Hiding in plain sight

Following up on my last post about the pathetic 50% who now believe that Saddam had WMDs, I want to point you to a great post by Anonymous Liberal which uses this sad reality to illustrate the point that controlling information is the best way to subvert democracy. The resistance and antidote to this control is one of the greatest benefits with which the blogosphere can provide us.

Whereas in the bad old days, control was accomplished through limiting information (censorship), he argues that the preferred method today is what he calls Informational Anarchy. If you can confuse people enough, they won't know what to believe and will tune out and/or accept something easy : "So long as a determined few insist that there really were WMD, those people who are instinctively inclined to believe such a claim will never be disabused of that belief".

There are two ways of keeping the truth from people. You can either withhold it from them (the old model) or you can hide it in plain sight by burying it in a sea of disinformation. This latter strategy has become the new paradigm. Whereas the autocrats of past eras would try to keep the public in the dark by limiting the flow of information, their modern counterparts operate by overloading the public with conflicting information. Damaging facts are countered by flooding the airwaves with contrary assertions and, at the same time, actively working to discredit, vilify, or co-opt any institution that might possibly be viewed as a neutral arbiter of truth (the media, academia, the judiciary, etc.). Whereas the old model sought to control what information people were exposed to, the new model seeks to render people unable to identify the truth, even when it is right in front of their faces.

A good example of how this new model works was the recent breathless announcement by Sen. Rick Santorum and Rep. Pete Hoekstra that Saddam's elusive WMD stash had at long last been discovered in Iraq. This claim was, of course, complete rubbish.

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But none of that mattered. Santorum and Hoekstra's claim was repeated by enough sources (generally partisan outlets like Fox News, talk radio, and right wing blogs) that it seems to have had a significant effect on public opinion. A recent poll found that 50% of Americans still believe that Iraq possessed WMD (up from 36% last year). That's a rather stunning statistic.

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Of course this strategy will never succeed in convincing the entire public that black is white and up is down, but it doesn't have to. The goal is to convince the party's political base and to sufficiently cloud the issue for enough of the rest of the country that shrewd political operatives can capitalize on the confusion. It's a recipe for winning bare majorities, not landslide victories.

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Fighting the spread of informational anarchy requires aggressive fact-checking and rapid response to bogus claims. This can help prevent disinformation from gaining currency in the mainstream media, and it is a task that blogs are well-suited for.

But ultimately, it is still the major media outlets who are in the best position to bring some order to the chaos. They can do so by being more assertive, by stepping in and calling at least the most obvious fouls. When truthful claims are presented alongside false ones in the interests of "balance," it is the public that loses. This sort of neutrality is easily manipulated by shrewd and unscrupulous partisans. Though the influence and reach of the major news outlets is nowhere near what it once was, it is still significant. But the relentless attacks on the media by the GOP over the last two decades have taken their toll. The press corps is now a feeble and emasculated version of its former self, and most journalists seem content to stand on the sidelines doing the play-by-play rather than engage in the thankless task of refereeing the game. But the bottomline is that there aren't any other institutions capable of doing the job. We need to encourage the press to take a more active role in guiding Americans through the sea of disinformation (and misinformation) they are bombarded with everyday. Only an assertive and energized press corps can counter the effects of informational anarchy.