I've been watching the news unfold over the past several days with both fascination and great alarm. I see mainstream media unintentionally not only spread Trump's propaganda, but in some cases chastise those who don't buy into it.
Although most people in the U.S. know that propaganda is very effective in other countries, few in the U.S. really know how it works. We also think we are mostly immune to it - or at least "our side" is. But propaganda is not always so easy to spot. By now, most of us are familiar with the use of reinforcement of pre-existing ideas to sow division between groups. In Barr's summary, we see that targeting pre-existing ideas can also be used to entirely redirect people's thinking. It does this by magnifying one natural response while minimizing another. This is why so many news organizations - ones that previously reported on a slew of suspicious activities by Trump, his family, and his associates - are now suddenly and vociferously proclaiming "No Collusion".
This is despite the fact that nowhere in the four-page summary does it say that the Mueller investigation found no evidence of conspiracy between Trump or his associates and Russia. The reason that most people - including top journalists who presumably have a very strong command of the English language - read it as "no evidence of conspiracy" although it didn't explicitly say that is due to very clever use of specific phrasing along with capitalizing on some basic characteristics of how people think.
Placement of the Negative
I'll start with the first thing I noticed. It was in the section regarding conspiracy with Russia. The phrasing technique used there involves strategic placement of the negative. The summary states: "The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election." Note here that the thing that did not happen was "FINDING conspiracy". The negative refers to what Mueller did (or in this case, did not do), not to what Trump may have done. If Mueller had definitively found that conspiracy did not occur, we most assuredly would have been given a positive statement of that negative result along the lines of: "Mueller found that the Trump campaign and everyone associated with it did not conspire." It seems reasonable to conclude that Mueller did NOT find that the Trump campaign did not conspire or coordinate with Russia. If he HAD found that, I personally find it very hard to believe that the summary wouldn't have explicitly said so. Being unable to state outright that "Mueller found there was no conspiracy", implying it would be the next best option - and that is exactly what the statements we were given do.The Mind Adds in Missing Information
The second thing I noticed was how one's understanding of the "...did not find [conspiracy or coordination]" statement is influenced by the statements regarding obstruction of justice: "The Special Counsel states that 'while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.'" The conclusion that the human brain quite naturally jumps to is that because "not exonerated" was explicitly spelled out in the second statement, the fact that it was not specifically noted in the first means that "not exonerated" doesn't apply to the first statement. And if "not exonerated" doesn't apply, then it's opposite, "exonerated", must. Again, this is most certainly not the case as we can be reasonably sure that if the President had been exonerated in the question of conspiracy that would have been explicitly called out rather than simply implied.Putting this another way, note that "did not find" and "does not conclude" are effectively the same thing. They both are functionally equivalent to "the findings were inconclusive". The additional phrase in the second statement, "also does not exonerate him", makes this inconclusiveness in that statement more clear. Its conspicuous absence serves the opposite purpose in making the inconclusiveness of the first statement LESS clear. However, its inclusion or lack thereof doesn't change the actual meaning of either central statement.
Before leaving this topic, I want to do a deeper dive into why this technique of selective inclusion/exclusion of bits of information is so effective at making people jump to incorrect conclusions. Examples are probably the best way to show it.
If someone tells you the following: "Two cars just drove by. The first was a very loud and probably missing its muffler. The second was a red convertible." Later, someone else comes by and asks you, "was the first car red?" The natural tendency is to respond with something like the following: "No, the first car was loud. The second car was red." In reality, the first car may very well have been red but no information was given about the color so you don't know. But here's the trick: you probably don't say "I don't have any information about the color of the first car." Instead, you are far more likely to assume that the color of the first car was NOT red because the color of the second car was explicitly given as red. If, on the other hand, you hadn't been told the color of either car, you are more likely to say "I don't know the color." The natural human tendency is to assume that when talking about two things, if a characteristic is specifically applied to only one of them, that same characteristic does not apply to the other.
You might very well think to yourself that you wouldn't make such a mistake. Here's a second example: I hand you a five-sentence paragraph to post on our website and I ask you to make the third sentence bold. It is almost certain that you would assume that the other sentences should NOT be bold. It's a good assumption and almost certainly accurate. The fact is we make these kinds of assumptions all the time. The vast majority of our thinking uses shortcuts just like this. Not having to explicitly spell out every single thing is usually extremely helpful. On the other hand, because these shortcuts are so central to how we think, they happen subconsciously, and this makes if fairly easy to use them to mislead.
Omission of Context
Back to the question of conspiracy. From the summary: "As the report states: '[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.'"In case you didn't immediately notice, the first half of Mueller's sentence is missing. There are any number of possibilities as to what that first part may have said. Here are a few:
- While significant financial and political ties between members of Trump's campaign and individuals close to Putin were found, ...the investigation did not establish...
- The volume of circumstantial evidence found lends credibility to the possibility of conspiracy, however...the investigation did not establish...
- Based on the evidence found Congress may wish to take other action, however we do not recommend further criminal indictments because ...the investigation did not establish...
Or it could have combined this with another sentence that was rather unobtrusively slipped in earlier in the report (that sentence is in quotes below), along with some additional detail (in italics) that was NOT explicitly mentioned in the report:
- "The Special Counsel obtained a number of indictments and convictions of individuals and entities in connection with his investigation, all of which have been publicly disclosed." Although several of these individuals are close associates of Trump, including his campaign manager and his personal lawyer, ...the investigation did not establish...
Manipulation of the "Facts Matter" Belief
The most effective type of propaganda is one that provokes a knee-jerk reaction.So what's the knee-jerk reaction getting triggered here and what are the underlying beliefs that were used to trigger it? William Barr's summary seems to me to be primarily (although by no means exclusively) targeted at journalists so I'm going to focus this section on them. To be clear, I'm not referring to "opinion commentators" in the entertainment wing of any news channel, but to actual journalists - and thus far, all of the major networks still have at least a few of those.
Journalists typically tend to have a strong belief that "facts matter". People with this strong belief also tend to believe that people should be easily able and willing to change their opinion when presented with facts that counter those opinions. They are therefore likely to change their own opinion when they perceive that the facts warrant it. Generally speaking, this is a very good thing. However, it can also be an Achilles' heel. People who care greatly that their opinions match the facts are prone to change their opinion very quickly so as to not appear hypocritical to other people or to themselves.
Speed is the key here. When a person who cares about facts and has a strong opinion on a topic is presented with a compelling argument to the contrary - whether that argument be correct or not - they have two choices: 1) double-down and look for holes in the new information presented, or 2) admit they were mistaken. In the case of the journalists who have been reporting about and appalled by all of the lies that Trump and his allies have doubled-down on, they would be especially averse to doubling-down themselves. The end result is that they quickly choose option two and concede the point.
There is another speed pressure involved here. For stories like this one, journalists have to report in almost real-time so they think they MUST come to a quick conclusion. This means that newspapers such as the New York Times will run a headline like the following after they've taken a few hours at most to both read the underlying summary and write the accompanying article: "Mueller finds no Trump-Russia conspiracy but stops short of exonerating president on obstruction of justice." This short turnaround requirement does not allow enough room for critical thought. As we saw above, quick conclusions require shortcut-thinking, and shortcut-thinking, while generally appropriate, can also allow clever people to mislead you. Once a few outlets make the error (by not catching the misleading phrasing), others follow and soon nearly everyone is saying the same incorrect thing.
It's not only that journalists push themselves to the quick conclusion because they don't want to appear as "unable to face the facts", some of them also immediately turn on each other so that journalism as a whole won't be accused of bias. Just two days after Barr's summary was released, a Washington Post headline read: "Rachel Maddow, the left’s powerhouse on cable, won’t let the Mueller probe go." Let that sink in. The Washington Post says that two days is too much time to spend thinking about this report. Anyone who notices that there is a significant disconnect between Barr's summary and facts that are already known and UNDISPUTED is supposed to immediately just set all those other facts aside and replace them all with this one "official" four-page summary - all without taking time to think about it.
Faith in Institutions
Another factor that went into this quick opinion-reversal is that journalists (and most liberals) tend to place an enormous amount of trust institutions. During Barr's confirmation hearings there was a great deal of concern that he would be biased towards Trump. As soon as he was confirmed by the Senate, he gained credibility due to the institution he was associated with. His four-page interpretation became: Attorney General informs Congress that Mueller Report shows no collusion, rather than: Guy who wrote 19-page opinion piece on why the Special Counsel investigation was a witch hunt writes summary of final report claiming he was right. Nobody else is allowed to look at what he based these conclusions on.Most journalists (and most liberals) have had a fair amount of faith that Robert Mueller would do a thorough and impartial investigation. This reliance on Institution made it fairly predictable that that faith could be transferred to a different person merely by association - regardless of the bias that person had already demonstrated. Although there are still a lot of people who want to hear directly from Robert Mueller, there are also a lot of people who are now content to let William Barr speak for him. If Mueller believes that Barr has in any way misrepresented his findings, it is unlikely that he would publicly contradict him. We can surmise that to be the case based on his remarkable ability to avoid the news media throughout the investigation. It is likely also true that he is legally prohibited from any such statement. If we don't see the full Mueller Report and if Congress is also not allowed to see it, we will probably never know whether Barr's interpretation is accurate.
The main point, however, is that many people transferred their faith in Mueller to a person who would not have earned their faith on his own merit. And then they threw out all of the evidence that was previously uncovered based on his four-page official statement.
The other truly bizarre thing here is that journalists aren't supposed to simply take official government statements at face value, regardless of who provides them. The news media is the Fourth Estate - they are supposed to verify the accuracy of what our politicians tell us, and call them on it when it doesn't match. Journalists are supposed to investigate. Earlier, when I said that sometimes propaganda works by magnifying certain strongly-held beliefs while minimizing others, this is what I was referring to. The magnified belief here is that facts matter. The minimized belief is that journalists must do their own investigation and not simply regurgitate government releases. The magnified belief is acted upon at the expense of the minimized belief.
The Effects
Most people are not going to read Barr's four-page summary at all. Because the general public relies on journalists to give them an accurate picture of what is in that summary, journalists really need to "get it right" and they need to take the time necessary to do that. If they don't do this, they become unwitting spreaders of propaganda. Every time a journalist repeats "no evidence of collusion", it chips away at the truth which is that we don't actually know what Mueller found out. It also minimizes the weight we feel we are allowed to give to the things we DO KNOW that suggest the opposite - like Trump's private meetings with Putin, his public request to Russia to find Clinton's emails, the "Love It" response Junior had to the offer of help from the Russians, and so on.Journalists have been watching Trump repeat propaganda to his base pretty much every time he tweets or opens his mouth. Some of these journalists keep a running tally of the lies told by Trump - and then tell us how many he's currently averaging per day. He sends people like Kellyanne Conway to talk to the media to double-down on those lies. It should come as no surprise to these journalists that Trump and his allies are going to try to manipulate them as well as try to manipulate their viewers. Propaganda is not just meant for people who are already on your side. Unfortunately, a large portion of the news media seems to think that it's only Trump's base that ought to be watching out for it.
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