The most important 2016 "misinformation" came from the regular news media

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The most important 2016 "misinformation" came from the regular news media

Matthew Yglesias

15 - 19 minutes

Recently published research by Gregory Eady, Tom Paskhalis, Jan Zilinsky, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua Tucker looked at the influence of Russian social media disinformation operations on the 2016 race and concluded that the impact was minimal, or potentially non-existent. It’s a good paper.

In terms of the discourse, I don’t think anyone credible is still seriously arguing that the pro-Trump Russian meme accounts were a decisive factor in the election, though the relevance of those accounts is sometimes downplayed by those on the right who want to blind themselves to the Russian government’s role in the election. But I think this is a good opportunity to step back and look at the explosion of interest in “misinformation” in the wake of the 2016 election specifically because I think an enormous share of this interest is a kind of displaced guilt.

After all, it wasn’t the GRU that made The New York Times run this front page on the weekend before Election Day.

Reasonable people can, to an extent, disagree about the appropriateness of the coverage of the Clinton email story in The New York Times and on network broadcast news during the 2016 campaign. But what I don’t think can be seriously doubted is that this coverage was:

    High-profile and seen by more people than any information operation

    Not “fake news” in the original sense of being willfully made up

    Damaging to Clinton’s election prospects

The irony is that the mainstream media’s relationship with Donald Trump was obviously and objectively very hostile. The New York Times in particular was quite tough in their coverage of him, and Trump would frequently vent with extreme rhetoric against the paper. After the election, the Times published a lot of great journalism about the Trump White House and also benefitted financially from a liberal subscriber base that saw the Times as a bastion of freedom and enlightenment in a dark time. The Washington Post tilted even further in this direction with its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” tagline. And while the Post is now in business trouble, the very well-managed NYT played the whole thing perfectly, reaping a huge Trump Bump but also using his four years in office to strengthen the larger business and build an appealing bundle with all kinds of great cooking and games content.

But the fact remains that if you want to place blame for Trump’s narrow victory over Clinton on someone or something in the information environment, it’s not the Russians or Facebook or “misinformation” you should be looking to — it’s the most influential mainstream news outlets in America.

That one splash from the Times has become emblematic of the obsessive coverage of the Clinton emails story, but the issue was much broader than that. The mainstream American press treated the 2016 campaign as one in which the most important issue was whether or not Hillary Clinton had accidentally mishandled classified information as a result of breaking State Department policy to use her own email server for work.

Consider broadcast television news. The Tyndall Report concluded that there were roughly 32 minutes of coverage of the candidates’ policy positions on network news during the 2016 cycle in contrast to 100 minutes on the emails story. David Rothschild and Duncan Watts looked at the Times’ front page and found, similarly, that “in just six days, the New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.”

I would also note that beyond the emails, there was an inordinately negative inflection to the coverage of Clinton.

The 2016 cycle, for example, saw a lot of scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation and its activities. I am, as I hope people know at this point, pretty interested in the subject of philanthropy. So I’d wondered for years whether the Clinton Foundation was any good. My suspicion was always that a closer look would show that the “real scandal” of the Clinton Foundation was that it spent tons of money on programs that sound nice but don’t do any good. But Dylan Matthews, who had similar suspicions, looked at it, and it turned out that the Clinton Foundation was pretty good!

    I thought it was likely the Clinton Foundation had gotten behind a lot of PlayPump-like projects — feel-good, sound-great ideas that attracted Clinton’s wealthy and well-known friends but didn’t really have much of a measurable impact the world.

    But I was wrong. After reviewing foundation documents and talking to numerous people in the philanthropy and global health sectors familiar with its work, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Clinton Foundation is a real charitable enterprise that did enormous good. Its projects are of varying effectiveness, but its work is supported by credible, discriminating funders, and the foundation has least one huge accomplishment under its belt — an HIV/AIDS program that saved an untold number of lives.

To have affiliation with a charitable enterprise that saved countless lives of sick people in poor countries turned into a negative against you is extraordinary.

At the time, I was really furious about this. Having mellowed some, I now believe there’s an element of scope to this — nobody held a gun to Democrats’ heads and made them nominate someone who was known to have bad relationships with the press. Part of the responsibility of a political party is to select strong candidates, and this was a failure in that regard.

Another thing you could say about the coverage (but that I never hear) is that the coverage was really good and that the heavy coverage of the email scandal helped people really understand the stakes in the election. You might think that whatever impact Trump’s presidency had on taxes or abortion rights or whatever else, voters who were concerned about scrupulous adherence to federal document retention and IT policies got their chance to elect a champion.

Except of course that’s absurd. And that’s what I think is so fundamentally damning about the 2016 coverage — not that I necessarily “blame” it for anything, but that it was simply a media failure on its own terms. We’re all of us responsible for our decisions about what to cover, and the decisions made painted a misleading portrait of the race in a way that helped Trump win.

There is a real Russia angle here, of course, which is that Russians (as best we can tell) hacked John Podesta’s email account, put those emails on the internet, and then the press wrote a bunch of stories based on Podesta’s hacked emails.

This is distinct from the question of whether the Russian Twitter accounts made a difference, and I think it’s a much more plausible line of argument for Russian impact on the campaign. But, again, the mode of influence here would be mainstream media coverage of the contents of Podesta’s hacked emails. This poses a genuinely somewhat difficult question of journalistic ethics. I don’t think you would want to say reporters should never write a story based on stolen information. But there is something odd about saying that Candidate X should be subjected to a cavalcade of negative stories based on having been the victim of a computer crime.

I do think a reporter in that situation should ask themselves: what exactly is the story here?

A fact that I think we, as adult human beings, know about the world is that if all your private communications were spilled onto the internet, that would cause you embarrassment. I don’t know you or what’s in your text messages. But I can guarantee you that there is some stuff in there that you would prefer to stay hidden from your boss/coworkers/subordinates/friends/spouse/parents. That’s just the nature of life. It’s natural to be somewhat curious about other people’s private communications, but the mere fact that Person X’s private communications are mildly embarrassing isn’t actually news about Person X. We know that for all X, X could be embarrassed by putting all of X’s communications on the internet.

That’s different from unearthing evidence of serious crimes or other major wrongdoing. And I’d say that what happened with the Podesta emails was a lot of people doing stories that were just embarrassing, and doing them without frontloading the context that the reason this was coming out was that the Russian government wanted to embarrass Clinton to help Trump win.

This is to say that even where the Russians were involved, the real issue here was editorial decision making by the media. But the major editors and producers didn’t want to acknowledge they’d done something wrong in their approach to 2016. And what’s really odd is they also didn’t decide to stand by what they’d done and say the public was well-served. Instead, these major institutions largely treated the election outcome as an information-induced calamity where the information responsible came from some other information source.

What we got was neither contrition nor defiance but instead a strange form of displacement, in which the Times, the Washington Post, and CNN also positioned themselves after Trump’s election as the antidotes to a supposed crisis in the information environment.

That crisis was originally located in the form of so-called “fake news” websites that would literally make up stuff designed to go viral. There was, for example, a very popular and completely fake story reporting that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump’s election. The tricky thing about assessing the information environment, though, is you have to ask who is clicking on and sharing a bogus Pope-endorses-Trump story published on the End The Fed website. You have to think this was mostly conservative Trump supporters engaging in a little light confirmation bias and not Catholic swing voters who deeply cared about the Pope’s endorsement. After all, if you actually cared even slightly about what Pope Francis thought about the 2016 election, it wouldn’t have been hard to find out.

Eventually, studies came out indicating that very few people were actually exposed to fake news and there’s little evidence of it having a significant causal impact. There have been many similar boom-bust cycles about the Russian influence operation. But the idea that’s had the most impact was the idea that people were picking up large amounts of “misinformation” specifically on social media.

There are three important truths in the misinformation narrative:

    A lot of people believe things that aren’t true.

    A lot of articles get published that are false or (especially) misleading.

    When people use social media apps to read news, they end up reading some articles that contain false or misleading information. 

This set of true facts got packaged and framed in a way that was itself misleading, resulting in a lot of people adopting erroneous narratives like “social media users are more misinformed than non-users” or “misinformation spread on social media explains important things about 2016 electoral dynamics.”

More broadly, I think the misinformation narrative implicitly relied on a false utopianism about the baseline level of information people have about politics. Any time I travel for work, I end up chatting with someone or other who asks what I’m doing in City X. When I tell them I’m a political journalist from D.C. here on work, most people have some kind of politics take they want to share. And it turns out that almost everyone is knowledgeable about a few things that are important to them but are also full of garbled quasi-facts they saw on TV or heard on the radio or read online and never really kicked the tires on. Not necessarily because they are stupid (though stupid people get to vote, too) but because if you’re not working in politics professionally, there’s no real reason to develop informed opinions about issues you don’t care that much about.

But check out my favorite study about why Facebook is bad (emphasis added):

    The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election (i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use. Deactivation reduced post-experiment valuations of Facebook, suggesting that traditional metrics may overstate consumer surplus.

I think it is pretty damning that what Meta’s employees do all day is try to induce people into engaging in compulsive scrolling behavior that makes them miserable. But whatever else you can say about the merits of spending less time socializing with family and friends and more time scrolling, all the scrolling leaves you more informed, not less.

Realistically, the kind of big influential organizations we’re talking about don’t like to apologize for things and are never going to come out and say “in retrospect, we devoted more column inches to the emails thing than it objectively warranted.”

What’s interesting, though, is that if you look at the handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story, you see both implicit acknowledgment that the editorial judgment around the Clinton emails was bad and also the collateral damage of the misinformation narrative.

Generally, I think mainstream coverage of the Hunter laptop situation was good. Its existence was reported on when it became known. The mainstream press reported on Tony Bobulinski’s allegations and also on the fact that the documents on the laptop didn’t really confirm those allegations. Over time, forensic experts confirmed the authenticity of the documents, which the Biden camp had tried to cast doubt on. Multiple outlets looked at this independently and reached the same conclusion. If you are really interested in a comprehensive look at the story of the laptop and what we learned from it, Andrew Rice and Olivia Nuzzi did an excellent deep dive for New York Magazine. Adam Entous, who published a long look at Hunter’s sketchy behavior long before the laptop surfaced, also did an exhaustive account of the whole troubled Biden family.

This is just to say that if you are sincerely interested in learning about Hunter Biden and his misadventures, there are plenty of mainstream press resources available to you that also manage to keep the Hunter Biden story in perspective. That’s exactly what was lacking in the Hillary 2016 coverage: perspective and judgment. The Hunter Biden story is interesting and worth reporting on, but it’s not that important compared to policy conflicts around inflation, climate change, taxes, crime, immigration, or even feckless posturing around the debt ceiling.

In other words, while we never got an apology, we did get a more responsible approach.

But the social media companies themselves responded to years of yelling about foreign information operations and rampant “misinformation” by engaging in a heavy-handed (albeit short-lived) effort to censor access to the original New York Post story about the laptop. This was both overreach and also, via the Streisand Effect, only served to make the laptop story more noteworthy and visible. The real issue all along had been poor editorial judgment by traditional media companies, and the actual solution was better editorial judgment by traditional media companies. The internet companies who were never genuinely at fault instead made things worse by trying to solve a largely fake problem.