You know those photos that show a younger Donald Trump hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein and some underage girls – one of them showing Trump with his hand on a young girl’s leg? Have you seen those? Yeah, well, they’re not real, folks. I’m sorry if this is devastating news for some of you who, like me, are desperate for something – almost anything – that might slow the spoilage of America that is proceeding apace in this 47th presidency.
This bad news – bad, that is, if you count yourself as part of the resistance – comes courtesy of NewsGuard, a nonpartisan organization that for the past seven years has used a combination of human intelligence and sophisticated technology to assess the reliability of information, and of news sources. NewsGuard is, in fact, trustworthy – it was founded by the media entrepreneur and journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Cravitz, and it has bipartisan investors. It assesses the reliability of various news sources – so that you can tell if, say, what you’re hearing about the war in Gaza or in Ukraine is true.
Or if the president really did cuddle up to a young teenager at a party with the now-deceased sex child sex offender. Actually, we don’t know whether or not Trump did that; we just know, thanks to NewsGuard, that the photo purporting to show it is 95.7 percent likely to have been generated by artificial intelligence – and that another image supposedly showing Trump dancing with a 13-year-old girl on Epstein’s private island is 99.8 percent likely to be AI-generated.
Yet a NewsGuard survey found that 35 percent of Americans believed the images were true, and 38 percent weren’t sure. Just 27 percent said, “Nah, those aren’t real,” and you might think that a not insignificant share of those folks might just be Trump partisans who will never believe anything negative about their cult leader.
How about this question: Did Trump declare martial law in Washington last month to fight crime there? No, he didn’t; but one-third of Americans think he did. And that FireAid concert to raise money for the victims of the California wildfires – did the $100 million that it raised really go missing? More than 6 in 10 Americans said they’re not sure, and one-fifth think, yeah, the money vanished – that claim is true. Well, it’s not.
My point here is that Americans these days are having a terrible time telling truth from falsehood. And who can blame us?
Lies spread so easily on social media. That false claim about martial law generated 10.9 million views on X, and it was posted 6,300 times. X – Elon Musk’s platform that used to be called Twitter – is totally undependable now that Musk got rid of any effort to keep it straight, and started plastering it with his own balderdash. It’s about as fraudulent as Donald Trump’s social media feed.
Which, to be clear, is one of the reasons we are in this mess. When the leader of our nation – the absolute source of authority for our controlling political party – blatantly lies and eagerly distorts reality, and posts computer-generated imagery and fake video, how are we to begin to demand a standard of truth-telling for anybody else?
To be sure, there are degrees of misinformation out there. Fox News commentators routinely rant way wide of reality, but even the supposedly straight Fox news report is distorted by tone and, especially, story selection. No wonder three-quarters of Americans told Gallup this spring that they worry a great deal or a fair amount about crime and violence – because that’s what Fox and its ilk tell them is the reality of our lives. Of course crime is a problem, but to worry a lot about it is to overstate its reality in the lives of most of us. Yet we believe it because we are told it, over and over.
One of the causes of this – and you knew I would say this – is the decline in local news media, which for generations has given Americans a true view of their communities. If your only sources of news are national, and the president is telling you that those news people are enemies of the people, you won’t know what to believe. When your news came from a paper or a radio station just down the way from your neighborhood, you were more likely to trust it.
So if our misunderstanding of what’s true and what’s not is caused in part by our media diet, and in part by our elected officials, what should we do? Well, of course, the problem of misinformation is more complex than this, but I’d say the first steps would be this: First, support trustworthy news sources – like your local public radio station and newspaper. That is, donate and subscribe. Second, don’t support politicians who lie, or who tolerate those who do. Anybody who tells you that Donald Trump was cheated out of re-election in 2020 is yanking your chain, and they know it. We’ve got to stop people who are so careless with the truth.
Our democracy depends upon an informed electorate making good choices. When we are so misinformed, we’re unable to thoughtfully handle the fundamental task of citizenship – which is voting. So assert yourself as a citizen: say unequivocally no to the liars, and absolutely yes to the truth-tellers. And let’s try to save this democracy.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
