Interweaving #28 - Bill Yousman on the Dangers of COVID Disinformation

Podcast
Written By Weave News

In this episode of Interweaving, host John Collins talks with media scholar Bill Yousman (Sacred Heart University) about recent trends in disinformation in the age of COVID and mass school shootings. They discuss how claims of secret conspiracies, facilitated by social media algorithms, can manipulate even the most critical media analysts and deflect attention away from much-needed structural analysis of corporate and state power.

Transcript

John Collins: Welcome to Interweaving! I'm John Collins. Disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda have been problems for decades, and scholars have developed some very useful theories and tools for unmasking these kinds of political and media manipulation. But what happens when the manipulation becomes so successful that even the expert critics can fall victim to it?

That's a question that we're here to address today. We have a guest here who has been thinking a lot about these things. Bill Yousman is an associate professor in the School of Communication, Media, and the Arts at Sacred Heart University. Bill has published widely on issues related to media literacy and media culture. In particular, I want to call attention to an award-winning anthology that he co-edited, it's called Gender, Race, and Class in Media, and we'll make sure to link to it in our show notes for today's episode. Bill was also the keynote speaker for the Weave News 10th anniversary conference held at St. Lawrence University in 2017. So I'm especially pleased to welcome him to our show today. Bill, thanks for joining us.

Bill Yousman: Oh, I'm happy to be here, John. Thank you for the invitation.

So you heard my introduction about disinformation and misinformation, and I know that you've been paying close attention to these issues for a long time, but especially since the start of the pandemic.

I have been focused a lot on COVID disinformation because I feel like it's a big factor in why we, in the United States in particular, with more access to vaccines, more access to adequate health care, have actually done one of the worst jobs in containing the pandemic in the world. So if you look at our very privileged economic and medical status, but then you look at how poorly we've done in getting people vaccinated, and in trying to mitigate against the worst effects of the pandemic, you have to start looking around for reasoning behind that.

And to me, one of the big reasons is that there is so much disinformation about the disease, about the vaccines, that has really permeated throughout American culture. Having said that, there are other issues as well, that I'm concerned about - issues related to democracy and the fairness of elections, issues related to gun violence, issues related to international affairs. The people who are very invested in spreading disinformation and propaganda seem to cluster around the type of propaganda that they're spreading. So you look at the QAnon phenomenon, for example, it gets into a whole range of issues that the proponents of that are really spreading a lot of lies and propaganda about.

Do you feel like COVID in particular then has brought these issues into more relief? And I wonder if you could say a little bit more about how COVID related disinformation connects with other kinds of disinformation that maybe have been around longer, or that seem to be about other issues, but in fact are clustered in these ways.

I do think COVID has raised it to a new level. But as you point out, disinformation and propaganda is certainly nothing new in world affairs, and it's certainly nothing new in the United States. You know, we can go back to the very beginning of the invasion of North America to talk about disinformation here on our own shores. But since we only have a half hour, I won't try to go that far back. But I think I would go a little bit back further than 2020 and the onset of COVID to the 2016 presidential campaign, where these issues of so-called fake news and the questioning of truth, and some people have written about what they call the post-truth society, they had always been there lurking under the surface. But I think they really came right into the mainstream with the advent of a mainstream presidential candidate who had no qualms about spreading all kinds of lies, and just a very tenuous relationship to the truth.

And then news organizations that were then doubling down on that and becoming fountains of disinformation and lies, specifically Fox News, because it's the most mainstream, it's the one that has the widest reach. There are certainly other versions of that. You know, there had been precursors to that with right-wing talk radio and things of that nature, but where I think it really started to come to the fore was during that presidential campaign and during Trump's presidency and then was sort of re-energized and catalyzed by COVID.

Right, and what's interesting here is that as you know, for people who study media and who do media criticism and critical media literacy work, a lot of the tools that we use and that we've inherited often begin from the assumption that disinformation and propaganda are really bipartisan, they're really associated more with things like corporate power, state power, and those sorts of things. And so when you have this particular candidate who's taking these processes to another level, that can pose certain challenges for people who use those critical tools. And I'm wondering, before we go any further, if you could just briefly summarize for our listeners, when we say critical media analysis or critical media literacy, what are the basic kinds of approaches that typically get used in those fields?

Critical media studies really looks at media, especially when looking at corporate media, as the voice of the powerful. And so we look at issues of political economy, who is funding media, how do they use media to further their own goals, how do they use things like public relations to advance corporate power, that sort of thing.

And I think that the legacy of those critical approaches remains really important today. I think you would agree with me on that. And so a question that comes to mind when we see this kind of, let's say COVID related disinformation or people questioning the veracity of information about school shootings, you know, did they really happen, claiming that things are false flag operations, those kinds of things. So the question that comes to my mind is, when does critical media analysis cross the line into paranoia, and how can we recognize when that happens?

Yeah, and I think that's sort of at the heart of the matter. I know that a lot of people who are invested in critical media analysis push back against the phrase “conspiracy theory,” right? Because they'll say that this has been a way to tamp down questioning of power, right, and that there certainly have been in history some real conspiracies that have happened. A very mainstream example is the tobacco industries and their coverup of information that they knew for sure that their products were killing people, and they invested a lot of labor and money in covering it up, in trying to go after their critics. We've seen the same thing with the oil industry and climate change. So, yes, these things do happen. We do know about the United States and the use of the CIA and secret operations around the world to overthrow democratically elected leaders.

All of that is true. These things do happen. But it becomes dangerous and misleading when we then use it to turn it into more of an individualistic sort of attempt to identify some secretive individuals who are pulling the strings behind the scenes rather than looking at it in terms of structural issues. There are structural issues of US imperialism and US capitalism and corporate power that explain the type of examples that I just offered. And that's very different to me than saying Fauci, Bill Gates, and George Soros or whoever are behind this plot to inject these microchips in people's veins in order to then, you know, execute them or control them. As absurd as that sounds, those ideas are actually being spread, and those ideas are being spread by some people like you and I, with doctorates, who are teaching students, who have the titles of professor and a certain amount of legitimacy that comes from that. And yet they seem to have abandoned a structural analysis for more of an approach that tries to just uncover a secret cabal that is behind these things for some nefarious purposes.

If you can indulge me for just a second, I'll give one example of this, and it goes back even before the 2016 presidential campaign: 9/11. So 9/11 happened, and there were kind of two different approaches to it from the left. I'm talking specifically from left critical analysis here. I consider myself to be a person of the left. That's the approach that I come from, that's the literature that I'm familiar with. And so I used to work for an organization called the Media Education Foundation, run by Sut Jhally, who was one of my professors when I was doing my doctorate at UMass.

And the Media Education Foundation made a film called Hijacking Catastrophe. And what that film was about was how the Bush administration took advantage of 9/11 to advance a range of policies that they had always wanted. They had always wanted to project American power further into the Middle East. They had always wanted to tamp down on civil liberties at home and provide more power to the domestic surveillance infrastructures. 9/11 occurred and they took full advantage of that.

So in the Media Education Foundation film, Hijacking Catastrophe, they talk about that. So Sut would go around and he would show this film, and he would talk to audiences, and invariably someone in the audience would stand up and say, why aren't you talking about the fact that the Bush administration actually pulled this off, that they planted these explosives in the building, that Israel was behind it, that Jewish employees didn't show up for work that day because they were in on it, why aren't you talking about those things?

And so to me, that is kind of emblematic of the problem, that a structural, critical media analysis of responses to 9/11 points to the way that neoconservative politicians and institutions took advantage of this horrible terrorist attack, rather than suggesting that they were actually behind it, and that they're the ones who pulled it off themselves. So I think we've seen a similar kind of pattern unfold in the subsequent couple of decades.

We're getting at here the difference, then, between, let's say a nuanced and critical structural analysis of the world and world politics and social structures and so forth and an analysis or a set of claims that are built on fantasies about some number of individuals who are in control of everything, which is not the same thing as structural analysis.

Exactly.

So think this is a really important distinction that you're making, and to the extent that some of that problematic analysis is coming from people on the left or people who identify themselves as being of the lft, there must be some pressure to keep these kinds of criticisms that you're offering here in-house. So I'm wondering what made you decide to address this issue in a more public way right now?

I think you're right that it's easy to critique people who you see as kind of part of the other side, but when it's people within your own group, it becomes much more difficult. So there are people who I've actually worked with, there are people who I've associated with, who I think have gone in this direction. And my belief is that there is a special responsibility that comes in calling out those who are in sort of your same sphere.

So I can use some analogies. You know, I feel like as a white person in the United States, I have a special responsibility to call out white privilege, white supremacy, to address white people, and to be an advocate for a critical approach to white supremacy. As a man, I feel a special responsibility to call out patriarchy and misogyny. I think there's a requirement to do that sort of thing. And so as a self-proclaimed left media scholar, when I see other people who those adjectives are assigned to, I do feel like an urgency to kind of address that, to address what's happening in our own house.

You know, there's a certain amount of prevarication and lying and falsehood and deception that I'd expect from the right. It doesn't surprise me when Fox News does this. It doesn't surprise me when the far right does this sort of thing. But when it's coming from within, I feel an extra obligation to say, wait a minute, hold on a second. It's one thing to critique the pharmaceutical industries and to talk about the inordinate amount of power they have in American society, and to point to the problems in public health that have resulted from some of the corruption in the pharmaceutical industries. It's one thing to do that. And it's another thing entirely to say that Pfizer is, you know, implanting us with some type of doomsday device, which some of these people are literally, it sounds incredible, but are literally saying. Those are two very different projects.

Some of the people who I would be more likely to say I am in line with the type of analysis that they used to do in the past have now moved more in terms of these individualistic, conspiracy driven ways of looking at the world. And to me, they're actually no longer really even doing critical analysis because they're not really talking about structural power any more. They think they are, but from where I sit, they're not.

So does this speak to the power of social media algorithms? Does it speak to the success of particular political actors in targeting leftists with disinformation? How do we explain the phenomenon that you've identified here?

I think all of those things are a part of it. I'm not one of the people who thinks that social media is the reason for this. But I do think that social media has made it easier to reach large numbers of people with some really startlingly bad and misleading ideas. There's always been this sort of thing, but when it was consigned to maybe a cable access television program or a newsletter that somebody mimeoed in their own home and then, you know, passed out or hung up on doorways or whatever, it didn't have the amplification that social media has allowed for where you can really reach huge numbers of people without having a big budget, without having access to television or the film industries. And so I think it really has given new life to something that has always been around.

In terms of why some leftist media studies people fall into this, that's a little more baffling to me. On the one hand, you can see how, from a critical media perspective, there has always been the encouragement of skepticism toward what the US government is saying, toward what corporate media is saying. And to me that's always been very healthy skepticism. But I often talk to my students about the difference between skepticism and cynicism. You know, where cynicism leads us to this path where nothing can be believed. Everything is a lie. And I think once we start going down that path, we get into some very, very tricky ontological territory where it sort of becomes too tempting to start looking at these cabals who are supposedly pulling the strings behind the scenes.

There was a professor in Florida named James Tracy. I'm a member of an organization called UDC, the Union for Democratic Communication. James Tracy was also a member of that organization. Although I didn't know him personally, you know, you kind of have a working knowledge of the people who belong to the similar small organizations. And Tracy, even though he was in Florida, after the Sandy Hook school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, decided that the whole thing was just a hoax, that it had never happened, that the students who were killed were so-called crisis actors, that this was all part of a US government plot to ban guns and to keep them out of the hands of the population.

And he became like an active participant, actually harassing families whose children had been lost in that terrible, terrible tragedy.To me, that's unconscionable. How do you go from a structural analysis of how power works to getting to that absurd, and really cruel to me, stance? He eventually lost his job. He claims it was because of that. The university claims that it was because he didn't file proper paperwork for conflicts of interest or some outside work he was doing or something. That was back in 2012 and 2013. So some of this stuff does have these long-term roots that, you know, are still very fruitful.

And for anybody who comes across a case like that, you can't help but ask yourself, like how could someone fall into that kind of rabbit hole, to use a term that gets thrown around a lot these days. And I know we need to talk at some point before we finish up today about some strategies for tackling this kind of problem, but I wanted to offer, just briefly, a reading from my own perspective. As you know, I share pretty similar training to the training that you have. And it seems to me like the whole idea of critical media analysis is built on the assumption that some of us, those who have the right critical tools, are able to see through the propaganda, the ideology, the machinery of corporate media and so forth. And when one's reputation as a critical media analyst is grounded in that kind of position, then you're constantly competing with others in order to show that you're the most critical, the most able to question what others are taking for granted.

For me anyway, that can lead to a kind of vulnerability that we rarely acknowledge, especially in the age of algorithmic power. And it can lead one to believe, I'm the only one who is seeing the truth. Everyone else is being manipulated. And so it feels to me like in that sense, critical media analysis is a hell of a drug. And I think we have to acknowledge that that particular ideological drug is especially attractive to white male scholars, those who are already positioned as privileged knowers within the dominant systems of knowledge and who are socialized to see their own views as objective and infallible. So when such people are unable or unwilling to step back and reflect critically on their own vulnerability to ideological manipulation, then we have a real problem.

And I'm reminded here of something that you'll appreciate, a line from Stuart Hall, one of the most important media scholars ever, who wrote about the idea of false consciousness. He said that I know a lot of people who think that everybody else is living in false consciousness, but I don't know anybody who thinks that they themselves are living in false consciousness. So this is a real dilemma, right? And I think it calls for some humility on all of our parts as critical media scholars to recognize that we are all vulnerable to disinformation, no matter how critical we think we are. Is that a fair characterization?

I think that's very fair. And I'm so glad that you're talking about that, because you touch on a lot of really important things there. The way this has started to unfold over the last few years, I have to admit, it's made me question myself a little bit as well. I've been teaching college students since 1995, and I've always taken a critical perspective on media power. And you know, I've had some moments where I've had to think about, is what I was saying to students what they were hearing? Or did I think I was making this sophisticated kind of structural analysis and were they hearing, don't trust anything anybody ever tells you? I didn't think I was doing that, but maybe I was, inadvertently.

I also think you touch on something really important when you mentioned the identity of some of these people. And I don't think we can think about identity in simplistic terms, but it does seem like most, not all, but most of the academics on the left who have gone down this path are white men. I mean, there is a certain commonality there, that I think at some point also needs to be looked at in terms of power and the privilege that white male voices have had in media, in academia, in being able to present ourselves as the smartest guy in the room. It becomes sort of like this testosterone fueled battle over who is going to pull the curtain and expose the wizard who's pulling the strings. I think it just becomes way too individualistic rather than structural in terms of how we're trying to think about these things.

Yeah, I agree with you there for sure. And it raises to me the question that I guess we could maybe wind up with today, although I'd love to continue this conversation for a lot longer. You know, what do we do about all this? So the easy response, I think, is to double down and say, well, we need critical media analysis more than ever now, we need to double down on the structural analysis and so forth. And I tend to agree with that assessment. But if your concerns are accurate, then it seems that those of us who identify as critical media analysts need to develop some new strategies potentially to meet these new realities. So where do we begin?

I think that's the toughest question. It can sometimes feel like you're Sisyphus, trying to roll that boulder up the hill and it just keeps gathering momentum and rolling back down at you, even harder than it did the first time. And I often kind of feel like that these days. It's a great question. I don't know if I have a good answer to it. I'm going to have to do a lot more work and a lot more thinking about that because you're right, the easy answer is we've got to double down on critical media education. We've got to double down on education about propaganda and disinformation. We've gotten to interrogate our own perspectives and be very reflective about how we're actually approaching those issues.

But honestly, and I don't mean to end on a pessimistic note, I don't know where that's going to go or how far it's going to get us in an environment where something has been established where no matter what evidence is brought to the contrary of some of these wild claims, that evidence then just becomes proof of more of a coverup.

Isn't that the essence of some of this kind of thinking?

Yeah, if that makes sense. So one thing we do know is that just countering this with just more and more facts and fact checking actually doesn't do very much. Because as much as it might seem on the surface as a conflict of facts, what it really is, is a conflict of narratives. What are these different stories that are being told? And unfortunately, the stories of some of the conspiracy theorists are narratively very powerful. They're emotionally very powerful.

The type of analysis that I'm interested in, the structural, the critical analysis, can seem very abstract at times. And it's much easier to just kind of point your finger at Fauci or point your finger at Gates, and to claim that they invented this thing that is going to mind control us or is going to start wiping us out. You know, that's like a Hollywood movie, and it's emotional and it's intriguing. You can understand why people do, as you say, fall down these rabbit holes. And the more they're looking at this stuff online, the deeper and deeper they go. The algorithms of the major social media companies push people toward more and more of that kind of thing.

So that's just my unfortunate response, that I'm not sure. I'm not sure where we go from here or what we do about this. One of the reasons that I do want to talk about this more, and I want to talk about this in forums like the one that you're providing here, one of the things that I'd like to see start happening is for us on the left to start talking about this more and to calling it out and to just be kind of vocal about that. When I've critiqued some of the people who had done this, I've gotten some pushback about it, to be honest with you.

I'm sure you have.

You start to kind of feel like you're a traitor to the cause. One person accused me of being like a McCarthyite, which, you know, for a 60-year-old leftist like me, boy, does that really touch a nerve! I'd like to see more of us just kind of saying like enough, enough with this stuff. It's actually destructive to what we're trying to do in terms of work toward a more equitable and more democratic society.

Bill, I'm really grateful to you for bringing this forward to us and engaging in this conversation. I do hope that we can continue it in a future episode because there's a lot more to explore. But you've given us a lot to think about ethically, in terms of our own responsibility as media producers, media analysts, but also politically in terms of strategy and thinking about how do we go about, let's say creating the world that we would like to see, which is the fundamental question, of course, of all good politics. So thank you once again for joining us today on Interweaving, and I hope we will be able to continue the conversation in the future.

Thank you so much for inviting me, John. I really appreciate it. And I'd be happy to come back anytime.

We look forward to it.

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