Pathologizing the Search for Truth: When is Disagreement with Conventional Wisdom “Misinformation”?

TrialSite has long chronicled the attacks on free speech that have become a normal part of our media eco-system; from our own lawsuit against the Trusted News Initiative in partnership with Robert Kennedy Jr and his Children’s Health Defense, to the Supreme Court’s pending decision in the case against the Biden administration and agencies in which an appeals court gagged them from telling social media firms what to, and to not, publish about issues such as COVID-19, vaccines, and the 2020 election. In this environment, “alternative media” and the “MSM” (Mainstream Media) have radically different conceptions on the important issues of our day, such as COVID-19, war and peace, and how our “MAGA v. Woke” fractured society can reconcile and learn to agree to disagree and make compromises. The key is that all sides tend to vilify folks they happen to disagree with. Also in this environment, the key elements of social science, psychology, communications, and more have arguably been weaponized in service of the MSM-government official truth. The US government has lied to the American people on key, life and death issues more than you can count on your 10 fingers. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was the cassis belli for a Vietnam war that cost over 50,000 American lives and 1-2 million Vietnamese. Supposedly the North Vietnamese attacked US military boats.

Government & Corporate history of lying

Many years later, Robert McNamara acknowledged that this didn’t happen. We cost the lives of one million Iraqis due to deliberate recycling of bad intelligence by top-tier outlets such as the New York Times. Yes, the concept that the MSM serves as a propaganda channel for larger, bigger forces in government isn’t new. Many have unanswered questions about historical incidents such as the JFK assassination as well as various other historical events.

And what about corporate scandal after corporate scandal the American public must endure. What, question a pharmaceutical company? Since the year 2000, Pfizer has violated laws 98 times, racking up $10.9 billion in fines!  What about Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family scandal? The opiate crisis itself at least in part was caused by suppliers priming the pump of demand with evidence that the product was highly addictive. Go back in history and the tobacco industry lies, and you get the point.

On the other hand, for society to function best, we need a certain trust in, and even deference to, government authorities and the MSM. Humans need a core consensus reality to be truly connected, and cohesive for a nation.

But whether this is geared toward freedom or control is an open question at this time.

“Epistemic integrity”

The pro-censorship view is typified by Current Opinion in Psychology’s “Misinformation and the epistemic integrity of democracy” from December, 2023. And the past statements of first author Stephan Lewandowsky  only reinforce the stereotype/reality of experts carefully crafting the public’s opinions. At the outset, the use of “epistemic,” instead of something like “knowledge,” hints at the elitism that is at play as well as the attempts to make the heretofore “soft” human sciences sound more scientific and technical than they actually are, while simultaneously utilizing these sciences to manipulate and control public opinion.

Skepticism versus disinformation

Lewandowsky and colleagues open their epistemic piece with the fact that, “Democracy relies on a shared body of knowledge among citizens, for example trust in elections and reliable knowledge to inform policy-relevant debate.” The authors go on to purport to review evidence of “widespread disinformation campaigns that are undermining this shared knowledge.” Getting a bit meta, they enter that they established “a common pattern by which science and scientists are discredited and how the most recent frontier in those attacks involves researchers in misinformation itself. We list several ways in which psychology can contribute to countermeasures.” Also, “reliable information” is needed when it comes to public policy options, the authors state.

Of course, these authors never cite the egregious and frequent cases that government or corporate interests, or the confluence of the two, lie to the public, which itself is telling, isn’t it?

Are “climate change” theories open for debate?
The authors focus on climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic as issues upon which “misinformation has played a crucial, and adverse, role.” Interestingly, they fail to address the possible validity of something thought to be misinformation by designated experts. Think of some of the examples raised above, like the opiate scandal which falls under existing memory.

For one thing, on the climate change topic, it is entirely possible that global warming caused the release of carbon dioxide from the ocean, and not the reverse, as the official truth holds. And we are still coming out of the last ice-age; in sum, climate is always changing, and the anthropogenic carbon-dioxide focused climate change theory is still just a theory, meaning it’s not a law.

The paper complains that 90% of climate change skepticism has “been linked to conservative think tanks.” But aren’t think tanks an important way for folks to come together and seek both truth and social change?

Wuhan lab “conspiracy” turned out to be true

Regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, the paper argues that we suffered an “infodemic” of misinformation and “conspiracy theories.” But this ignores the indisputable fact that the government was not forthcoming about the pandemic: for years, the theory that the virus came out of the Wuhan lab where US and Chinese researchers had been modifying bat-based coronaviruses was called out as misinformation, despite the authorities having evidence that this theory was true. Years after the fact, “official truth” is now modified to state that this disease likely did come from a lab. Likewise, the authors deride misinformation about lockdowns, masks, and vaccine safety. Yet all the hard science now says that masks don’t work. This has been shown by meta-studies in top-tier journals like Cochrane Reviews and The Lancet.

Yet earlier in the pandemic if an independent news organization even bothered to raise the specter of a lab leak when discussing SARS-CoV-2, they were immediately censored on the biggest platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and back then, Twitter.

Authors allege misinformation is a conservative phenomenon
 The ”two entwined drivers” that underly “opposition to science” include being suspicious of state-sponsored measures and being “adherents of right-wing libertarianism.” To these authors, left-wing or liberal disinformation does not exist based on the state of the research, but this seems like a quite biased claim. And because these authors don’t acknowledge the basics of sociology, psychology and economic interest—e.g., they are hired by the side representing the group covering up truth, or propagating at least in part, a coverup or lie—and they cannot be considered serious, objective researchers.

In a separate article, Lewandowsky does acknowledge valid reasons for folks to take government claims with the proverbial grain of salt: “Western countries, especially those with colonial histories, have also damaged people’s trust in medical treatments through their previous mistreatment of indigenous populations…and misuse of vaccination centers, for example, by the CIA in its hunt for Osama bin Laden…. It is unsurprising that people would question scientific evidence communicated by the same institutions that caused them harm or deceived them in the past.”  

Don’t take our word on this, read the paper for yourself, and think about the methods used to bolster the prevailing view as fact and absolute truth.

https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/pathologizing-the-search-for-truth-when-is-disagreement-with-conventional-wisdom-misinformation-1ced2a61

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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