BRIEF NOTES
A poll last week provided some insight into public opinion about disinformation. The results of one question are highlighted in my “Fact of the Week” visual.
Also, according to the survey, 35 percent of the public identifies “Misleading information” as the biggest threat to keeping our elections safe and accurate.
Telling excerpt: “Although there is no evidence that any votes were changed by a foreign power in 2016 or 2018, almost 4 in 10 Americans surveyed said they believe it is likely another country will tamper with the votes cast in 2020 in order to change the result.”
Insightful: the poll designers didn’t ask, or probe for, what the public thinks about what should be done with the malicious actors from Russia, China, Iran, and other nations which develop and propagate disinformation campaigns against the United States.
* * * * * * * * * * *
If you are reading and/or sharing stories online or in social media from the American Herald Tribune, you’re an unwitting actor of an Iranian disinformation campaign. Below is a link to a CNN story exposing this online publication as being sponsored by Iran. An excerpt:
“As Russia did around the 2016 election, Iran appears to have co-opted and in this case paid a small number of unwitting Americans to lend legitimacy to its operations.”
RIP
Jim Lehrer, a first-rate journalist and one of the creators of the News Hour on PBS, died this past week. He was highly respected in his profession, and was an excellent author as well.
Lehrer had eight rules to live by as a journalist. The Wall Street Journal link below contains them. How many of these eight do journalists follow in 2020?
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/24/tech/iran-info-ops/index.html
Disinformation: Destroying Democracies 