The modern world of American politics brought us this wonderful propaganda ecosystem that even the most gifted sophist would admire, bringing such glorious words as disinformation, misinformation, and even malinformation to the forefront of our political discourse here in America. Let’s flesh out these words and their meanings a little more, disinformation is defined as, “false information which is intended to mislead, especially propaganda issued by a government organization to a rival power or the media.”
The next term in this political game of getting around the truth or labeling the truth as fake truth like some spurious religious prophet is misinformation which can be defined as, “false or inaccurate information, especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive.” And finally, we have the newest term in our game of political charades, malinformation which has several different definitions from the highly deceptive, “is fake information to make a scheme sound more believable.” To the following more malicious meaning, “is genuine information that is shared to cause harm.”
This can all be rather simplified to politicians lying for a living, and politicians compete against other lying politicians for the political spoils that elected office brings in this purported representative democracy, and any available tools to help obfuscate the truth will be used when and if needed. And as it turns out, in today’s world of unbalanced budgets, forever wars, runaway inflation, and poor legislative policies, lying is the holy grail of American politics.
Ironically, with the news media being largely bombastic banal mouthpieces for the two political parties these days, CNN representing the Democratic Party, and Fox News representing the Republican Party, the news media as an industry have become the biggest purveyors of disinformation in this country. If you watch liberal news outlets, they will make you feel all warm and fuzzy with liberal biased political spin, and if you devote your time to conservative news media platforms, they will sing your favorite political song with all the conservative propaganda that your sanctimonious heart desires.
However, if you just want the important news of the day, free of political spin, you are fresh out of luck in our modern world of partisan journalism. You see journalism today doesn’t have very high regard for the facts, or even the truth for that matter, but instead, how information itself can be shaped towards their activist goals and overall political worldview.
The journalism industry has grown to be bigger and more important than the actual news itself, at least in their minds, and they get more power in society by becoming political news disinformation propagandists. Why merely report the news, when you can have a hand in creating what is news in the first place? In reality, the journalism industry gains more power by actually inserting itself into the news dissemination process and the increasingly partisan communication channels.
The liberal bias of the news media is understandably larger, and I think we can trace this back to our wonderful bastions of cult-like group thinking in the liberal colleges and universities of this declining nation. The journalism programs are churning out vast numbers of enthusiastically liberal Kool-Aid drinkers, whose sole mission is to do God’s work in changing minds through social and political activism, and the news business gets these simple-minded social justice warriors a lot of bang for their activist buck, so to speak.
Just as an aside, it really is rather dreadful what colleges and universities have devolved into these days, they have become incessant breeding grounds for closed-mindedness and liberal conformity at all costs to rationality, tolerance, and creative thinking. And mind you, I am not a conservative, liberal or independent, just a curious bystander to the absolute collapse of the American mind in thinking rationally on individual issues which are free of partisan political ideology.
In a nutshell, there is so much lying going on in American politics, that when the truth rears its inevitably ugly head, it needs to be politically spun as disinformation, misinformation, and in some cases malinformation. In this particularly divisive political paradigm, there is no such thing as the truth, the truth is a mere inconvenience at best, it can be shaped, molded, manufactured, and even obliterated when necessary, what really matters is winning the political game at all costs.
