MEDIA COMMENTARY
How Disinformation
Journalists Practice
Disinformation
CHRISTINE ROSEN
W
HILE MANY MAJOR media outlets such as and Brandy Zadrozny. When executives promoted the
CNN have recently announced large layoffs, two to “senior reporters,” they were credited with cre-
one journalistic beat is still booming. Call ating the “disinformation and misinformation” beat
it the Disinformation Desk. The Washington Post has at the network. NBC News executive editor Sally Shin
created a new position exclusively reporting on “health said the pair’s reporting “has served as a wakeup call
disinformation,” which includes “the forces promoting to the dangers stemming from the dark corners of the
scientific and medical disinformation on subjects such Internet.” They often work in tandem.
as vaccines, drugs, nutritional supplements and health- Like prolific writers of pulp fiction, Zadrozny
care treatments.” National Public Radio hosts an entire and Collins have settled on a reliable formula for their
“Disinformation Team” whose mission is broad: “From work: They examine a shady patch of the Internet, find
the lies about the 2020 election to the growing influ- something terrible, then extrapolate to assert that these
ence of anti-vaccine activists, to the enduring influence fringe views (always conveniently right-wing) are now
of climate-change denialism, lies and conspiracy theo- mainstream and dangerous. This was the template they
ries have seeped into nearly all aspects of modern-day used to downplay the New York Post’s revelations about
life, both in the US and around the globe.” Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 elec-
As NPR’s wording demonstrates, the field is tion. They lumped these in with conspiracy theories
dominated by people on the left who are very worried involving child trafficking that were making the rounds
about misinformation on the right. When the New York on right-wing online message boards at the time. The
Times recently featured “6 Podcasts About the Perils of two concluded that the laptop revelations and the con-
Misinformation,” the topics covered included January spiracy theories were all “part of a wider effort to smear
6, incels, anti-vaxxers, and Alex Jones. And while there Hunter Biden and weaken Joe Biden’s presidential
is plenty of ground to cover on the spread of mis- and campaign, which moved from the fringes of the Inter-
disinformation on the right, the fledgling field’s parti- net to more mainstream conservative news outlets.”
san focus has already produced some cautionary tales. Collins did much the same in a piece called “QA-
Consider two exemplars of this new breed of non’s New ‘Plan’? Run for School Board.” He sought
keyboard warrior: NBC News reporters Ben Collins to pin the Q label on several people who told him on
the record that they didn’t believe QAnon theories but
Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American rather were running for school-board elections over
Enterprise Institute. concerns about what was happening in public schools.
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It didn’t matter what they said. Collins had his theme, interference in the 2016 election. Evidently when the
and he was sticking to it. Russians do it, it’s dangerous election interference,
That was also the formula for recent remarks by but when Democratic disinformation experts do it in
Collins about Kanye West’s anti-Semitic statements. service of defeating Republicans, it’s “research.”
Appearing on MSNBC, Collins asserted, without NBC’s star disinformation reporters are not
evidence, that unnamed “Republican podcast circles” averse to peddling disinformation themselves. Con-
were to blame for Kanye’s vile remarks: “There are a lot sider one recent example: In the immediate aftermath
of people who are pushing those same talking points.... of a mass shooting that killed five people at an LGBTQ
They don’t agree with the classification that all the bar in Colorado Springs, Collins appeared on NBC and
Jews are doing this, that Kanye might have some good claimed the shooter had been radicalized by conser-
points, that’s a lot of stuff you hear in the Republican vative media and its animus toward gay people. Law
podcast circles right now.” enforcement at the time had shared no information
It is not news that people post crazy things on- about the shooter’s motives, but according to Collins,
line, and not a surprise that some people unfortunately reporters needed to “have a come-to-Jesus moment.”
decide to believe them. What is new is the industry that Appearing on MSNBC, he said: “What are you more
has emerged to report on it and afraid of? Being on Breitbart for
police it, and the incentive to see saying that trans people deserve
crisis and danger around every It is not news that people post to be alive? Or are you more
corner. The language of military crazy things online, and not afraid of waking up to the news
conflict crops up regularly when of more dead people? I’m more
disinformation reporters de- a surprise that some people afraid of the dead people.” De-
scribe their work. They note that unfortunately decide to believe spite his supposed fear of more
they are on the “front lines” of an corpses, he found the time to fo-
“information war,” as if scrolling
them. What is new is the cus most of his remarks on him-
through 4Chan and appearing on industry that has emerged to self, highlighting many of his
cable television are akin to risk- report on it and police it, and own previous stories and asking,
ing one’s life in battle. “What am I doing wrong?” In
They also frequently rely the incentive to see crisis and a two-minute clip he used the
on the insights of a small num- danger around every corner. word “I” 15 times.
ber of disinformation “experts” Collins later appeared on
who share their political views Meet the Press and repeated his
and are willing to overlook the harms of disinforma- claim that “the monthslong campaign of targeting
tion so long as it benefits their side of the aisle. A fa- trans and gay-rights events and supporters…has been
vorite expert source for Collins and Zadrozny is Renee a persistent narrative by the anti-LGBTQ right in the
DiResta, now of the Stanford Internet Observatory but last, you know, six months to the last year” and that
previously of Yonder (once called New Knowledge). “these narratives have taken such hold that they are, in
DiResta is an odd person to consult, since she was her- fact, endorsing violence at this point.”
self part of a team at Yonder that launched a conscious When the shooter appeared in court, however,
campaign of disinformation designed to help Demo- he claimed to be nonbinary and wanted to be referred
crat Doug Jones defeat Republican Roy Moore in the to as “Mx”—a disruption of Collins’s tidy narrative.
2017 Senate special election in Alabama. But when Collins was asked on-air in 2019 about
Yonder “orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ op- a mass shooter in Dayton, Ohio, whom authorities
eration that planted the idea that the Moore campaign had discovered was an avowed socialist with a public
was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” history of supporting liberal politicians such as Bernie
according to an internal Yonder report obtained by Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and expressing anger
the New York Times. Yonder created thousands of fake about the 2016 election (a typical tweet: “I want so-
Russian Twitter and Facebook accounts supporting cialism, and I’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come
Moore, bringing negative national media attention to around to understanding”), he refused to speculate
his campaign. When caught out trying to influence an about motive. “More neutral than anything,” he said.
election in this manner, Yonder claimed it was just an “We don’t know if there’s any political affiliation.”
“experiment.” Ironically, Yonder’s employees, includ- His colleague Zadrozny was also quick to blame
ing DiResta, had also recently worked with Demo- conservative media for the Colorado Springs shoot-
crats in the U.S. Senate to author a report on Russian ings. “I’ve been following this since about March and
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April,” she said on NBC. “We follow online hate trends, the phones for months, then slaughtered my mental
I guess. And since April and March, really the LGBT health writing these stories?”
community has been the main focus of this hatred. If If you’ve read Collins’s stories, the answer is:
there is a pipeline it starts from some smaller accounts Probably not. Those pieces are heavy on hyperbole and
online...[then] moves to the right-wing blogosphere, extrapolation and one-sided in their presentation of
and then it ends up on Tucker Carlson or it ends up out the complicated problems of our current information
of a right-wing politician’s mouth. And it’s a really dan- ecosystem. His story about anti-masking and wellness
gerous cycle that does have real-world consequences.” groups was largely about one woman who is bipolar
When the Washington Free Beacon tweeted out and who, in a manic phase in isolation during COVID
a clip of the show with a direct quote from Zadrozny, lockdown, found herself reading some crazy stuff on-
Zadrozny tweeted back, “This [is] absolutely not true line and then attacking a display of masks at her local
and if you had a shred of legitimacy you’d delete and Target. Collins manages to be both condescending and
correct. I won’t hold my breath.” Correct what, exactly? portentous about such “wannabe anti-mask influenc-
Her own words, recorded on video? ers,” as he calls them—which comes as a surprise from
Like many reporters in the disinformation space, someone who says that writing about online wellness
Zadrozny dislikes Libs of TikTok, a Twitter account groups and 4Chan conspiracy theorists “slaughtered”
that posts snippets from left-leaning social-media his own mental health.
accounts. Libs of TikTok tweeted the following after In early December, these crack disinformation
the shooting: “This organization in Colorado teaches reporters were given an opportunity to revisit one of
kids how to become drag queens and helps kids ‘safely their most egregious mistakes: covering for the spu-
experience the art of drag on stage,’” with direct links rious claim that the Hunter Biden laptop story was
to the organization’s publicity materials. Zadrozny a Russian disinformation campaign. Twitter’s new
tweeted in response: “Hateful and violent online rheto- owner, Elon Musk, turned over many of the company’s
ric targeting LGBTQ people has been ratcheting up for files to the independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who
months. Now, just hours after a deadly mass shooting then tweeted out details of Twitter’s internal efforts
at #ClubQ, the worst of these hate accounts, LibsofTik- to suppress the New York Post’s story. Collins imme-
Tok is targeting another drag event in Colorado.” diately tweeted, dismissively, that Taibbi was merely
Zadrozny, the mistress of the motte-and-bailey doing “PR work for the richest man in the world.”
approach to journalism, believes that a Twitter account Whatever one can say about Matt Taibbi, and there are
that posts publicly available information is “targeting” many uncomplimentary things one could say about his
people for violence—which then becomes a justifica- often-wild work, the idea that he’s a billionaire’s shill is
tion for censoring it. In this, she echoes the beliefs of among the most preposterous.
many current and former employees of social-media At a time when trust in media as an institution
platforms; Twitter’s former head of safety, Yoel Roth, remains historically low, anointing a small cadre of
recently said that Twitter accounts such as Libs of reporters as the judges of what is and is not disinfor-
TikTok and the Babylon Bee were not only “not funny” mation is risky at best—especially given their own pro-
but “dangerous” and their existence “contributes to an pensity for glib snark and witlessness combined with
environment that makes people unsafe in the world.” their frequent descents into sodden self-pity.
“Let’s start from a premise that it’s f***ed up,” he said. Worse still, those who have been tasked with
This suggests a broader problem with the disin- reporting on the many ways misinformation and disin-
formation beat. These “reporters” see themselves not formation are shared among the masses have decided
merely as reporters but as saviors and advocates, and that it is their job to censor. Their logic is this: The only
as such they react badly to criticism of their work. In way to save you from yourselves and the gullibility
2020, when Glenn Greenwald questioned the cred- from which you all suffer is to prevent you from saying
ibility of some reporters on the disinformation beat, and seeing things we have determined are not in the
Collins chose to respond by posting a lengthy, self- nation’s best interest (as we define it).
indulgent Twitter thread of his own pieces. He said of In the heady early days of Silicon Valley, its boost-
himself: “Should I not have talked to all of those doc- ers frequently claimed that “information wants to be
tors back in April and May who told me disinforma- free.” Today, as the Hunter Biden laptop and other sto-
tion was killing their patients and ravaging their ERs? ries demonstrate, almost all mainstream media jour-
Should I not have discovered the link between the viral nalists on the “disinformation” beat think information
anti-mask freakouts and QAnon’s invasion into well- should instead serve their agreed-upon narrative or be
ness and religious groups? Should I not have worked removed from view. Anything less is “dangerous.”q
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