back to the beginning and read and concentrated on every single word. Believe it or not, this story had nothing to do with another incomprehensible tragedy, the one in Highland Park, Illinois that left all of us questioning, well, everything. Didn’t deal with inflation or war. No, this story was about another crisis that, believe it or not, might even be more difficult to remedy than any other.

The quotes were from Nina Jankowicz, who for a scant few days was the head of the Disinformation Governance Board, a body created this past April by the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission? The herculean task of figuring out how to fight back against the tsunami of baseless conspiracies flooding our society, and the unscrupulous people and bots that distribute them - disinformation. More accurately, a desperate stab at trying to scrape away at least some of the muck and mire that has made truth ambiguous if not unrecognizable.

As it turns out, Nina and the board weren’t around long enough to lose the name tags or bring a coffee cup from home, let alone do any scraping. Within just a few weeks the whole thing was “paused,” which is a silly and disingenuous way of saying it was sent to the scrap heap, ironically, the victim of a tidal wave of wait for it…disinformation.

The sad irony here is that no one really disagrees with the notion we’re literally choking to death on the stuff. In fact, the DHS in 2019, (during the Trump administration), commissioned a study that found increasing levels of disinformation could “aggravate existing societal fissures” and “cause panic that reverberates through the financial markets.” The push back against the board was actually proof positive that those nasty “societal fissures” have, in fact, been aggravated. The reaction was sadly predictable and in line with our current reality. If the democrats wanted it then any good republican knew it had to be part of an evil plot to undermine the democracy. And, hold on a sec before you call me a liberal leaning commie. If the same had been proposed during the previous administration you can bet the farm that that tidal wave of resistance would have been there all the same - just with a decidedly blue tint.

Let’s Be Honest…

While we should applaud the effort by the Biden administration to do something about this epidemic that now threatens our very democracy, having the government at the center of the solution was probably not the best choice. Besides the extreme political polarization that insured the aforementioned tidal waves of protests from one party or the other, having the government as a policing body in this area is a akin to the fox guarding the hen house. As anyone who has studied the work of Woodrow Wilson and George Creel can attest, the U.S. government could teach a master class on using disinformation as a tool for all kinds of bad stuff. It is that undeniable history that made the all to easy siren-like warnings of potential government censorship and partisan propaganda seem all too credible when the DHS board was announced a few months ago.

For Example…

In 1916 Wilson won re-election to the White House with a campaign centered on “he kept us out of war,” as in World War I. The U.S. supported the Allied powers but, playing firmly into the public sentiment in the country at the time, Wilson had been decidedly against actually entering the fray and encouraged Americans to remain neutral. But then, just five-months later, things changed. The Germans began to disrupt U.S. shipping and there was a growing concern in D.C. that the war was about to be lost. Wilson quickly flipped and convinced Congress to declare war. Convincing the American public to do an emotional u-turn on the subject would be the bigger challenge, which gave immediate rise to the Committee on Public Information, led by former journalist George Creel. His mandate was to win the public relations war at home; whip American citizens into, in Creel’s own words, a “white hot mass of patriotism.”

The CPI oversaw the work of tens of thousands who had been recruited to aid the cause. Top artists created patriotic posters touting the U.S.‘ military might and others that depicted German soldiers committing unthinkable atrocities. It stressed the clear and present danger that “your family” sitting there in Toledo, Ohio or Bakersfield, California might experience the same horror if the enemy was left unchecked. The content created was, by design, purely visceral, in hopes that Americans would just feel it, not think about it. And, in what you might call the early 20th century’s version of social media, an army of 75,000 Four Minute Men were recruited to go door to door, speak at town meetings, and generally whip up the fervor in cities across America. It worked like a charm. Young men flocked to enlist and were shipped off to the front lines. People and companies donated tons of goods and cash for the cause. Flags flew, people marched, normal, everyday German-Americans were suddenly suspect, feared, and even persecuted. Oh, and one more thing - it was all crap. Most of what the CPI was putting out, especially the parts about the “Mad Brute Germans” and the threat they represented - complete and total fabrication, but boy did it do the trick.

An Industry is Born. A New Brand of Warfare Created…

The work of the CPI was the largest and perhaps most successful disinformation campaign the world had ever seen and literally gave birth to the modern industry of public relations. Disinformation proved to be as powerful as any weapon on earth, especially when aimed at the gut and designed to trigger our deepest, most irrational fears. It changed a population’s outlook on the world. It subverted values. Turned neighbor against neighbor. Of course, it’s happened over and over and over again since that time and we still don’t seem to have the perspective necessary to avoid it.

Now imagine that sort of messaging designed to influence in one way or another connected to the power and reach of social media and all that comes with it. Factor in a public that, as a result of all this disinformation, is rapidly receding into tribalism and losing confidence and trust - at historic levels - in all the institutions that represent facts, truth, and foundational stability. And consider that 54% of adults in this country read below a 6th grade level and many can’t even define the idea of critical thought let alone employ it. Perspective and context don’t enter into that picture. It’s an ugly concoction that increasingly has the smell of something akin to anarchy.

Desperate Times Call For…

We need big ideas and equally impressive execution at all levels. We need programs like TEGNA’s Verify only 100 times larger and turbo charged to the max. And although I know this will go over like the proverbial lead balloon, once we have efforts like that in place companies need to make it open sourced - even pool resources with competitors - and make it available to any news organization that wants to participate. Before you get up in arms at the thought, let’s be honest, most of the newscasts in any given market are virtually identical anyway so what’s the harm, especially relative to the upside for humanity. And here’s another far out thought…how about an elite selective service of Fact Finders, and Content Creators who are trained to dig, do research and find truth in facts, not ideology. Make it an equal number of republicans, democrats, and independents who are trained to function the way we imagine the Supreme Court, Congress, or our news organizations should. Why can’t the major media companies along with any and all concerned with the deplorable state we find ourselves in band together to fund a blue ribbon Truth Project (or Truth Force? Fact Force?) that’s accessible to one and all, anywhere, at ANY time.

I know this all sounds like a bad Howard Beale rant, desperate and crazy and maybe it is but, like it or not, I think we’re at the proverbial fork in the road. Priorities need to be reassessed against a much broader concern than competition and capitalism. As utterly un-American as this sounds, the bottom line needs to be a secondary concern right now. Believe it or not, at this moment in time, there’s actually a greater concern. Remember where we started this rant…

“I think we’re in a really bleak situation here in this country. It’s hard to imagine how we get back from this…” Nina Jankowicz

You have to admit her words don’t really feel like hyperbole, do they? The time for incrementalism is long gone. Bring on the bold and the wacky, that final trick play or Hail Mary that just might turn the tide or at least shock the system and giving us time to figure out a better path.

Let’s end this with another, more famous quote that, no matter whether it really happened or not, is a sentiment that rings truer today than perhaps at any other time in our country post civil war. After a session of the Constitutional Convention Franklin was asked “what kind of government have you given us?”

“A democracy, if you can keep it.”

That challenge, that question, is now squarely on the table. It’s now very literal and real and the degree of passion and boldness with which we address it, or don’t, could become the greatest inflection point in our history.