EDITORIAL: Do we trust feds to define ‘disinformation?’

Published 2:00 pm Monday, May 2, 2022

That the Biden administration has created what it calls the “Disinformation Governance Board” — that’s the official title, not some right-wing exaggeration — all but demands a reference to George Orwell.

We can’t know at this point whether this board within the Department of Homeland Security will in any way resemble the Thought Police in Orwell’s novel, “1984.”

But even if this new apparatus has nothing in common with Orwell’s dystopian setting, Americans ought to be a trifle concerned that the federal government, with its limitless resources, deems “disinformation” — a noun for which there is nothing like an absolute definition — a topic so serious as to warrant expanding the already gargantuan government.

The Department of Homeland Security’s announcement of the new board, on April 27, seems innocuous.

This is hardly surprising — no one expects the bureaucrats to admit it if they intend to try to suppress information lest it get to Americans.

Yet if this new board is so wholesome, then why, as of April 29, had Homeland Security officials declined an interview request from The Associated Press?

The official announcement about the board stated that “the spread of disinformation can affect border security, Americans’ safety during disasters, and public trust in our democratic institutions.”

This is certainly true.

(Although the federal government struggles mightily with border security regardless of disinformation.)

Homeland Security said it would immediately focus on false information allegedly intended to encourage illegal immigrants to try to come to America, and monitor, as The Associated Press put it, “Russian disinformation threats as this year’s midterm elections nears and the Kremlin continues an aggressive disinformation campaign around the war in Ukraine.”

The obvious problem here is that we are, apparently, expected to trust that federal officials can discern between “disinformation” created and distributed by foreign agents, and what an American says on his podcast or posts on his social media accounts.

Or, for that matter, what a major American newspaper publishes.

The distinction is vital.

In October 2020 the New York Post reported about a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and that allegedly contained information showing business dealings between both Bidens and Ukrainian leaders.

Many people dismissed the Post’s stories as either unproven or — and here comes that word again — “disinformation.”

Among the skeptics is Nina Jankowicz. She is the executive director of the Disinformation Governance Board. In 2020 she told The Associated Press, in an interview regarding the Post’s reporting, and referring to the laptop itself, “We should view it as a Trump campaign product.”

Yet subsequent reporting by other newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post — albeit a year and a half or so later — corroborated some of the Post’s reporting.

Put simply, the person in charge of the Biden administration’s “disinformation” agency branded as disinformation stories published by the New York Post. Stories that are accurate. It is reasonable, then, for Americans to wonder just how Jankowicz, and the board she will be running, would deal with future reporting that they brand as “disinformation.”

The simple answer, of course, is that they can’t do anything at all — unless they have as little respect for the First Amendment as Jankowicz seems to have for the New York Post.

Her dismissal of the Post’s stories isn’t the only reason to question not only the creation of this board, but specifically giving her the authority to operate it.

Jankowicz has also written books examining how people use social media to harass others. This is an unfortunate truth about online forums, to be sure. But while the federal government has a legitimate reason to ensure that Americans have accurate information in an emergency — the need to evacuate during a wildfire, for instance — there is no justification for trampling on the Bill of Rights to deal with some cretins on social media.

The federal government obviously is capable of distributing information whenever it chooses — there’s no need to create a new board to accomplish that.

But responding to disinformation, with the goal of refuting it, is a vastly different thing than suppressing Americans’ opinions — the difference between public relations and unconstitutional censorship. It ought not be lost on anyone that this new agency’s name includes the word “Governance.”

— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor