A rant. Dear readers, some obloquy for the disinformation police.

ob·lo·quy, noun. strong public criticism or verbal abuse. "He endured years of contempt and obloquy"

Kelso, CA circa 2014

The most underreported story of this past week concerned efforts by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to surreptitiously work around the First Amendment by enticing social media and big tech to do what they, themselves, cannot - censor speech of which they disapprove. It’s an outrageous attempt by our government and a few enablers to stifle free speech and end debate.

Reporting by The Intercept, based on leaked DHS records and documents obtained through a lawsuit brought by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, reveal that the recently disbanded DHS, “Disinformation Governance Board,” was not a standalone effort. It’s evident that there’s been collusion, some ongoing, between government officials, social media and tech platforms to get around the U.S. Constitution under the guise of protecting us from “disinformation.”

Well thanks, but no thanks. I think that I’ll just continue to figure out what information is good and what isn’t for myself - a benefit of learning how to read and my right as a citizen of this country. You may take your disingenuous concerns and go pound sand.

Also, and I don’t mean to be any harsher than I need to here, you DHS folks should know that many believe you to be quite inept with regard your current responsibilities, e.g., keeping our borders secure. The last thing that DHS needs is some new canvas onto which they may paint their incompetence.

This DHS conceived sortie against the First Amendment is an outrage on many fronts. And there is some criticism to go around - especially concerning the media’s culpability in this.

Elements of the legacy media have encouraged assaults on free speech under the guise of combatting disinformation. This, of course, is completely beyond the pale and needs to be called out. I’m talking a full Pulp Fiction level of retribution. Well allow me to retort… You read the Bible, Ringo?

Let’s examine the legacy media’s evolving role in this witch hunt. Decades ago, when journalists were professional broadcasters and writers (as opposed to entertainers, pundits and soothsayers), reporting was generally dispassionate. Just the facts. Watchers, readers and listeners were trusted to be sufficiently well-informed by good reporting to draw reasonable conclusions about the events of the day depicted in the news.

The entire idea behind the production of news was to inform; not to coerce, not to browbeat, not to wind up a carefully cultivated audience in order to sell ads; and definitely not, upon failing at these, to put down audiences as ignorant hoi polloi who reject a preferred narrative only because of their gullibility and susceptibility to manipulation.

So what changed? For much of the latter half of the 20th Century, news divisions of media corporations were not expected to make a lot of money, just not to lose a lot of money. Then, around 1990, came the rise of “infotainment,” which demonstrated that news, spiced up with some sensationalism and opinion, could attract large audiences. The goldrush was on.

News personalities didn’t have to be good journalists anymore, they just had to have mass-appeal. This gave rise to vacuous 90-minute morning shows with cheery on-air personalities being shown by celebrity guests how to pour organic milk into a bowl of cereal.

With the rise of 24 x 7 cable networks, the push for news content was put on steroids. Since a lot of news is wonkish and boring, the ability to spice things up became paramount. Enter punditry. Exit objectivity. I just have to look good, I don’t have to be clear.

Allow me to digress for a moment for some background. I have been involved in written journalism decades - though as a sideline until recently. The career I trained for was in physics. Near the end of a quarter century as a university lecturer (and one of the go to members of my department for interviews), I became interested in why the media was so uniformly terrible at interpreting elementary science. You could thoroughly explain something simple to a reporter, like the routine approach of a comet, but the final story would invariably resemble a clip from Armageddon.

I came to the conclusion that journalists just don't generally possess the content knowledge or, sans that, the chops required to process complex information beyond their education or experience. It’s like trying to explain the Schrödinger equation, just before an exam, to a student who’s bereft of mathematical knowledge and has absolutely no idea what a wave is. It’s not the journalist’s fault, but the result is that explaining even modest complexity to most reporters is a public exercise in pissing up a rope.

Journalists are not generally subject matter experts in science (or, for that matter, anything else) - and they don’t have the time to be. Media outlets used to have actual science journalists, but those days are long gone. This lack of subject expertise leads to reporters having to fill in contextual gaps when producing a story. The problem is that these gaps tend to be filled with things that the reporter does understand, like “comet = danger.”

This same conundrum applies to subjects beyond science: economics, energy, public safety, law and politics. The problem is that journalists, when reporting on topics on which they are not personally knowledgeable, tend to fill in the gaps in their comprehension with things that conform to their own biases - which are almost always liberal.

The Dunning-Kruger effect, being widespread in the media, all but guarantees that those most prone to filling in their knowledge gaps with personal biases are also the most likely to be blissfully unaware that they are doing anything untoward. Expertise, sans expertise.

This is why the last thing I want is to be pontificated to (or labeled) by someone in the media with no relevant expertise concerning information, disinformation, misinformation or anything else. Why should I give a damn about what the media thinks about disinformation when I’m reasonably sure that they generally don’t know what the fuck they are talking about?

All of this is unfortunate when it comes from the media, but that’s the end of it. Media incompetence does suck, but there are far worse things. You can choose the media that you prefer - or you can just turn it all off. The media does not have the ability to arrest dissenters and charge them with crimes. The media does not have the ability to put anyone in a reeducation camp or execute them for their views.

No, since the middle ages you need a malevolent government for that.

Cue the DHS and their short-lived attempt, earlier this year, to establish a Disinformation Governance Board, helmed by YouTube singing sensation Nina Jankowicz, herself a prominent case-study in expertise, sans expertise.

This, of course, is a far more troublesome development. The government, thanks in no small part to the Obama era, 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, has the ability to detain American citizens indefinitely and without trial. Given the problematic recent behavior of the DHS, the FBI, Covid response officials and President Biden in the sphere of disinformation and political propaganda, it’s not incredibly far-fetched to think of the Disinformation Governance Board as an attempt to construct a Ministry of Truth - with the best of intentions, of course.

Well allow me to retort. I’d like to let the disinformation police at DHS, the legacy media. big tech and elsewhere know that I’m completely capable of deciding for myself what is disinformation and what is not - without your help. I learned to read 60 years ago and I’ve done it daily since. I’ll put my track record of parsing bullshit from facts against yours anytime and I will kick your asses. And, unlike all of you, when I’m wrong, I cop to it.

The disinformation police may stick their concerns about my susceptibility to “disinformation” where the sun doesn’t shine - if they can find any extra room up there not already occupied by their heads.