AS BEFITS OUR FRACTURED TIMES – and especially during the seemingly endless Trumpathon that is the 2020 Republic National Convention – we can and should turn our critical attention to the dark arts of disinformation. And how to fight them.   

Not a single American would have been surprised to learn that the ‘virtual’ Convention is in part orchestrated by two practitioners of that other dark art, the making of what is ridiculously called ‘reality’ television. To be blunt about it, given the genre’s heavy reliance on tight scripting, its name should actually be ‘unreality television’.   

Before becoming consultants to the Convention, Sadoux Kim and Chuck LaBella had both produced a specific example of that dubious TV genre. Unsurprisingly, it was ‘The Apprentice’, the NBC show that had the effrontery to cast Donald J Trump in the part of ‘business magnate’ despite his trail of bankruptcies. Among Kim’s other credentials is his time working – if that’s the word – as a judge for the Miss Universe pageant, when Trump owned it. LaBella meanwhile, according to Variety magazine (the appropriate authority in these matters) has carried the job-title: ‘Entertainment Executive’ at NBC.

Such ‘Infotainment’ as they produce – again, too kind a coinage, I feel – is just one feature in the broad, confusing, but all-too-familiar landscape encompassed by the general label of disinformation. And as serious journalists have repeated over the past four years, there’s nothing new about ‘Fake News’. Ways of combatting it, too, are very well established. Nonetheless, and gratifyingly, the media world is now getting extra-determined and is promoting afresh some practical tools that we know to be effective in elevating the truth (our fundamental job, after all) as a counter to the nation’s pandemic of untruths.

The venerable Associated Press, the non-profit news agency that services all kinds of media outlets, ever since it brought news out fast and first from the Mexican-American War in 1846, has set up a special beat, being patrolled by David Klepper. The beat is specifically to cover (to clearly expose, we can say) misinformation in this election year. Klepper was previously a respected AP correspondent covering New York’s state Capitol in Albany; he’s no stranger to disentangling the webs of untruth that are inevitably woven in the hothouse of state legislatures.

Note that the AP in its careful house-style calls it Misinformation. I appreciate that etymologically there’s supposed to be a world of difference between those two prefixes Mis– and Dis-. They parse separately the question of how deliberate the intent might be behind distortions of truth. But frankly these days, that parsing amounts to a distinction without a difference. Mistaken untruths and deliberate untruths are both in dire need of correction, and  the same corrective method applies to both – a clear statement of the factually demonstrable truth. I’m sticking with DISinformation.

THE AP IS NOT ALONE in setting up new institutional onslaughts against sloppy rumors or malicious lies. These range from Minnesota Public Radio’s “Disinformation 2020: Can you believe it?” feature, to the work of the Better Government Association, an Illinois alliance of local journalism outlets and non-partisan civic advocacy groups.

All this of course comes in addition to long-established outfits like PolitiFact, the fact-checking arm of the academic non-profit, the Poynter Institute in Florida. (PolitiFact’s famous Truth-O-Meter graphically graces my column this week, with its authoritative assessments graduating from the flaming ‘Liar, Liar’ category, at top … to proven truth, below).  And long pre-dating our current President’s taking office, the hometown newspaper of our nation’s capital, the Washington Post, created The Fact-Checker, operated by editor Glenn Kessler and his stalwart team. They maintain as a running database  their mounting count of lies coming direct from Trump’s mouth; it recently passed the 20,000 mark in total – in effect 12 lies per-day-in-office.

Other help is at hand, too. Really expert help. You might, like me, appreciate skills being applied to the exposure of disinformation by the kind of intelligence officer who, as a professional way of life, continually scans information for its accuracy or lack of it. (You might of course not appreciate skills coming from such a source, if you believe our intelligence services comprise a ‘Deep State’ dedicated to undermining and replacing our head of state.) These intelligence skills are now on offer in handy book form.

The expert is former CIA officer Cindy Otis, and her book is True or False: A CIA Analyst’s Guide to Spotting Fake News from Macmillan publishers (above left). Her specialty as an analyst is described in spook-speak as “disinformation threat analysis and countermessaging”. Sounds like over-technical jargon, perhaps, but it could be pretty relevant, yes?

I ought to say that I’m rapidly approaching my 72nd birthday. That’s worth my saying because Otis’ book strikes me as powerfully helpful, even if its publishers earmark it as aimed at the market they call Young Adult. I’ll simply emphasize that it’s intensely practical.

We need such practical guides. “Now More Than Ever”, I would say, recalling with heavy irony the election slogan for that infamous liar Richard Nixon.