Democratic erosion and misinformation

Sitting in on a panel at the RNC

One of the truly nice things about national party conventions is that there are a lot of groups (ideological, academic, religious, professional, and more) that show up and put on an interesting range of events, from happy hours to panel discussions. This morning I sat in on one hosted by the Annenberg programs at USC and University of Pennsylvania on the subject of international broadcasting and public diplomacy, but it ended up focusing a lot on democratic erosion. I want to report a few highlights here.

John Lansing of NPR depicted the modern world as engaged in a “war on truth.” The rise in authoritarianism first noted in Russia and China has spread to NATO countries like Turkey and Hungary, and now is chipping away within the United States.

He added that to say that authoritarians like Putin lie about things is to oversimplify it and miss the point. Putin’s Playbook is to act as though truth doesn’t exist: “If nothing is true, then anything is possible.” And part of the way to counteract that is to focus on the existence of empirical reality and not concede that everything is subjective.

Former Ambassador Cynthia Efird made a point of saying that we should not feel hopeless in the face of disinformation. It’s possible for people to believe something entirely wrong but still be open to corrective information, or to get it right on a range of other things. There’s a temptation to be despondent when dealing with disinformation campaigns but we actually have experience in combatting them.

In an interesting moment, a young woman who identified herself as a Chinese journalist asked a question about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. She was at that rally, she said, and was deeply jarred by it.