The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Disinformation -- What is It, Why Is it, and What Can We Do About It? - Encore

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

An encore of Lee McIntyre philosopher & author who's written extensively on the issues of truth & disinformation.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday. That means our encore Wednesday edition. We'll tell you which one in just a moment. But first, a word about tomorrow's program, your turn and the question of the week. We've only given you, well, barely 24 hours to come up with your answers. So we're going to extend that two hours. We'll go from the 12 noon Eastern time tomorrow deadline

to 2 p.m. Eastern time tomorrow as a deadline. Write to the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com, include your name and your location you're writing from. Keep it under 75 words. The question was, what is your current feeling about the monarchy? And we asked that question because of course, King Charles is coming to Canada next week to read the speech from the throne. And with the backdrop of the US president's comments about the 51st state and the UK's invitation for a state visit from Donald Trump to the UK, that came of course from the Prime Minister of the UK,

Keir Starmer, plus the King. The King signed the official invitation. So what do we feel about that? What do we feel about the monarchy today? What's your current state of feeling on that? That's the question for this week's Your Turn. Get your answers in by 2 p.m. Eastern Time tomorrow. Now today's

Encore edition of The Bridge. We go back almost a year and a half to November of 2023. The guest was Lee McIntyre. You may not have heard of him before, but he's written a great book on the question of disinformation. You know, what is it? Why is it? How is it used? That's our encore edition today. I hope you enjoy it. And hello there, welcome to Tuesday. Peter Mansbridge here with The Bridge, special conversation coming up on the topic of disinformation. Okay. Well, if there's one thing you want to get unhappy about, it may be the extent to which disinformation has clogged our society, our information mechanisms. It's right in there in a way that, you know, it's been around

for a while, but the way we see disinformation and its impact on what we know and what we don't know, how that's changed in the last decade, is something to be concerned about. So I wanted to talk to somebody, I've wanted to talk to say, you know, we talk about it every once in a while with Chantal and Bruce and other guests, we talk about disinformation. Janis Stein has talked a lot about disinformation when it comes to the Middle East and Ukraine. But I wanted to talk to somebody who could give us some deeper thoughts, if you will, about disinformation. So I tracked down Lee McIntyre. Now you may or may not have heard of Lee McIntyre. He's a bestselling author. His current book is called On Disinformation, but he's written others. How to Talk to a Science Denier, The Art of Good and Evil, the philosophy of science, the scientific attitude, post-truth.

Are we living in a post-truth world? Anyway, there's lots of books and speeches and studies that Lee McIntyre has been involved with. He's a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. He's a recent lecturer in ethics at Harvard Extension School. He's got a PhD in philosophy from the University of Michigan.

And the list goes on. And I could speak for the next 15 minutes about all the different things that Lee McIntyre has done. Anyway, I reached out to him last week and I could speak for the next 15 minutes about all the different things that Lee McIntyre has done. Anyway, I reached out to him last week and I said, any chance we can have a conversation? He says, I'm really busy, but I'd love to do it. And so that's what we did. We had our chat on disinformation.

And I wanna share it now with you. So and you know quite often I'll you know I'll break up an interview halfway through as we switch topics and take our break in the middle of the interview. Not going to one this one because it's all basically one one topic. So we'll go for the full route on that. We'll have our break at the end of it, and a couple of other issues to quickly deal with after that. But right now,

let's get to this conversation with Lee McIntyre. I think you'll find it interesting. Here we go. So why don't we start with trying to understand what we don't understand about disinformation? What's the biggest misconception about disinformation? I think the most important thing that people can understand about disinformation is that it's different from misinformation. Misinformation is a mistake. It's when you believe something to be true and it happens not to be true. But disinformation

is a lie. Disinformation is when somebody invented a falsehood and they pass it to you because they want you to believe in it in a way the person who believes it is victimized. So this information is a different category I think because it's intentional. It means that somebody is not just wrong but they were duped. They were and they're usually they're duped by somebody with nefarious intent who you know wants them to believe that falsehood usually because it serves their interest and makes a victim of the person who believes it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but has the balance between misinformation and disinformation

tipped towards more disinformation than misinformation over these last, I don't know, five, 10 years. Interesting. I think that there's more disinformation now than there was because I think that people figured out that you could do it. I mean, it used to be a kind of a warfare tactic. You saw this was something that governments did to other governments or governments did to their own citizens, in some cases, citizens of other countries. I mean, but, but it was a warfare thing. Now it's a way of life. And I mean,

it's because the internet has made it so easy. Some people, I mean, look, I'm a philosopher, so I've got to draw the fine distinction here, right? Because sometimes there's misinformation that just grows up as a kind of a, an organic falsehood that nobody invented. Nobody, you know, nobody created it. Nobody's benefiting from it. It's just a, it's just a false thing. You know, and that's pretty rare, right? That's pretty rare for some, I'm trying to think of an example here of something that's, you know, just a, um, just a, just a mistake or an accident, but you

could also technically use the term misinformation when somebody hears a lie, they hear disinformation and then they pass it on because they believe it, then I suppose that's technically speaking also misinformation. But that's really damaging, isn't it? Because then they're just being duped and they're doing somebody else's work. So I don't like to use the word misinformation for that. I think if something starts with a lie, then you should call it disinformation. But I don't mean any disrespect there to people who are duped and maybe have a big platform and passing it on, you know, when Nicki Minaj was, you know, passing on all the falsehood about the COVID

vaccines, I don't think she was doing that on purpose in the sense that she was making any money or she'd made it up. She was duped and she had a big platform. So she was doing that on purpose in the sense that she was making any money or she'd made it up. She was duped and she had a big platform. So she was passing it on. She was passing it on as misinformation. But if it starts with a lie, if the origin is a lie, then I'm going to call it disinformation. I just thought of an example of misinformation. The idea that the earth is flat, whoever made a buck on that, whoever gets any

power or what suits their ideology. I mean, it's just this weird thing that some people believe that comes out of nowhere and then maybe they pass it back and forth to one another, but it's not like there's some strategic denial plot behind it, you know, to get people to believe that the earth is flat. I don't think I've at least I've studied these folks and I've never discovered one, right? I mean they're usually conspiracy theorists and they think there's a plot to cover up the fact that the earth is flat. I don't think there's... how do they come to that? I don't know.

The way disinformation is passed around now, and as you've fingered the main culprit, which is the internet, social media, is it, you know, it's more than a game, those who are behind disinformation. there's a reason they're pushing disinformation. And how do we get at that? How do we get it? What the reason is. It's such an important question because once you figure out what they want, then it helps you to expose the lie.

And it helps you to keep it from being amplified on the internet into these other people who are getting duped, right? So once you realize that the cigarette companies spent 40 years saying the conclusive link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer has never been scientifically proven. Why did they do that? Because they wanted to continue to sell cigarettes. Now so what did they get out of that? It's obvious they got money.

Now they don't understand, or let me put it this way, they did understand how science worked and so they exploited that word proof because science can't prove something does or doesn't happen. I mean, that's not how empirical reasoning works, but it's overwhelmingly probably true that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, but by saying it hasn't been conclusively proven. Then they were technically speaking saying, oh, well, we're saying the truth, but it's still disinformation because they are using it in a cynical way to get what they want.

I'll give you a better example. We've all heard the ridiculous claim that the COVID vaccines have tracking microchips in them. And thousands of people probably died because they didn't take their vaccine because they were afraid of that. What people don't know is that that lie was invented by Russian intelligence. That was a product of the SVR, which is a branch of what used to be the KGB. And they invented that in April 2020, published it in an English language propaganda arm of the SVR called the Oriental Review, in which they said any future tracking, any future COVID vaccines developed in the West, my, um, that COVID vaccines developed in the West will have tracking microchips and them courtesy of Bill

Gates, who holds patent 666 on the technology, the bottom of the story. It said share on Facebook, share on Twitter, which apparently millions of people did because in May, 20, 2020, 28% of the American population believed it. Now why did the Russians do that? It destabilized American society, which is always good for them. It undermined confidence in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines before they were even invented, which meant that maybe people were going to take the Sputnik vaccine, which Russia had invented, and they wanted to dominate the African and Asian markets with that. Think of the money they could make.

But hell, it was also called the Sputnik. I mean, there's some national pride there, right? There's some power, there's some ideology. So why did they invent that lie? Because it served their interest. And the horrific part is that they knew that people would die, but they did it anyway. Now, if you can expose something like that in advance,

that's the best way to fight back. Exposing it after the fact, that's second best, right? Because you can get people to, you know, people who are down the rabbit hole, you can try to talk them back up, but best to expose the plot before it even gets to their ears. That's called pre-bunking. And they're using it now. Biden is using it. I mean, the American government is using it when Russia has got some disinformation plan, campaign plan for Ukraine.

A couple of times now Biden has exposed it in advance and that defangs the snake. So it's a great way to fight back. You know, it seemed at times, especially when we were talking COVID, it seems at times that the way they tried to fight back was to ridicule the theories that were coming out. Yeah. And ridicule doesn't seem to work as well as, you know,

taking them on, I don't know, in a much more substantial way than just trying to make fun of them. Yes, because if you make fun of them, sometimes it sounds like you're making fun of the people who believe it. And humiliation is not a good way to convince somebody to change their beliefs.

I mean, if you insult somebody or you humiliate them or you shame them, they're never going to change their mind. And people are in different places on the spectrum of denial. I mean, some of them can be convinced and you don't want to lose them. No, I think the best way to fight back is to expose the plot. I mean, make it clear what's at stake. Imagine, imagine when that, when that article came out in the Oriental review, if that could have been preempted or immediately followed up by a debunking. You know, immediately to say, because people tended to say, Oh, that's such a stupid idea. Who would believe that?

28% of the American population believed it. So, you know, that, that old line response that you saw John Kerry give back when he was running for president and they were saying all these ridiculous things about him and he said, I'm not even going to dignify that with a response. Boy, is that the wrong way. You've got to get there as fast as you can ahead of time. If you know about what they're going to say, but immediately after is the second best choice.

That's how to fight back. When it's a polluted information stream and everybody's passing around rumors and lies and all sorts of falsehood on the internet, you've got to try to nip it in the bud. That's why I'm so disappointed with the social media companies for not doing more content moderation now,

because it just makes it so easy it's just it's that kind of amplification is a disinformers dream let me let me throw one of your quotes back at you Ben get you to okay explain a little bit and this is this is from on disinformation your latest book welcome to the world of reality denial where truth is subordinate to ideology, feelings have more weight than evidence, and democracy hangs in the balance. Take us behind that quote because that's pretty scary stuff. I think that disinformation, look, let me, let me back up. Why do people deny facts?

Some people deny facts because they get something out of it, but most people who deny facts don't get anything out of it. Most of the people who deny that the, that, uh, who say that the 2020 election was stolen. They don't get anything out of that. Most of the people who said that the COVID vaccines were too dangerous to take, they didn't get anything out of it. Some of them died.

The people who were making the claim that climate change isn't real, they're dooming themselves and their great grandchildren to a terrible outcome. So why do they do it? They do it because they're duped. They do it because they're disinformed. And so again, I think that it's important to make clear to people why this is happening. People don't wake up one day wondering whether the California wildfires are started by a Jewish space laser. It's just not the kind of thing that just occurs to you when you wake up or you're taking a shower or you're shaving.

You hear that from somebody. And then you think, most of us think that's ridiculous, but some people think I'm going to look into that. They get on the internet and then, Oh, there are other people who believe this. Maybe there's something to it. Then they go to YouTube, they get 20 videos in a row and it's too late. Now, how did that happen? It happened because it served somebody's interest

to have an army of people think that the California wildfires were started by a Jewish space laser. Who? Who? And what was the interest? If you can answer that question, who's behind it and what do they get out of it? then you've got a chance. Then you've got a chance to fight back. You know, as well as I do, that there are people listening to this right now who are saying, I'm not duped, he's duped. Yeah, I just got that email today.

I did, I get that email every day. And what do you do with it? Is there a response to that or is or is it just, you know, it's too late? Yeah, look, I understand where it comes from. I mean, if the person is respectful, then I give them a respectful answer back. If it's hatred, I have a file called hate mail and I just put it in there. Right. But I mean, Mark Twain said it's easier to fool somebody than to convince them

that they've been fooled. It's very hard once somebody has been fooled because it makes them feel like an idiot. And so when I write a respect, when they've written to me respectfully and I write a respectful response back, I will, I try to have empathy because they're a victim and sometimes it can be hard to deal with, but I will say, I said to a woman the other day, you know, she was, she was telling me, you know, there was some conspiracy theory about vaccines. And I said, I'm so sorry, but you were, you were duped on this.

And here's an article that you might read. And it was from USA Today. If it had been from the New York Times or the Washington Post, she might have said, ah, it's a liberal rag. But it was from USA Today. So I kind of tailored the source to push back. And I also recognized that you can't convince somebody against their will, and you can't shove facts down their throat and think it's gonna work you can just treat them with dignity and respect and

try to get them to trust you and Maybe they'll change their own mind so you know, I I Try to treat everybody with dignity and respect I went to a Flat Earth convention and I didn't know what I was going to find. But what I found were a lot of people who genuinely believed that the earth was flat. And what I channeled was not my inner physicist, because I don't have

any inner physicists. I couldn't, I mean, they had read what I had read. They just didn't believe it. I channeled my inner philosopher and I said, I'm really curious why you believe that. What's, what's your, you know, and I can, can you, can you convince me that you're right? And they were more than happy to have that conversation because I listened to them. And then usually they turn to me and say, What do you think? Or you know, they were upset because they hadn't convinced me. My best question was, I would say things like, Look, you don't believe this on faith, do you? And they say, no, evidence, evidence.

We've got evidence. Come to some of the seminars. You'll see the evidence. I say, OK. So you're kind of scientific then, right? You do experiments of your own, and your belief in Flat Earth is based on your sensory evidence. They say, that's right.

Absolutely evidence. They said, that's right. Absolutely evidence. So then I would say, okay, so tell me this, what evidence if I had it right now to present to you would change your mind and none of them could answer that question. Now I said that not to get in their face, but to make them a slight bit uncomfortable because the ones who got it understood that that was the whole show because a scientist can answer that question. If you ask, there was a famous scientist one time that they asked him what, I think it was Dobzhansky, um, what, um,

what could convince you that evolution by natural selection was not true. And he said, rabbit fossils in the pre Cambrian era, that's pretty damn specific, right? And, but a denier does not do that. And they don't do that because they, they don't believe what they believe based on facts and evidence, actually they believe it because they trusted the wrong people and disinformation doesn't just get you to believe a falsehood, it gets you to distrust the truth tellers.

And so they were not even listening to the scientists anymore. And that's why I went, because I'm not a scientist, but I wanted to show up in person and say, I can engage in respectful dialogue with you and try to build some trust. Let me wrap this up by going to the heart of this issue of the lie. That disinformation is a lie. We all know about the art of the lie and the art of the lie in politics and we see it more now than ever. And not just with one person, you know who I'm talking about, but we see it with a number of politicians in a number of countries. And what I want to try and get at is how the media fits in,

the legacy media as opposed to the social media. How does the media fits in, the legacy media, as opposed to the social media, how does the media, television networks, newspapers, how do they deal with this? Because we've seen, well, we mentioned Trump without mentioning his name, but I mean, we saw the situation a couple of months ago where he did an interview on CNN, where just like in most of his interviews, it's kind of one lie after another. You can challenge, but at a certain point, you kind of lose that.

You lose that contest. It's a disinformation tactic. It's called the fire hose of falsehood. He learned it from Vladimir Putin. Look, I'm sorry I interrupted you there. No, no, no. But I mean, you know what I'm getting at. What do you do?

Like what do you do in a situation like that where you're in an interview with somebody who is running for office, a major office, and they're lying to you and they're lying to the public. And you know, you try to challenge them, but as you say, the fire hose, it just like, it just keeps coming. Well, the media, the media needs to do a better job. The old model used to be that they would catch the politician in a lie and then

the politician usually had some shame. Yeah. No shame. There was some accountability. There was some shame, right? Yeah, no shame anymore. Do you remember John Edwards? Sure.

I mean, you catch him, you catch him red-handed in a lie and they resign, they drop out of their campaign. I mean, used to be, right? That's not what happens now. Trump has made it safe for people to double down on the lie and the media sometimes, and again, I'm, and I'm too, I'm talking about the mainstream media kind of caught flat-footed because their model has always been, well, wait a

minute, I just beat you. Why don't you admit you're done? And he won't admit that he lost because he's doubling down on the lie. So now what to do? Um, the, the journalists that I think know what they're doing in that situation are the ones who are used to interviewing dictators. You see Christiane Amandpour go interview Gaddafi, interview Saddam Hussein. You know, you see when they expect to be lied to.

And that's how to handle Trump. That's how to handle the guy who doubles down. Jonathan Swan did a great job with him. Not so long ago. Now the context matters. Jonathan Swan had him. It wasn't a live interview. It was taped so he could stop and fact check, you know, et cetera.

He didn't have an audience of cheering supporters there. Poor Caitlin Collins, she got waylaid. I mean, that was the worst possible way to do that because the audience was filled with Trump supporters and it was in real time. And when you interview a liar, if you just let them talk you're doing great damage, right? Because you're just amplifying the lie. Even if they're pushing back what the supporters are hearing is

their fearless leader saying what they want to hear. So what do you do? Do you just not do the interview? If you can't, you don't do the interview. Yes. You de platform a liar if that's possible. But if it's somebody who's running for office, if it's somebody who just, you know, by the fact that it's this person lying, they're making news by the lie, and I put Trump into

both those categories, you can't just ignore him. I think they need more journalists who understand how to interview a hostile subject, who do the Christiane Amenpour type interview. And I mean, there are others in the past, you know, who have done this. I remember Barbara Walters doing this and Diane Sawyer. I mean, there are other people who have done this. The thing that doesn't work is the, the lazy interview where you, you put the microphone in front of them, you let them talk, you give one quick pushback and then you're out and then you move on to the next question. Worse yet is the split screen where you take a, I mean, they, they used to do

this for opinion matters only. Now they do it for factual matters. You have, you know, the award-winning scientist on one side of the screen. And you have the guy with a website on the other side of the screen. And they're going to, you know, they're, they're going to mix it up about whether the COVID vaccines are safe. And what the audience sees is two equal size boxes on the screen, both of which sounds somewhat credible. That's the terrible way to do it.

Right. That's not, so they shouldn't do those kinds of interviews. They shouldn't platform somebody in that around, uh, you know, that sort of an issue. That's the worst way to cover a factual issue. It's called false equivalence, right? It's just not it doesn't doesn't work. Or let me put it this way. It disinforms the audience to do it that way. I think the reason journalists do that is because they're terrified

of being accused of political bias. They don't want somebody to say, oh, well, you're just a shill. You're just saying that because you're Democrat. You know, I mean, wasn't this the criticism they gave of CNN, right? Which all of a sudden now CNN is going to rebrand themselves as, you know, no, they're, they're not, you know, they're, they're, they're going to be right down the middle. They're not going to be partisan. Well, Stuart Stevens in his recent book, I can't remember what it's called, but I wish

I had said this, but I'm going to attribute it to Stuart Stevens who said it. He said, how do you tell both sides of a lie? How do you have the liar on your program lying? And then you have, I mean, you can't say any better than he did. How do you tell both sides of a lie? You just you can't. So don't look, don't book liars on your program. And if you have to book a liar on your program, be prepared to interview them like you would Saddam Hussein or

Kaddafi. You know they're going to lie and you'd and you're not going to let them get away with just, um, pretending it's all true. And I like that. I like that advice. Don't book a liar. Um, that was Soledad O'Brien was the one who said that used to be on CNN. That's why she's not there anymore, but she's, she's awesome. She was a tough, tough cookie. Very tough. The only trouble with that advice is the pool for those who can talk to is

getting smaller and smaller all the time. If you're not, I mean, look, yeah, that that's true. I mean, there, there is a way if they're interviewing, you know, some Senator on a topic other than the 2020 election, they, yeah, I mean, there, there are ways to do it. You don't, I mean, if, if you couldn't book any politician who is a liar that meet the press wouldn't exist, right? I mean, they all, at a certain level, but, but you have to,

it's the strategic lie. It's not the self-serving lie. It's, it's the strategic one that I worry about the most. It's, you know, John Edwards gets caught. He'd done a bad thing. He gets, he's out of politics. Trump lies. He might bring down American democracy.

You shouldn't let him double down on that. You know, that's, they, they, they, they, the mainstream media needs to do a better job on that. I like your split, uh, split screen example too, because, you know, you go back to the smoking debate, there used to be a time where they were treated equally, both sides of that argument, right? And then eventually the media said, you know what? We're getting had here. These guys who are, you know, usually the tobacco companies, they're wrong,

and we know they're wrong, and it's proven wrong. We saw, we've seen the same kind of thing with climate change, right? Same strategy. Same strategy. Exact same blueprint. And we see the same thing with, you know, the election was rigged or what have you. Exactly. Here's the same thing. Here's my last question. What is your advice to the consumer of information, the consumer of news, no matter how where they're getting it? What's your advice to them? We assume for a moment they're somewhere in the middle here and they're looking for information that they can trust. What's your advice to them?

One of the most insidious things about disinformation is that it doesn't just get you to believe something false it polarizes you It polarizes you whether you believe the lie or not If you believe the lie, then maybe you begin to distrust the people who are telling the truth and Maybe it that poisons the well for anything else. They've got to say too But it also polarizes the people who don't believe the lie. Because sometimes it can make them feel helpless. It can make them feel cynical.

It can make them feel like there's nothing I can do. And I've had friends say, I just can't even read the news anymore because you don't know who's lying and who's not. You can't fact check everything. And who fact checks the fact checkers? And it's just too exhausting. And you've got to realize that that's exactly where the authoritarian wants you to be. And I'm going to read you a quick, you read a passage from the book.

I'm going to read you one that comes up even earlier in the book from quotation from Hannah Aaron on page three. She says the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false no longer exists. The authoritarian doesn't need to get you to believe the lie. They need you to give up on the idea that you can know the truth. And because once you've done that, then they've, then they've really got you. Right.

And so I think that the best way to fight back against this information has got to be to wake up to the fact that you're not helpless. Don't be cynical. You cannot fact check everything for yourself. That's true. Most of what we believe, we haven't fact checked for ourselves. We believe it because it comes from a trusted source. So I would say that if you go individually with each

fact, trying to fact check it, playing whack-a-mole, it's just going to make you crazy. Instead, spend some time finding a reliable media source that you trust and then watch that. I, I listened to NPR. I watch PBS. I'll tell you the show that I enjoy more than any other is the BBC. Anytime I can get BBC radio, I love it because they're funny. Their perspective on American politics is sharp and important and not quite so apocalyptic on one side or the other as American coverage is. So I mean I've got a set of media sources that I enjoy and trust. I'd say that's the best advice. I have to say one of them that I trust is Nicole Wallace on MSNBC.

Some people have said, you know, oh, MSNBC, they're just as bad as Fox. They're not. Fox are proven liars, as we know from the Divinion lawsuit. MSNBC not. But there's some confirmation bias sometimes. Sometimes the narrative is, you know, from a point of view, especially, you know, there's some confirmation bias sometimes. Sometimes the narrative is, you know, from a point of view, especially, you know, there's some opinion programming, not all hard news, but Nicole Wallace, the thing that I enjoy about her coverage, she's a former

Republican operative in the Bush white house, by the way, is that she never gets it wrong in distinguishing between miss and disinformation. She doesn't just say, Oh, well, that's a lie. What do we do next? She, she drills down. She, if there's a lie, there has to be a liar. What do they get out of it? What do they want?

Who are they radicalizing? Where it's the next step. So I watch her show every day. You're not even though it's, even though it's MSNBC and people will say, Oh, that's just a democratic leaning network. I, I find her to be very, um, to be very credible. Yeah. I'm a, I'm a fan of hers. Um, and, and one of the reasons I'm a fan of hers, I mean,

there's no doubt about where she stands on Trump. I mean, she doesn't hide her feelings about Trump at any time. But one of the things I've always admired about her, and this included when she used to stand behind the microphone for George W. Bush in the Bush White House, which was she has clearly researched what she's talking about. She doesn't sort of come into the studio at five to four in the afternoon and wing it for two hours. She's worked hard at it and we're gonna miss her for these next few months as she brings up a new child

in her 50s, good for her. Yeah, yeah, I heard that. I'm gonna miss too. And you know, I don't remember so much of what you remember when she was behind the microphone, but the, you know, it brings up, I mean, we all, the term spin doctoring is always that kind of cute word for what they do. And she, and that is what she did. And that's what she did. But spin spin,

I wrote an earlier book called respecting truth in which I argue there are different ways of respecting and disrespecting truth. Spin doctoring is not exactly respect for truth, but it's not as bad as lying for the following reason, because spin doctoring is putting the best face on the facts. And there's some editing and it's not, you know, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But it's not as bad as what we saw during the spokespeople that Trump had. I mean, so… Right out of the gate, right out of the gate, day one, I mean, I was in Washington, I was

there for the inauguration. And you know, day one was that whole crazy situation about the size of the crowd. But the fact is, that was a signal to us. These guys are going to lie. They're going to lie about the most obvious things and just keep saying it. And know that you know that they're lying, but they're going to do it anyway. Uh, Masha guess and captured that perfectly. Um, they said that's an assertion of power.

Uh, it's not meant to convince you. It's meant to show you who's boss. It's not meant to convince you. It's meant to show you who's boss. I thought that my, my friend, Jason Stanley, it is book, how propaganda works, makes that very same assertion. And I think that's a, that's a great insight into propaganda disinformation, you know, however you want to call it. It's if they can get you to believe the lie, great. If all they can do is bully you to show you who's boss and maybe get you to shut

up and not fight back and be cynical. That works too. Lee Mcintyre has been a great conversation. I've really enjoyed talking to you and I'm sure we could go on for hours yet on this topic. And hopefully we'll talk again at some point because this isn't going to be suddenly solved in the next 24 hours. No. We're going to have this hanging around us for a while. Next year should be quite something

in your country as they head to the presidential elections. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. This is the way to look at it. All right, well thank you so much for doing this. Really appreciate it. And I hope we do get a chance to talk again at some point. Peter, thank you so much for having me on your show.

I really enjoyed our conversation. Well, there you go. Lee McIntyre, author of On Disinformation and many other books. You can find them at your local bookstore. You can order them online. He's a thinker, right? He's a thinker.

He's a philosopher, as he says. And he has the background and the knowledge and the studying to have these conversations and engage in them with people across his country. And he spends a lot of time going to universities and television appearances, you name it. And now he's finally made it. He has made it to the pinnacle. He's made it on the bridge. It was great to have him. And as I said, I hope we can have another conversation at some other point on this same topic, because I know it's of interest to you. You write to me about it. You have strong feelings about disinformation. And good for you that you do. I hope you found this interesting.

Okay, we're almost out of time for today, but we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, just one final thought. That's right after this. And welcome back. You've been listening to The Bridge on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. This kind of relates in-bit of sorts. The headline in pointer.com, excuse me, pointer.org, is the United States lost more than two local newspapers each week year. Two a week. Here's the main body of the story, part of it anyway. The rate of local newspaper closures has accelerated to 2.5 a week in 2023, according to a new report from the Meadow School of Journalism at Northwestern University. More than 130 papers have closed or merged this year,

and the country is on track to lose a third of its papers since 2005 by the end of next year, the report found. Over half of counties in the United States have just one or no local news outlets. Now, we know some of the reason for this is advertising dollars. They've just evaporated. You know, you're looking in your mailbox, you want to see where the advertising goes. It's not in papers. It's in flyers. Or it's online. Or on some rare occasions it's on TV but not a lot of it.

This has had the impact on local newspapers across the United States but also across Canada. Those numbers are going to be available soon and we'll mention those as well. But every time you turn around some form of local news seems to be shutting down. And the impact is, well, it's horrible. It's horrible on the knowledge of those in smaller communities about what's going on in their communities. And it hurts democracy. When you're not aware of what's going on, it's hard to make your voice known. As one of the researchers in this latest study said,

it really is still a country of journalism haves and have-nots in a lot of ways. In a lot of rural and less affluent counties, there just is not any local journalism at all. Now, at a time when some people are upset at journalists, and they release the bots on social media to go after the mainstream media, the legacy media, call it whatever you want. And we see that all the time now, to the point where it's kind of a joke really, internally. Now there's lots of criticism that is well-pointed and open for real discussion. But some of the stuff that's personal and, you know, there are no examples given.

You know, they attack a journalist for a story they wrote. They don't point out a single thing in the story that the journalist got wrong. They just attack them for the sake of attacking them. That happens a lot now. A lot now. Or you can tell, especially on social media, that it's a bot. It's just some created listener or viewer.

Anyway, the point was, as Lee McIntyre says, you need an active, an active, a journalistic community that is trusted by the larger community to take on disinformation. If you don't have the trust or you don't have the community itself, the journalistic community, you're in a bad way. And in many parts of the U.S. and in Canada, that's the situation today. And thanks for listening to today's Encore edition

of The Bridge. We went back to late 2023 for that interview with Lee McIntyre. Look forward to joining with you tomorrow for your turn, your answers to the question of the week. Look forward to that. That's tomorrow. Bye for now.