The President's Daily Brief - June 14th, 2022. Special Brief: The History of Fake News.

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

It’s June 14th. You’re listening to a special edition of the President’s Daily Brief. If you have listened to the PDB since the beginning, you will likely remember this edition of the PDB. Unfortunately, Bryan has fallen ill and so we have returned to one of our favorite briefs that a large portion of our audience still has not yet heard. ----- "Fake news" isn't new. We have had biased, leaning, and flat-out misleading news for a very long time. From William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer to the 2016 Presidential Election, this special brief takes a look at the history of fake news. Also, a suggestion on how to combat the urge to stop reading after the headline, ------ Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this episode of the President's Daily Brief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's June 14th. You're listening to the President's Daily Brief. I'm your host and former CIA officer Brian Dean Wright. Your morning intel starts now. The brief you're about to hear is in the same spirit of the actual President's Daily Brief, which is a top secret summary of the most critical events in the past 24 hours, all delivered to the president each day by the nation's spymasters. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I am your spy, and this is your special brief covering the issue of fake news. If you have listened to the PDB since the very beginning, you will recognize this brief, even though you may not recognize this voice. This is Eric Foster, producer of the PDB. Remember when Brian briefed us recently on how COVID lockdowns have helped to create superbugs out of our normal seasonal viruses? Well, unfortunately, Brian has caught one of those bugs, and so like any good operative team, we have decided to pivot for today's brief.

Brian, I do hope you get better soon, my dear friend. If you would also like to wish Brian well, as well as maybe let him know how much you appreciate his work on this show. Please feel free to reach out to him at PDB at thefirsttv.com. Again, that's PDB at thefirsttv.com. And now without further ado, your special brief on fake news. By now, you have probably seen the headlines and concerns that the Biden administration and its Department of Homeland Security have set up a disinformation governance board. I covered in a previous brief this week that there are some odd and even alarming issues with this development, from the very partisan leadership of the new board, to a peculiar focus on the very things that the American people don't particularly like about Joe Biden to include his handling of illegal immigration. In other words, Joe Biden is going to decide truth about the things that Joe Biden has failed on.

There are a thousand great questions that all of this brings up, especially how exactly this new disinformation governance board will operate. But one of the questions to consider, I think, is this. Is it even possible to stop disinformation or fake news? And building on that question, how and who gets to decide what truth is? That's the focus of today's special brief. But to do this right, I want to take you back to the late 1800s and early 1900s in this country. There were two men, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, who were arguably America's leading newsmen. They had duly newspapers mostly in New York City, but their reach extended to St. Louis and San Francisco.

Both were Democrats, progressives, in fact. But they were also businessmen, and they were in a vicious competition with each other to build their readership, to build their companies and make a lot of money. ad revenue. Now, in order to build their readership, they did some bad things. For example, they fabricated interviews with experts. They promoted sensational crime stories. And most especially, they put out misleading or frightening headlines. It got so outrageous that people coined a new term for it, yellow journalism. But the thing is, it wasn't just that it was outrageous. It was also deadly. In 1901, one of William Randolph Hearst's newspapers asked readers to consider the benefits of killing then-President McKinley. Not long after an anarchist did just that.

Now, 50 years later, there was a new kind of fake news that was coming onto the scene, supermarket tabloids. The National Enquirer was one of the first, focused on sensational stories of sex and scandal, while later magazines like Starr gossiped about Hollywood performers. This field of tabloid journalism, by the way, is still big business. Online outlets like TMZ make millions of dollars off of gossip and rumor, usually fake. The point I'm making is this. Misinformation and disinformation are not new. Not in this country? Not anywhere. And yet somehow, this country has managed to survive. Somehow, people like you and I have managed to sort through what's mostly right and what's mostly wrong, and then we just marched ahead. I'm highlighting this

history because the next time you hear a politician or talking head scream about how we are wrestling with some profound new issue that is shaking the bedrock of our democracy, well, you can sit back and smile and remember that we've actually been here before. Now, before we get too smug and think that the whole fake news issue is really just a problem caused by media outlets and their owners, we have to acknowledge that we as readers and listeners also share some of the blame of liking or spreading fake news. Obviously, I've already mentioned the supermarket tabloids, but there's something else here. A few years back that the Pew Research did a survey that found that, yes, we're concerned about fake news, but 23% of us shared fake news, including when we knew

that it was fake. As my mother would say, that is naughty. But it gets to this idea that for some reason, some human beings just like being little devils. And I suspect that that's never going to change. Some of us are just born to cause trouble. But putting aside these rebel rousers, the rest of us can contribute to our fake news problem, but in a different way. We don't do it with malice. We do it because we're not focused. Let me explain. About 60% of Americans, It's 6.0% of Americans never read past a headline. Now, I get it. We are all busy. We've got families. We're working long hours. Or maybe we just want to ignore the world's problems. Sometimes I do. Regardless, that means that a headline is about as far as we will go in consuming our news. We don't take the time to delve deeper into the stories or the complexities and the nuances of an issue. And that takes us back to Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.

Even back then, remember that both of those men used outrageous or misleading headlines to drive their news coverage. It was yellow journalism. They did that because even back then, they knew that people weren't going to dive further into a story. The headline was about as far as most people would go. That means then as now, media owners and editors know that they have the power to push an agenda with just a simple headline. Let's take an example. During the 2016 presidential campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, there was an analysis done on the headlines about those two candidates. It found that there were far more headlines about Trump than Clinton, about double the headlines at one point.

And the coverage, well, in liberal outlets, they treated Clinton more favorably, not so of Trump. Now conservative outlets, on the other hand, they treated Trump more favorably, less so Clinton. I suspect that that's not a surprise to any of you. Bias, in other words, is baked into all of our news. Okay, so let's summarize what we've learned so far. First, fake news is not a new phenomenon. Second, media owners and editors profit from fake news. That's why they use misleading headlines.

It drives clicks and views, and that drives more ad revenue. Finally, some of us, maybe even you, actually kind of like fake news. news. Supermarket tabloids, yes, but some of you all are little devils, and you just like cause and trouble. For the rest of us, we're just really busy, and we don't have a lot of time to explore the news in any real deep sense beyond the headlines. So that leads us to the question that started out this brief. Can we stop fake news? If you were the president, this is how I would brief you on answering that question. Simply put, no, we cannot stop fake news. Certainly not with some sort of governance board or fact-checking staff? Because those solutions are made up of people,

and it turns out that people are very flawed indeed. Moreover, when you give fact-checkers the power to decide truth, you don't just get truth, as we've seen. You get bias, you get preferences for political parties, for instance, or sometimes people just like being troublemakers. In other words, Stopping Fake News is chasing after something that just doesn't exist. Bias-free journalism. There's just no such thing. There's never been such a thing. But that doesn't feel satisfying, does it?

Because most reasonable people would like to see us do something to at least acknowledge there's an issue and maybe provide a framework to help suss out truth from lies. And that's a fair goal, and it's important. So let's talk about some imperfect solutions, all the things that we can do, ourselves, because that's the easiest thing to control, and we can start today. So first, when you're reading or listening to news, push yourself to go beyond the headline, especially on big issues. And when you do that, or frankly, even if you're just reading a headline, I want you to pay attention to a very important emotion, and that is surprise. You see,

when the mind experiences surprise, when you feel surprise, that's usually the brain signaling that a belief that you hold is being challenged. You expected one thing, you thought you knew something, but a new set of facts or opinion is being presented and your mind is quite taken aback by it. I encourage you to stop and really pay attention to whatever's being presented in that moment, to that opinion or to that fact. Because if nothing else, it gives you a chance to either dismiss the new information and confirm what you already know to be true, in other words, you're your own fact checker. Or maybe that surprise leads you to discovering something new and you change your opinion or you add some nuance to your belief. And that's a good thing. It's good to change your mind.

Second, pick three different news outlets that run the spectrum of bias. Read or listen to each and dig past the headlines and see where your gut leads you on a story because the truth is in there somewhere. Finally, look for opinion writers or podcasters who believe that the world is gray, not black and white. We all know the gas bags in today's media. I hope you can find voices that leave you thinking, you know, that guy or gal has a bias, but he or she is reasonable. All right, so those are my major recommendations. Now, what you didn't hear me say is that we should embrace some government oversight board or a ministry of truth. You didn't hear me say that, social media outlets should hire fact-checkers and start blocking what they think is wrong.

That's because when faced with a choice between truth overlords or the untamed masses enjoying free speech and all the fake news that comes with that, I'd rather gamble on imperfect people like you and me. Because the moment that we turn over truth to a government body or corporate interest, That's the moment when we lose not just our freedom of speech, but we start to lose our freedoms entirely. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes your special morning brief. I sure appreciate you listening in and recommending the PDB to folks that you know. It's really neat to see how each day more and more people are tuning in. It's just incredibly humbling.

As always, please keep sending me those emails. Whatever's on your mind. The email address is PDB, as in the president's Daily Brief, or PDB. at thefirsttv.com. And with that, my friends, we end the show reminding each other of why we are here, talking about our country and our world. It's the creed of every good spy and every smart American. It's from John chapter 8, verse 32. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Good day.