Eric Boehlert of Media Matters for America pointed, in the film The Brain-Washing of my Dad, that out often The Noise Machine, as he called it, tries to create confusion, fear, and misinformation. This is a common tactic used by those political leaders that want to be kings or modern equivalents. By the Noise Machine he meant the Republican Noise Machine that works in conjunction with Fox News. He said “It is designed to attack people and smear people…in order to confuse viewers and news consumers and get them all riled up.” There is not much better than fear or anger to get people engaged. That is its goal and it is very effective. It helped Trump win 2 presidential election. In the world of social media there is nothing more important than engagement.
Senko, the producer of the film, asked Boehlert for some examples of deliberate spreading of misinformation. One he gave was the 2008 American presidential election where a lot of right-wingers were unable or unwilling to believe that Obama won the election and claimed voter fraud and faulty voter registration. Sort of like Trump does too.
There was very little voter fraud meaning someone shows up to vote and pretends to be someone else. That did not stop American conservatives from alleging voter fraud in the election and then again and again. Lies have a long life span it seems, on the right. Of course, this same tactic was used by Trump in the election he won in 2016, as crazy as that sounds, and once more in 2020 in the election he lost, and he was even trying to set up his supporters once more in 2024, but did not need to do that. The claims were bogus, but they got their own based riled up so effectively that they thought the Democrats had tried to steal all of those 3 elections.
Political theorist Noam Chomsky said this was similar to the massive attempts to create climate change denial. Again, these were very effective campaigns by corporations who benefitted massively from delaying action on climate change. They tried to convince Americans that humans have nothing to do with climate change even though they had a lot scientific information from their own scientists that this was not true.
This was also a fantastic success for the oil and gas industry which gained decades of American inaction on climate change when the science had already made it clear that climate change was real and was caused by human activities. A lot of this information has come out in litigation where courts have required these corporations to reveal their tactics. In law suits this is called discovery. Participants in a trial must disclose a lot of information to the other side. As Chomsky said, “you gotta make profits tomorrow and if the species goes down the tube that is somebody else’s problem.”
Decades earlier tobacco companies used the same approach to convince Americans that tobacco smoking did not cause serious harms to smokers even though they had massive scientific data showing that this was not the case. They ended up paying billions in those law suits. The oil and gas sector used the same public relations firms to sell those falsehood to Americans, again giving those corporations decades of extra profits as Americans were getting sick and dying.
In each of these cases the corporations used tactics of sowing confusion through disinformation designed to make people angry at the liberals who were interfering with their life style choices. In each of these cases the corporate predators that organized the campaigns showed callous indifference to the harms caused by their disinformation campaigns to the American people. Profits are all that mattered.
As Brown and Williamson a former tobacco company said in a memo it was forced to disclose, “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.”