Purchasing Truth And The Impact Of Disinformation On Our Ideals And Emotions
Subscribe Today!
Although the news media is designed to deliver dispassionate facts to the public, ratings and viewership numbers are still rooted in emotions. The impact of disinformation is undoubtedly significant when doubt and skepticism are sowed for the sake of influencing these numbers. Bill Stierle and Tom sit down to dissect how disinformation is spread, even in the mainstream media, just to pique our interest and emotions, leading consumers to convoluted opinions and perspectives. They focus on how this plays out in the search for potential fraud in the aftermath of the US presidential elections, dividing the nation in votes and in ideals.
---
Watch the episode here
We’re doing a few episodes here leading up to where we’re going to talk about this documentary called After Truth. We mentioned it last time. In advance of that, we want to talk about disinformation, the impact of disinformation and how it has a serious impact on truth. There were a few examples we’re going to share and discuss. It’s still fascinating to me even though I’ve been engaged with you in these episodes for a long time and working with you for a long time. I don’t know why it still surprises me sometimes that disinformation can get more attention than truth.
It has an impact on the brain and body. It’s amazing how you sow the seeds of doubt. If you water those seeds of doubt, seeds of skepticism and emotions of helplessness, it creates the molecules of confusion inside a person and works to knock the human being off the track. The reason why Americans have a particular sensitivity to it is that one of the things that we were taught in Parenting 101, many parents divert the child. If the child is upset, divert them. How do you divert them? Put a shiny object in front of them, stick a pacifier in their mouth or don’t let them express their emotion fully. Meanwhile, on this show, what we’re interested in is finding out what is the need behind the emotion and face the issue right then and there. Why is that child crying?
The child cries because they want to get out of the stroller. They want and desire a need for connection. It doesn’t mean it’s inconvenient for the parent, although it might be at that moment. The emotion is trying to communicate, “I’m upset. I need to deal with it.” The children that don’t get to express their emotions, when they grow up, they make the tantrums bigger. We’re regrettably experiencing a little bit of that in politics, “I want to prove something and therefore I’m throwing a tantrum and I happen to have some money in my pocket. I’m going to make some noise.”
If you sow the seeds of doubt and skepticism, the emotions of helplessness create the molecules of confusion inside a person.
CLICK TO TWEET
When you put it like that, it makes it seem childish. I do have an example of people who paid attention to the details of the news of the election. This may sound familiar but after the election, as the Republicans and the Donald Trump campaign are saying, “There’s widespread voter fraud.” They’re calling for it but they weren’t putting up any significant evidence of it. At one point, the Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who is a Republican, announced that he would pay up to a $1 million reward for anyone who could produce proof of fraud. The irony of this is people paid attention to the emotion and the announcement of the reward for proof of fraud.
Interestingly on its face, it suggests, “We, the Republican leadership, doesn’t have evidence of fraud. We’re asking for the general public’s help in finding it and pointing it out.” That’s not what people paid attention to. They did not pay attention, “The Republican Party can’t back up this talking point that there’s widespread voter fraud so I’ll pay you to help.” That’s not what people paid attention to but they said that, “There’s so much voter fraud that they’re willing to pay all this money for it.” I don’t know how people square that circle but they did. The interesting thing that happened is the only voter fraud that’s been identified, which now there is someone saying, “Dan Patrick, you need to pay up that $1 million.”
In fact, there was more than one incident so they’re asking him to pay up $3 million. The Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman found voter fraud of Donald Trump’s supporters who voted on behalf of dead relatives. He’s saying, “You need to pay up because we found voter fraud.” That is humorous because the Republicans are expecting the fraud to be found on people that supported Joe Biden. Here they find voter fraud for people supporting Donald Trump. The Lieutenant Governor in Pennsylvania said in the media that he knows that Dan Patrick is never going to pay this reward, but he’s trying to shine a light on the fact that there was no voter fraud to begin with.
Even these incidents are small and isolated. It’s not a widespread systemic thing. It’s humorous but it’s serious at the same time. Unfortunately, the reality that there’s not much voter fraud, there’s at least as much voter fraud that occurs in small amounts from Republicans as Democrats. There is in small ways but it’s not this major systemic thing but that truth never gets the attention. It’s the announcement of, “There is so much voter fraud. We have to go find it.”
The announcement makes the difference. The announcement moves the molecules of emotion. The impact of communication is if you want to get somebody to change from the feeling of confidence to the feeling of doubt, disinformation has to land. Even disinformation followed by a retraction also creates doubt and confusion. Tucker Carlson did one of these. He went in and did a show about a husband that voted that was dead only to find out that the vote was cast by his wife and the naming convention on the ballot was Mrs.
He’d got on-air and he did the retraction but he didn’t fully clean it up and say, “I’m following this small little crumb down this rabbit hole but my job is all about disinformation or creating doubt and skepticism. If I create doubt and skepticism, you, as a viewer, will follow me and my rating stays high. I can prove that I am a person of integrity because I’m doing a retraction.” You’re exploding something and make it disproportional. You’re not providing the truth. You’re providing entertainment too in the political sphere in order to get 1 million, 2 million or 3 billion viewers. You want people to follow your network because that’s your job. It’s to get eyeballs. Your job is not a function of delivering the truth.
Disinformation is easy to spread because they tap into people’s belief biases with disinformation and people latch onto, “That must be true.” There are many examples of this. I remember the second Gulf War with Saddam Hussein where he’s supposed to have all these mobile bioweapons, labs and weapons of mass destruction and all these things. A colleague of mine that I worked with at that time was like, “We’re going to war.” We’re assuming that he has this stuff. We don’t have evidence. He says to me, “They’ll find the weapons of mass destruction. They’ll find the mobile weapons labs. He wanted it to be.”
ucker Carlson has great power. His average is 4.5 million people watching and listening to him and looking for truth to be put in a perspective that they believe sides with that point of view. That’s an average audience. The challenge is to reinforce the beliefs that our body wants. It doesn’t want to question. We’re not actively looking for truth. Our brain is actively looking for belief reinforcement, which is unsettling. How do logic and beliefs are at odds with each other? Truth does not stand up to the emotions of doubt and skepticism. It shrinks when the feeling of doubt and skepticism comes up. Truth and trust become casualties.
That explains a lot about why President Donald Trump was adamant that Ukraine announced an investigation into Joe Biden, doesn’t it?
I’m interested in creating a casualty for truth and trust in Joe Biden. Far on the way out, we’re canceling the investigation into Hunter Biden.
Did he cancel that? I thought he was not willing to appoint a special counsel. This is an investigation that’s been going on for a couple of years. Donald Trump wanted him to announce to assign a special counsel and try to make it as big as the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Even William Barr said, “It’s not that much there that’s worth appointing a special counsel for.”
William Barr slow-walked it.
In a rare moment of integrity for the Attorney General, he did not let the news of this investigation come out before the election. If he had, it would have been a lot like if Ukraine had announced an investigation into Joe Biden to announce ahead of the election that there’s an investigation into Hunter Biden going on at the Justice Department and the FBI. That would have done a lot of damage to Joe Biden’s vote count.
What swung votes in swing states. Wisconsin and Michigan might’ve been that way because we’re wired to trust the legal system, judge or the system that the law is going to be applied equally and we’re trusting that. People that are in those positions, most certainly have earned them, haven’t they? Most certainly have had experience in that, haven’t they? When I heard that Bill Barr didn’t try any cases or anything like that, I was going to like, “He didn’t go in front of the Supreme Court. He’s never tried a case. He’s never worked on the side of the prosecution.” He doesn’t fully know the levers that you’re allowed to pull in the ones that you’re not and he’s a messenger in the position. He’s got the Law degree but it’s unsettling what that experience is. There have been people that are called for who’s going to get rid of his Law degree or retract his Law degree.
We're not actively looking for truth. Our brain is actively looking for belief reinforcement, which is really unsettling.
CLICK TO TWEET
There have been some calls to do that especially because some of them are controversial things that he’s been a part of with how he tried to frame the Mueller report before it came out, and all that had to do with what we’re talking about. Think about Bill Barr coming out and giving that press conference with his assessment of the Mueller report. That was disinformation. He was trying to pre-emptively kill the impact of the Mueller report before he came out and say, “There’s nothing there.”
It worked to create doubt and skepticism. They played doubt and skepticism over the air to the 4.5 million people that watch Tucker Carlson and then bounce to Sean Hannity, then to the other shows of disinformation. The need for news to create emotion inside the audience is problematic because news is supposed to be fact-based. There is a gap between when something is being reported on or trying to be discovered and then when the fact comes in. Once the fact comes in, the dopamine and the molecules of emotion are going to drop inside the audience, “They figured this one out,” so the viewership has got to go down.
I’m not going to listen to that issue because the fact came in. One of the things that have happened in cable news is they stretch the playtime and create a bunch of doubt and skepticism before the fact lands. Even if the fact does land, they’ll say, “This is what has been reported on up to this time.” Rudy Giuliani is the one that is going like, “You’re stretching it. You haven’t won a case anywhere in any environment. There are no facts. You keep pretending that there’s a way to show this.” There’s rampant. He has sold this process, viewership and his expertise as a person who promotes that he knows something other people don’t know and that’s how you purchase truth.
I want to be careful here to honor all the vast majority of journalists with integrity in our country that cares about the truth. We’ll wait and not release a story until they vet the truth and know if there are facts behind it. Unfortunately, those people that are good stewards of facts and the truth do not get as much attention as what’s happened in our major media these days. There’s the addition of all these opinion shows and opinion hosts. I’m talking about the Sean Hannitys and Tucker Carlsons of the world. We have to be fair.
We have to lump people like Rachel Maddow and certain other people into that on the other side. Not that there isn’t a truth that’s reported on all those shows but there’s also an awful lot of speculation and opinion and they can all tend to propagate a story that has no basis some more than others. There’s almost this smokescreen, then all of a sudden, the information. When the fact lands, it doesn’t land well. It’s obscured. People don’t realize that they’re listening to opinion and that opinion is feeding into their belief biases and allows the disinformation to grow.
It allows the person’s belief to sit there and go like, “I have a form of certainty that Tucker Carlson said about War on Christmas is true because he was impassionate about it and he makes some sense. The person needs to make some sense. The announcement is what’s needed. The announcement says, “It makes sense that Hunter Biden worked for the president and got this deal. If he wasn’t the vice-president’s son, he wouldn’t have got on the board of this thing.” He took a paycheck for it because they thought of him as a person that they would as a part of their marketing spin for the oil or gas company to have him on the board so they would attract the investors because they have a big-name person. Clearly, the US government looks good.
It gives them credibility as a company that they would have somebody on their board. It was all about optics. Honestly, there’s nothing illegal about that. I guarantee you, this happens all the time with Donald Trump’s children too. A lot of wealthy people or people in a position of power, their children and brothers get hired and asked to be onboard because they want to be able to say, “I have somebody close to the president or I have somebody close to this person on my board.” Therefore, that makes people feel more confident about giving them business, investing in them or whatever it is that their goal is.
If Barack Obama, any notable senator, a person of interest or celebrity came on this show with us to talk about the purchasing of truth, wouldn’t this show’s rating go up? It would skyrocket. We’re doing the same thing with storytelling and we’re spinning a tale to try to have our viewers pay attention to our point of view and not be ranters because there are a lot of folks that rant and you get views like, “Look at how angry he is.” “I wish I could get as angry about something as Alex Jones does. He’s mad about something therefore he’s committed to what he knows as a belief. I’d like to have that certainty. I’ll listen to him.”
That’s the hard part about this. When we purchase truth, then we look at the truth, we also have to have a spoonful of humility that it doesn’t go fully our way. We need to be able to admit things we don’t know that we’re not a person that’s at the top of things. That’s one of the biggest problems that Donald Trump had in government. He would have a second term if he would have turned over the entire healthcare pandemic to people that were doctors. He didn’t try to make it an eyeball grab. He makes it like, “I’m caring for the nation and letting the experts run this show.”
I am not an expert in medicine, instead he goes, “I get this stuff. I’m smart. My uncle was IT.” It’s like, “Give it up to the experts and stop saying things. They’re not factually accurate. Read off a script.” He goes like, “I read off-script. What makes my show The Apprentice the famous thing is I would say something wacky and they would cut it, fix it and then post.” That’s what they did. It’s important to follow this thread of misinformation and let’s keep focusing on it because when you put a spotlight and you ask for truth, you’re able to proportionalize the things that other people are saying.
On a scale of 1 to 10, when Tucker Carlson says, “There’s voter fraud,” it’s a 1 not 0. It’s not enough to overturn the election, there are all these redundant systems in place so vast fraud does not slip through. That’s my belief. You and I might be sitting on the other end of a new truth and new evidence that shows up. Don’t you think they would have found it by now? Could it possibly be the inept, corrupt, democrats would have made this mistake by now? It’s not that they’re holding the entire intellect on that side of the fence either.
They’ve got people that are swinging ideas and points of view on their side that are like, “I don’t know about that one. I’m not sure how that one is going to work.” This is where truth becomes something that we get to talk about openly and use our powers of curiosity and mindfulness to go like, “Let’s figure this one out. Let’s research this a little bit. Let’s stay curious and increase our awareness about where the truth is and let truth find us instead of trying to pretend that we have it because it’s a process.”
We need to raise awareness in people that’s long-term. People need to have the awareness that the difference between something that makes them feel better emotionally and something true. They are often not in alignment.
More to come on this disinformation, Tom. There’s a lot here to take a look at. The impact on our physiology is something we’ve got to watch and make sure that we’re checking our beliefs at the door and not necessarily going like, “This is a reinforcing thing.” Look at this and then be in a place of staring it down a little bit.
That sounds good, Bill. Thanks.
Thanks.
Important Links:
- After Truth – YouTube
- https://www.MSNBC.com/rachel-maddow-show/texas-dan-patrick-prepared-part-his-1-million-reward-n1252419?cid=sm_fb_maddow&fbclid=IwAR3sAek1SvP41H8D7dN2EG36DBm-MIsolYv17PStLNSFUYkewpcQasGtYQk
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
