Last week, the Flyer editorial staff had our regular Wednesday meeting in the office. We crowded around the big table in the “fishbowl” (so called because of its glass wall) conference room and dared to breathe the same air. In person! I don’t typically use exclamation points, but I feel the previous sentence warrants some excitement.
Michael Donahue, our inimitable food and party writer, author of the popular “We Saw You” column, made the mistake of saying he would see everyone at next week’s meeting — on Tuesday. I corrected him, but he somehow planted that little bit of misinformation in everyone’s brain, where it took root and bore poisoned fruit.
Why would we meet on Tuesday morning — before the issue has gone to press? It makes no logical sense and flies in the face of a Flyer editorial tradition that long predates my time with this estimable publication. Nonetheless, a third of the staff remembered and seemed to take as gospel Donahue’s slip of the tongue.
I spent the last week fielding emails, texts, and in-person(!) questions about our untimely Tuesday meeting.
My intention here isn’t to tease my editorial staff — well, not only to tease them — but to point out in practice something that has been clearly demonstrated in studies. Gossip, rumors, and misinformation travel much faster than proven fact.
After an analysis of 126,000 rumors spread on Twitter over a period of 11 years, a 2018 study by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that false news travels more quickly and reaches more people than true news. Rumors and false news were found to be 70 percent more likely to be retweeted and reached people up to six times faster than actual news. Of course, this study is limited to stories spread on Twitter, but what is the bird app if not society’s rumor mill?
Of course, I am once again referring to the propagation of vaccine-related misinformation online. (I don’t want to talk about it anymore, folks, but for the moment it seems to be one of the more immediate dangers disproportionately affecting our region. We’re a hot spot again, one of the top five states for increases in case counts.) But I’m not just thinking of vaccine and coronavirus misinformation.
There’s also the Big Lie, the belief that the most recent presidential election was stolen, and all of the dozens of smaller lies it’s spawned. There’s a crisis at the southern border. President Joe Biden will soon give the signal to the Chinese army (currently hidden in Canada) to invade. Or, as Senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted on Monday, President Biden is using his political power to silence his opponents. Well, Marsha, he’s doing a downright terrible job of it if that tweet is still up. All of this — these flurries of fearmongering tweets and email blasts and news spots, the needless trips to inspect the troops at the border, this grandstanding — serves only to distract from real issues affecting real people. Our neighbors and friends and family and coworkers aren’t being served by trips to the border between Texas and Mexico. I’m much more concerned with the bridge that spans the border between Tennessee and Arkansas, thank you. Or with the way certain county borderlines seem to demarkate a dramatic difference in vaccination levels.
Disinformation is deadly. I’m not up in arms about a difference of opinion, but spreading patently false information for political credit is another thing entirely. “Almost all the patients that get admitted to the hospital and admitted to me in the intensive care unit are unvaccinated patients,” Dr. Todd Rice, the director of Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s COVID-19 unit, told Nashville’s WKRN last week.
I wish we could get past all this. It’s like we have our own 21st century version of Vichy France, with outposts in most communities in every state, remotely governed from Mar-a-Lago. (And yes, I am aware of all the xenophobic, authoritarian, and Nazi-collaborator connotations of my reference to Vichy France. Can you honestly say it doesn’t fit?)
Look, there are no Chinese troops stationed in Canada waiting on an order from an American president to give them the signal to invade and subjugate Tennesseans. The level of coordination that would take is, put simply, beyond the realm of possibility. If anyone is that put together, it flies in the face of the evidence of every meeting I’ve ever tried to schedule.
See you next Wednesday.