Disinformation and propaganda pose real threat to America | GARY COSBY JR.

Harvard University’s president, Claudine Gay, resigned recently after failing to curb antisemitic protesters on Harvard’s campus. Her testimony before Congress proved to be weak and ultimately cost her the Harvard presidency. Nevertheless, Gay wrote a New York Times opinion piece after her resignation that has an on-point statement that must be understood.

“This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their  legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.”

Gay was bombarded by accusations that she allowed antisemitism to flourish at Harvard. That does not mean she can be disregarded. The former Harvard president unmasked what amounts to an undeclared war within the turmoil of American politics.

Political extremists, particularly on the conservative side, are attempting to do precisely what Gay said in her quoted statement. Donald Trump did not begin that war, it was going on before he came onto the political scene, but he made it his priority to attack any news organization that said anything he didn’t like, calling it “fake news.”

During the COVID pandemic, Trump was among the loudest voices criticizing public health institutions and regulations. Again, there was a focused attack, almost exclusively from the hard right of the conservative party, aimed at discrediting medical professionals while Trump advocated a number of unproven and often dangerous treatments for COVID, a careless approach that cost lives. Yet people were willing to believe him and other voices on social media rather than those of seasoned health-care professionals due to the effectiveness of this propaganda war.

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Compounding the situation, many people were either confused by the recommendations from the CDC or simply ignored them because the regulations changed several times. In any dynamic emergency situation, not only does the knowledge acquired by the professionals tasked with dealing with the event change, but the evolving situation dictates changing responses.

To be a bit more plain, Mike Tyson is credited with saying that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the nose. Military planners know that as well. No matter how good their battle plan is, it will be modified almost immediately once the enemy responds to what they are doing. The old saying is that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

Situations change, knowledge changes, understanding grows, new treatment and prevention plans emerge. But what happened in America was widespread distrust of medical professionals that was ignited from the top and fanned in the absurd winds of social media, creating a firestorm of disinformation that discredited the very people who spent their professional lives preparing to deal with just such an event.

Attacks on legitimate news media intensified under Trump. Undeniably, there is bias in every news organization because there are people involved, and try as we might to divorce opinion from our reporting, some will always creep in. The thing is, conservatives flung invective after invective at what they perceived to be liberal media while watching heavily biased coverage from a preferred network on television and following the most biased social media sites and treating them as if they were absolute truth.

Simply because one agrees with propaganda does not make it truth. And that is the critical sentence in Gay’s column. “Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda.”

What so many are embracing as truth is nothing but propaganda. Truth in reporting can be easily identified by balanced coverage. When a publication of any type, broadcast, print, or internet, is solely focused on one side of the story, it is propaganda. Propaganda is, by definition, not truth. It may have a seed of truth in it, but it is not truth and is designed to mislead the public.

In a healthy democracy, or in our case a democratic republic, there is always something of a struggle between left and right. There is no way a country with such a diverse population as ours will be frequently singing from the same page in the songbook. That, however, does not excuse this war that has developed and has cast people with differing opinions as enemies as if they were some foreign power trying to overthrow America.

Diversity in a population group can create a dynamic strength or it can tear a nation apart. America stands upon one of those knife-edges of history. If we continue this propaganda war, we will do what no enemy has ever been able to do. We will destroy what is the best, most stable democracy in the world.

We will never and should never silence the voices of dissent, but we should put them in perspective and understand that propaganda, not truth is the driving force behind this war that is rending our nation.

Gary Cosby Jr. can be contacted at gary.cosby@tuscaloosanews.com

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Propaganda vs. the truth in America | GARY COSBY JR.