The gray zone between partisan spin and misinformation

The gray zone between partisan spin and misinformation

How to categorize the GOP response to the omicron variant

By Daniel W. Drezner

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

November 30, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EST

Ben Smith has done a stellar job reporting on the media beat for the New York Times for the past year or so. I look forward to his column dropping on Sunday nights, as they are usually far more entertaining than whatever sportsball is on that evening. This past Sunday’s column was no exception, focusing on the October 2020 Biden laptop story and whether it qualified as “misinformation” or, in Smith’s words, “a threadbare, 11th-hour effort to produce a late-campaign scandal.”

Smith notes that responsible outlets like the Wall Street Journal took a hard look at the story and decided that as October surprises go, it was a weak one. There was zero evidence that then-Vice President Joe Biden had tried to alter public policy to enrich his family. That did not mean that the story was misinformation, however.

Smith fears that some are carrying the label of “misinformation” too far:

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The new social media-fueled right-wing populists lie a lot, and stretch the truth more. But as American reporters quizzing Donald Trump’s fans on camera discovered, his audience was often in on the joke. And many of the most offensive things he said weren’t necessarily lies — they were just deeply ugly to half the country, including most of the people running news organizations and universities …

Politics isn’t a science. We don’t need to mystify the old-fashioned practice of news judgment with a new terminology. There’s a danger in adopting jargony new frameworks we haven’t really thought through. The job of reporters isn’t, ultimately, to put neat labels on the news. It’s to report out what’s actually happening, as messy and unsatisfying as that can be.

I would push back a little on some of Smith’s claims. Donald Trump lied a LOT during the 2016 campaign and as president, and the most offensive things he said were not true. Also, saying that politics isn’t a science is fighting words to a political scientist. Still, Smith has a valid point to make. The overreactions to the Biden laptop story conflated misinformation with oppo dumps.

My question is about the large gray area between misinformation and partisan talking points. Just as security analyst talk about “gray zone” conflicts between peace and a declared war, it is difficult at times to parse when a partisan talking point morphs into misinformation.

Consider, for example, the right-wing reaction to the emergence of the omicron variant. The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts would prefer the omicron variant to be the title of a lesser Robert Ludlum novel, but that ain’t so. It is a new variant of the novel coronavirus that was first detected in South Africa and has already spread to Europe, Israel and elsewhere. Late Sunday, the World Health Organization issued a technical brief stating, “The likelihood of potential further spread of Omicron at the global level is high.” This Science story by Kai Kupferschmidt contains lots of scientists worried about omicron’s significant mutations as compared to previous covid-19 variants.

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Kupferschmidt’s story also suggests that it is too early to tell whether this variant is more transmissible or more severe in its effects or the extent to which existing vaccines offer robust protection. President Biden said Monday that the omicron variant was, “a cause for concern, not a cause for panic.”

Now let’s turn to the right wing to see how they are reacting to the emergence. My Washington Post colleague James Downie has already reported on standard GOP talking points over the weekend. Let’s focus, however, on the more “out there” responses, the one that might challenge Smith’s bright line between misinformation and partisan rhetoric.

Here is Michael Flynn just as the omicron variant is starting to make waves …

… and then there is what hosts and guests are saying on Fox News …

… and then there are the Republicans running for election or reelection:

It’s easy to presume that someone like Flynn is unhinged and therefore believes the crazy stuff he is saying — except there’s evidence that he has dissembled about conspiracy theories in the past. The “Fox & Friends” hosts can claim that they are mostly kidding and therefore should not be taken literally. If you take them seriously, however, they are not completely joking.

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The claims by Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.) and Kari Lake, who is running for Arizona governor in the 2022 race, are spectacularly dumb. The single best thing Biden could do to improve his political fortunes is orchestrate an end to the coronavirus pandemic. The emergence of the delta variant in the United States ruined Biden’s narrative of a return to the pre-pandemic state of affairs. As Nate Cohn recently noted in the New York Times, “voters seem to reward presidents for presiding over peace and prosperity — in a word, normalcy.” A new variant is not going to lead to more peace and prosperity.

Smith’s column seems to suggest that Trump supporters are able to parse the talking points from the out-and-out misinformation contained in the above clips. He may well be correct for a fraction of conservatives. Still, the polarization of death is a real thing. There are real casualties from this rhetoric. This leaves me less sure than Smith that the media is as prepared to deal with this kind of gray area.