Monday Musings: Lesley Stahl and 60 Minutes betray the legacy of Edward R. Murrow. Royal Photos II. Of course DEI produces poor scholars and scholarship. You were expecting?

Venting my spleen over the news of the day

Photo: CBS

I was flipping through channels yesterday evening during a break in music practice when I came across this pearl: The Right to be Wrong, on 60 Minutes. I happened upon this right at the opening monologue. It took less than 30 seconds to be stunned. Even by my low expectations, the disinformation in this 60 Minutes segment about disinformation is simply stunning.

From the opening monologue:

“As big tech firms wrestle with how to keep false and harmful information off their social networks, the Supreme Court is wrestling with whether platforms like Facebook and Twitter, now called X, have the right to decide what users can say on their sites. 

The dispute centers on a pair of laws passed in the red states of Florida and Texas over the question of First Amendment rights on the internet. The Supreme Court is considering whether the platforms are like newspapers, which have free speech rights to make their own editorial decisions, or if they're more like telephone companies, that merely transmit everyone's speech.

If the laws are upheld, the platforms could be forced to carry hate speech, and false medical information (emphasis mine), the very content most big tech companies have spent years trying to remove through teams of content moderators. But in the process, conservatives claim that the companies have engaged in a conspiracy to suppress their speech.”

This, of course, is a hugely disingenuous framing of this issue. I don’t personally know (or know of) anyone who argues, convincingly anyway, that private companies should be forced by the government to carry “hate speech” or “false medical information.” The issue being argued is who exactly is the arbiter of any of this and, further, what is true and what is not on social media.

Is it the companies themselves, which, despite exceedingly poor track records and demonstrable bias, probably have every right to do as they please within their terms of service? Or is it the government, which the First Amendment forbids from doing so directly but which many people, including myself, believe is attempting to do so by "persuading" social media companies with offers they can't refuse?

There is a grain of truth in Stahl’s framing of the issue. Social media companies are frequently threatened by both parties when it comes to speech that torques someone inside the Beltway off, and that typically comes in the form of threatening to treat these companies less like utilities, who are merely conduits for speech, and more like traditional news media, who can be held accountable for their content under certain circumstances.

The latter would employ a model of liability that would hold a social media company responsible for potentially millions of unpaid contributors. That’s why it’s such a potent threat.

Stahl goes on to lament the phenomenon of “social media moderation teams shrinking” and inveighs against the rise of “disinformation,” which she curiously imagines as the sole provenance or the right, supported by an interview with “misinformation researcher” Kate Starbird. From this interview:

With social media moderation teams shrinking, a new target is misinformation academic researchers who began working closely with the platforms after evidence of Russian interference online in the 2016 election.

Lesley Stahl: Are researchers being chilled? 

Kate Starbird: Absolutely. 

Kate Starbird is a professor at the University of Washington, a former professional basketball player, and a leader of a misinformation research group created ahead of the 2020 election. 

Kate Starbird: We were very specifically looking at misinformation about election processes, procedures, and election results. And if we saw something about that, we would pass it along to the platforms if we thought it violated their-- one of their policies. 

Here's an example: a November 2020 tweet saying that election software in Michigan "switched 6,000 votes from Trump to Biden." 

The researchers alerted Twitter that then decided to label it with a warning.

Lesley Stahl: I understand that some of the researchers, including you, have-- had some threats against them death threats.

Kate Starbird: I have received one. Sometimes they're threats with something behind them. And sometimes they are just there to make you nervous and uncomfortable. And it's hard to know the difference.

Lesley Stahl: This campaign against you is meant to discredit you. So we won't believe you.

Kate Starbird: Absolutely. It's interesting that the people that pushed voter fraud lies are some of the same people that are trying to discredit researchers that are trying to understand the problem.

Lesley Stahl: Did your research find that there was more misinformation spread by conservatives?

Kate Starbird: Absolutely. I think-- not just our research, research across the board, looking at the 2020 election found that there was more misinformation spread by people that were supporters of Donald Trump or conservatives. And the events of January 6th kind of underscore this.

Kate Starbird: The folks climbing up the Capitol Building were supporters-- of Donald Trump. And they were-- they were misinformed by these false claims. And-- and that motivated those actions.

Throughout the course of this segment, neither Stahl nor Starbird were able to identify a single instance of disinformation originating from the left. Nor threats directed against speakers or speech on the right. And some of their own examples of misinformation from the right rely on discredited things like Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election.

This is a classic hit piece. It’s so one-sided and dishonest in it’s framing of relevant facts as to be, itself, disinformation. It’s an example of how, when it comes to the mainstream media, the mighty have fallen. If Edward R. Murrow saw this, he would puke.

Last Monday, I ranted about the media’s pandering, gossipy fixation on the British Royal Family’s photoshopping of a family photo of the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton. We don’t have royalty in the United States. In fact, we fought a war over that very issue. I know hardly anyone in this country who’s obsessed enough with the British Royal Family to warrant the coverage the photo received. Yet it dominated news cycles for days.

While I couldn’t care less about Kate Middleton as the Princess of Wales, I have huge compassion for her as a human being facing a terrible medical prognosis. I wish her nothing but the best, and I hope that she finds a way to use her position to further the battle against cancer. That’s the truth.

Here’s the rub. I watched the coverage of the Photoshop controversy mostly on CNN, where the navel-gazing was off the rails. This week, I watched again to see how their tune must have changed. Not an apology to be found. In fact, they were slapping themselves on the back for how great their initial coverage was. While it is technically true that none of their anchors personally attacked the Princess of Wales for the photo, the vast majority of their guests did. It was a lot like watching an NFL team glorify the skunk rule after beating up a Pop Warner squad.

I’ve been tracking a growing story concerning research fraud and plagiarism at Ivy League and other prestigious colleges and universities. As it currently stands, there are about a half-dozen serious allegations of research misconduct and plagiarism among this cohort. My favorite is the 100-page complaint recently filed against Stanford University DEI math-ed wanker, Jo Boaler, citing over 50 instances of misconduct in her research citations.

Boaler is best known for her work in getting eighth-grade algebra banned from San Francisco’s public schools a decade ago to maintain “equity” in the classroom. Her research, which was based on numerous fabrications, was used to push this through, depriving students in San Francisco’s public schools of a decade’s worth of important math education over stupors and vapors.

My response to this, What did you expect? The academy has spent decades beating down merit, the enemy of DEI, by promoting bogus work and underqualified individuals as, respectively, legitimate scholarship and as leaders in academia. And this was supposed to somehow lead us to a virtuous intellectual promised land? I think not. If you thought that this problem began and ended with Caudine Gay, you’ve got another thing coming.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.