Cynthia Tucker: Rise of misinformation undermines trust in facts

My sister recently told me that her former supervisor at a small-town library doesn't believe the moon landings were real. I was stunned to hear that, but I shouldn't have been. My sister's former boss is a college-educated professional — and younger than the old folks I used to hear disputing the facts of the moon landings — but she is hardly an anomaly.

We live in an age of misinformation, disinformation, easily accepted conspiracy theories and broad distrust of reliable sources of information. As our science and medicine become more advanced, we become more benighted. As our educational systems become more accessible, we become more ignorant. As technology ensures that more credible information is readily available, we become more misinformed.

Count this as one more thing the Founding Fathers got wrong: The advance of science and education have not triumphed over a dogged belief in the asinine and the absurd. Well-educated men themselves, they were weaned on the ideology of the Age of Enlightenment. In "Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart — Again," Robert Kagan writes that the vast majority of Enlightenment philosophers wanted to "impose the rule of reason on the world. ... They believed that nothing could improve the human condition except knowledge."

Yet, even as knowledge has given us modern medicine, mobile phones and, yes, moon landings, the human mind remains subject to outlandish fabrications.

It is easy enough to see this in our political and civic lives, where social media and partisan information outlets have drowned facts and elevated falsehoods. The Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, for example, which was widely recorded on video, including by participants, has been downgraded on the right to a vigorous political protest protected by the First Amendment. Never mind that the footage clearly shows rioters assaulting the Capitol, pummeling and kicking police officers as they broke in.

Years earlier, the right-wing provocateur Alex Jones tossed off any pretense at basic humanity when he began to spread the egregious lie that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School had never happened — mere hours after six educators and 20 small children had been gunned down. Because so many listeners believed that the shootings were a hoax, the victims' families were subjected to cruel harassment.

Jones, who was finally stopped by two lawsuits, trafficked in familiar right-wing tropes, but stubborn ignorance is not the province of any particular ideology or the affliction of a single political party. As just one example, the science of vaccines — which have saved millions of lives over the last few generations — has been rejected on the right and the left. Left-wing parents have joined their right-wing counterparts to press school systems and state legislatures for exemptions from district-mandated vaccination protocols. Robert Kennedy Jr. has based his presidential campaign largely on anti-vaccine pseudoscience.

In an era of such misinformation, it's much more difficult for honest brokers, whether they are politicians or pundits, scientists or scholars, to explain problems that are complex, as so many of our current problems are. Climate change is just one of those. Even as extreme heat kills hundreds on the annual Hajj to Mecca, wildfires stalk the planet, ice caps melt and sea levels rise, fossil fuel magnates spend hundreds of millions of dollars to lobby politicians to allow them to continue to market carbon products. Those politicians, then, dutifully deny the obvious: that the planet is in peril.

Pandemics, too, are complex. They are also likely to become more frequent because of the ease of human travel across continents. A virus may take hold in, say, China and spread across the globe. Science is equipped to help us to fight such diseases, but too many of us resist. We'd rather rely on fake cures from bad actors than believe the public health pronouncements of physicians.

I don't hear denial of the moon landings much anymore. It's such hoary old nonsense that I use it as an example of outdated conspiracies in the media literacy college classes I teach. But there are so many more modern-day lies and conspiracies that it's difficult to keep track of them — much less to combat them. The world is awash in information, and many of us have chosen to pick and choose among the bits we want to believe. It hardly matters whether those bits are true.