WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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The League of Women Voters of Bloomington-Monroe County brings you the latest installment of its podcast on the WFHB Local News – Civic Conversations. Today’s episode revolves around disinformation and features our guest, Professor Betsi Grabe of the IU Media School.
Professor Grabe says disinformation can be used as an umbrella term for false information, but she adds that an important distinction of disinformation pertains to intent. She said a false statement stemming from an honest mistake should be categorized as misinformation. Purposely constructing a lie and misleading the public, on the other hand, constitutes as disinformation, according to our guest.
“Understanding the motives for disinformation is really understanding the motives for deception,” said Grabe. “It comes down to two things: to sway political opinion or to make money.”
She said the term disinformation originates from warfare, particularly tactics used by the KGB’s Active Measures program – a Soviet Union form of political warfare that used propaganda, deception and espionage to achieve its political ends.
In today’s show, our civic conversation with Professor Grabe spans from fake news, the spread of false stories on social media and how to combat rising forms of disinformation. She mentions the alt-right social networking site, Parler, and what role it played in the storming of the U.S. Capitol that resulted in the death of 5 people.
Grabe says that local news is currently undergoing a crisis, which leads to the phenomenon of “news deserts” – essentially small communities that receive little to no news coverage as the broadcast industry becomes more and more consolidated. According to a study conducted by the University of North Carolina, about 1,300 U.S. communities have totally lost news coverage.
“Local news is in fairly bad shape at the moment,” she said.
The bottom line – host Jim Allison asks – how do we deal with disinformation in our societal and political discourse?
“Detect it so we can see where it’s happening,” responds Grabe, “and then we need to do a lot more social science research to understand human vulnerability to disinformation.”
Grabe adds that if we use the tools and what we know about human vulnerability to design media literacy programs that we should introduce in primary school through high school, then the public would be empowered to better understand disinformation.
Furthermore, Grabe says that based in our understanding disinformation, how it functions and how we become vulnerable to it, we desperately need policy reform – particularly with the First Amendment – to prevent increased polarization in the U.S.
“I’d say our social fabric has been stretched by disinformation,” said Grabe.
Find out more by listening to the January edition of Civic Conversations. The League of Women Voters is a non-partisan, grassroots, citizen-led organization that has fought since 1920 to improve our government and engage all citizens in the decisions that impact their lives.
Tune in next month to hear about gender equality with Susan Williams of the Indiana University School of Law.
Credits:
Our host is Jim Allison.
Our guest is Professor Betsi Grabe.
Our producer is Becky Hill.
Our engineer is Kade Young.
