Agreeing on facts a casualty of politics
Experts, observers see no easy fix for misinformation, disinformation ahead of ’24
With the 2024 presidential election still more than one year away, voters have been flooded with misinformation and disinformation at a pace never seen before.
The disinformation has led to increasing political polarization in the country as former President Donald Trump faces four criminal indictments and President Joe Biden faces an impeachment inquiry by House Republicans.
The most prominent example of disinformation, observers said, is that Trump maintains that he won the 2020 presidential election, something repeated by his supporters for more than two years. That misinformation helped cause the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that led to more than 1,000 rioters being arrested for storming the U.S. Capitol and trying to stop the certification of the Electoral College votes that eventually confirmed Biden as president.
The ongoing clash has led to a nationwide battle on the facts that has not cooled.
“This is totally on the increase,” said Scott McLean, a longtime political science professor at Quinnipiac University. “This is tied to partisanship. The more you have a partisan leaning, the more likely you are to think that people who disagree with you on values are also wrong on the facts. What we’re increasingly saying is because I don’t agree with you, that means all of the facts that you’re using are lies. This isn’t just one party. This is a feature of partisanship. … Facts don’t speak for themselves today.”
Political disputes have been around for centuries, but the rhetoric and polarization are speeding up with partisan media outlets and distorted information on social media and the internet.
“We’ve always been cynical about politicians who lie,” McLean said in an interview. “Now, what we’re increasingly saying is that it’s OK to lie in politics — as long as you win. People are OK with lying. Disinformation campaigns have
rendered people so cynical that they don’t believe anyone is ever telling the truth.”
Nationwide, millions of voters agree with Trump that the election was stolen. At the same time, millions of Democrats have polar opposite views of Republicans on gun control, crime, climate change, abortion, immigration, and Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
“There is one party’s facts and the other party’s facts,” McLean said. “We’re fighting to make our set of facts the ones that are in charge. So the question of whether they’re accurate or true is just sort of out the window too often. I’m sort of exaggerating it because obviously people still believe that there is a truth and there are facts, but I just believe this is under assault in today’s political system. Besides, even if you’re just reporting the facts, you’re going to be accused of being on one side or the other.”
A nationwide poll last year of more than 1,000 adults by the Pearson Institute and the Associated Press showed that 91% of those surveyed believe that misinformation “is a problem,” and 74% described it as a major problem.
“About three-quarters believe misinformation is increasing extreme political views and hate crimes including violence motivated by race, gender, or religion,” the pollsters said. “About half of adults say misinformation reduces trust in government.”
A recent CBS News/YouGov poll showed that the Trump voters believe that Trump is telling them the truth more often than anyone else.
When asked who they believe “that what they tell you is true,” 71% said Trump, 63% said friends and family, 56% conservative media figures and 42% religious leaders. The same poll showed that 77% of likely Republican voters said the criminal charges against Trump in Georgia for seeking to overturn the 2020 election are motivated by politics.
Both sides of the aisle
Joseph Visconti, one of Connecticut’s most outspoken supporters of Trump, said that some voters are comfortable remaining in their own echo chamber in which they do not hear opposing viewpoints.
“I’ve talked to a lot of my right-wingers, and they don’t want to hear,” Visconti said in an interview. “The lefties don’t want to hear the whole picture, either. They’re too fatigued. They stay with what they know. That’s dangerous because they’re only getting the spin or the viewpoint from this one source. The people are too fatigued to read The Daily Beast, Mother Jones. All of them are really lefty. But I’ll get information from them that I won’t get either from Drudge, Breitbart, Fox News, or one of the other rightwing” outlets.
A problem, Visconti said, is a blurring of the lines on Facebook and other social media, where news is sometimes filled with halftruths and partial truths.
“There’s a fine line between punditry, commentary and news,” Visconti said. “That line has been crossed. It’s clickbait. A lot of this stuff has been targeted to catch eyeballs under the appearance of news for corporate clickbait dollars and ad revenue.”
Jonathan Pelto, a liberal Democrat who currently teaches about misinformation both in Connecticut and online in a graduate course at the University of Florida, said he does not believe there is an immediate solution to a growing problem.
“The vast majority of Republicans believe that Donald Trump won the election,” said Pelto, a former state legislator and former gubernatorial candidate. “Obviously, he didn’t win the election.
Yet, the majority of active Republicans believe something that is not true. … Donald Trump says the election was stolen. It’s the Deep State. It’s a conspiracy. And the true believers say, ‘Yeah.’ So the Republicans keep moving to the right, and the Democrats keep moving to the left.”
Among both Republicans and Democrats, the traditional moderates who helped forge compromises in the 1980s and 1990s have largely disappeared from their parties. Some voters on both sides have become cheerleaders for their parties’ extremes.
“They want to hear messages that ‘don’t tell me something that doesn’t match up with my beliefs,’ ” Pelto said. “‘Don’t confuse me with any facts. I want passion.’ So misinformation and disinformation actually furthers their passion. So they’re not going to change. They’re not going to say, one day, ‘Trump is a lying, narcissistic, mentally ill person.’ They can’t go there because they have been such a strong supporter and so committed.”
Fox News vs. MSNBC
The worldview of voters is often shaped and reinforced by the news outlets that they watch and read. Many conservatives watch Fox News, while liberals favor MSNBC. People watching those networks often have completely different views, shaping their opinions on issues like whether Biden is too old for the job and whether he should be reelected. It also reinforces their views of Trump, the FBI, law enforcement in general, and Ukraine, among others.
Fox viewers get a steady diet of Hunter Biden, immigration problems at the border, and crime in Democratic-run cities. MSNBC viewers see plenty about Trump and little about crime.
“It’s the facts that they stress,” McLean said. “Yes, Hunter Biden did some bad things. Is that something that needs 24/7 news coverage? Trump did some things. Does that mean the other networks should put 24/7 coverage on that? That’s where this becomes a big problem when these networks only focus on a few facts and not something more comprehensive. It’s also part of the misinformation when these networks are spending most of their time trying to fact-check, they don’t have time to cover anything else.”
In a TV appearance earlier this year, longtime broadcaster Bob Costas said, “If you were someone from outer space and somehow you understood English, and you watched CNN for a week and you watched Fox for a week, you’d have a much better understanding of what was happening in the world from watching CNN than from watching Fox.”
Fact-checkers
With so much misinformation on the internet and in the public sphere, voters sometimes do not know where to turn to get accurate information. The logical place normally would be the “fact-checker” articles in newspapers and online. But some conservatives have charged that the fact-checkers themselves are liberals. A national poll by the Pew Research Center in 2019 showed that 70% of Republicans believe the fact-checkers favor one side, while only 29% of Democrats believed that — and 69% of Democrats said the fact-checkers deal fairly with all sides.
“Liberals think you can factcheck things, and ‘Oh, we’ve won,’ ” McLean said. “That’s a very antiquated view that made a lot of sense in a previous political area, but I’m skeptical that’s all that needs to happen in the current political era. … If the lies are so constant, just catching people in a lie doesn’t do anything. We’ve become desensitized to being lied to all the time.”
Besides policy issues, many Republicans and Democrats cannot even agree on whether nonpartisan public servants have performed well, including outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley and infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci. Trump said recently that Milley was a traitor, who, in a previous time, would have been executed.
But Milley, in his often-fiery retirement remarks Friday, said that the military will continue to defend the Constitution.
“We don’t take an oath to a king, or queen, or a tyrant or a dictator,” Milley said. “And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”
Weddings and Thanksgiving Day
The polarization has seeped down into family life across America as some voters seek likeminded people.
In some families, the parents are concerned that their daughter or son might marry someone from the other political party.
“There is truth in that,” said Gary Rose, a longtime political science professor at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield who has studied polarization and teaches classes on it. “Now, it’s not like marry within your own religion. It’s marry within your own party framework, within your own tribe. … This is very real. I think the word that describes it is tribal.”
The issue with weddings can also extend to Thanksgiving dinner.
“Think about the dinner tables with relatives over,” Rose said. “It lends itself to hostility. That’s why they say it’s best not to talk about politics around the dinner table any longer when you have a big event. It’s only going to end up causing hard feelings, and dinner is going to end up with some people getting real quiet and angry. This is the culture we’re living in now.”
He added, “There just doesn’t seem to be any middle ground any more. It’s the polarized world we’re living in.”
Nationally known attorney George Conway recently said on CNN that misinformation has become rampant among viewers.
“They are addicted to hearing what they want to hear — whether it’s true or not,” Conway said. “They sometimes would tell the truth on Fox, and they would get blowback for it, and they realized they couldn’t do that — so they kept putting on [Trump attorneys] Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani even though they knew — as the emails that were produced in discovery showed — they were peddling lies.”
The future
In the short term, some observers do not see any easy solutions to the problem.
“What worries me is that disinformation lends itself to resolving differences by force,” said McLean, the Quinnipiac professor. “If you really cannot have a debate on the facts, violence becomes an increasingly workable option for some groups and people. That’s scary. Democracy really depends on that there’s a world of facts.”
The Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, McLean said, “is an example of what can happen when some people really believe a certain set of facts.”
Visconti said some voters are getting burned out by the constant rhetoric and are becoming cynical about politics.
“The public is so fatigued right now that they don’t want to pay attention,” Visconti said. “This is a dangerous point. They don’t want political solutions, and we end up being polarized. … If you’re looking for solutions on what to do, you’re not going to get any corporate entity to really move in any direction unless it’s Bud Light and there’s some kind of a boycott. People aren’t going to boycott for the truth.”
Visconti added, “If you want to be informed, you must inform yourself. You have to read everything. Don’t complain. And if you want to be misinformed, then just read one or two things, and you will definitely be misinformed in this world because there is too much information on any issue.”
Unlike some, Visconti believes that a solution is up to the voters.
“Read everything on the other side of the aisle,” Visconti said. “Right now, there is no middle ground because we’re polarized. We’re going to have to find common ground or the chaos is going to continue to grow in this country. How do we get our country back? We have to all decide we want it back. The only way to get it back is to understand each other. And the only way to do that is to read articles we don’t want to read. Truth we don’t want to hear. Pieces of information that make us uncomfortable about Trump or Biden or whoever. … We won’t have a country unless we all decide to get informed. It’s the only answer.”