There have been two dominant narratives about the rise of misinformation and conspiracy theories in American public life.
What we can, without prejudice, call the establishment narrative — put forward by dominant foundations, government agencies, NGOs, the mainstream press, the RAND corporation — holds that the misinformation age was launched by the Internet boom, the loss of media gatekeepers, new alternative sources of sensational information that cater to niche audiences, and social media. According to this story, the Internet in general and social media in particular reward telling audiences what they want to hear and undermining faith in existing institutions. A range of nefarious actors, from unscrupulous partisan media to foreign intelligence agencies, all benefit from algorithms that are designed to boost engagement, which winds up catering misinformation to specific audience demands. Traditional journalism, bound by ethics, has not been able to keep up.
The alternative narrative — put forward by Fox News, the populist fringes of the Left and the Right, Substackers of all sorts — holds almost the inverse. For decades, mainstream political discourse in America has been controlled by the chummy relationship between media, political, and economic elites. These actors, caught up in trading information, access, and influence with each other, fed the American people a thoroughly sanitized and limited picture of the world. But now, their dominance is being broken by the Internet, and all of the dirty laundry is being aired. In this view, “misinformation” and “conspiracy theory” are simply the establishment’s slanders for inconvenient truths it can no longer suppress. Whether it’s the Biden administration establishing a Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security or the New York Times’s Kevin Roose calling for a federal “reality czar,” the establishment is desperate to put the Humpty Dumpty of controlled consensus reality back together again.
As opposed as they seem, in fact both of these narratives are right, so far as they go. But neither of them captures the underlying truth. There is indeed a dark matter ripping the country apart, shredding our shared sense of reality and faith in our democratic government. But this dark matter is not misinformation, it isn’t conspiracy theories, and it isn’t the establishment, exactly. It is secrecy.
Truth Decay
In discussions of online misinformation, one inevitably comes across some version of a ubiquitous quote by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” This is often mustered at the climax of some defense of “journalism” or “science” against “fake news.” But the bon mot is always tossed out without any interest in Moynihan himself. Defenders of the social importance, and the ongoing possibility, of a fact-based democratic culture would do well to consider how the quote holds up against one of the major preoccupations of this great legislator and intellectual.
The Moynihan quote captures an important dichotomy between facts and opinions, one that has been blurred by the rise of alternative media, the explosion of “news-commentary” in newspapers and on television, and an influencer-centric media economy. But at the same time, hanging like the sword of Damocles over our shared sense of reality, is an invisible and unspoken third category, one on which Moynihan became increasingly fixated.
Born in 1927, Moynihan had government roles for most of his career, serving in the Navy, on the staff of New York Governor Averell Harriman, in the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and then to India, and finally a quarter-century as a U.S. Senator from New York. Late in his political career, in the 1990s, Moynihan became deeply concerned about government secrecy. Beyond particular worries about the legal and practical consequences of an explosion of classified documents, Moynihan believed that expansive secrecy was deleterious to our form of government. The 1997 Moynihan Secrecy Commission Report warned: