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Hayden, Joseph, R. A History of Disinformation in the U.S., New York, NY: Routledge, 2024, 348 pp., $52.99 (paperback). ISBN 9781032330518
Reviewed by Paula Hunt, Independent scholar based in Washington state pdhunt27@icloud.com
Joseph Hayden’s A History of Disinformation in the U.S. is among a growing body of literature examining falsehoods and fabrication in journalism. In it, he surveys disinformation’s long history in America encompassing Benjamin Franklin printing a fake edition of a real Boston newsletter in 1782 to QAnon claims about cannibalistic pedophiles in 2017.
Consistent across this 225-year history, Hayden argues, has been American media’s systematic and purposeful manipulation of information, most of it intended to disenfranchise, denigrate, and disparage specific groups of people: women, immigrants, Jews, the working class, African Americans, and homosexuals, among others. The media’s nurturing of false and negative stereotypes and myths about marginalized groups is the book’s organizing theme.
Familiar episodes of media disinformation like the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, World War I propaganda, and the Red Scare are recounted. The impact of advertising’s power and stronghold in the media industry also comes under scrutiny.
Changes in technology and journalism practices that have impacted media are largely background to examples of its ignorance, racism, and lies. What is really worrisome, Hayden writes, is the contemporary digital media ecosystem in which the scale and hazard level of disinformation has birthed dangerous conspiracy theories that along with an erosion of trust in experts and institutions, threatens democracy.
While Hayden writes that Disinformation is not comprehensive, there are nonetheless some notable absences.
While admonishing newspapers for propagating lies against the new Russian state in the wake of World War I, Hayden leaves out Walter Duranty’s reporting for the New York Times. The Moscow bureau chief’s series of articles praising Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union government’s five-year plan assiduously ignored the devastating consequences of forced collectivization of farms that eventually led to mass starvation of millions of Ukrainians. (Although it did earn him a 1932 Pulitzer Prize.)
Then there was Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who returned her 1981 Pulitzer Prize after admitting the story she wrote about an 8-year-old heroin addict was fabricated. Twenty years later, the Post’s sensational story about a 19-year-old supply clerk named Jessica Lynch “fighting to the death” against her attackers in the early days of the war in Iraq exemplified just the kinds of lapses in reporting, judgement, and sourcing that Disinformation criticizes. Yet it launched a hero myth narrative about Lynch (which she has always rejected) just as untrue — and arguably more enduring — as the myths perpetuated by 19th century media about the Masons recount in the book.
Disinformation also gives the false impression that the right is the primary perpetrator of mis- and disinformation. The chapter “Partisan Lies in the New Millennium” is almost exclusively devoted to President Donald Trump, Republicans, and their primary mouthpiece, Fox News. That Democrats and the Left are equally adept peddlers of duplicity is almost completely overlooked. Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden were all dinged by FactCheck.org. Left-leaning news outlets like the Times, the Post, and CNN are left largely unexamined. MSNBC, for one, promoted a number of falsehoods around Democrat Stacey Abrams’s loss in Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race.
Most problematic, however, is the absence of clear and unambiguous definitions that would provide readers a shared understanding of the terms and concepts used in the book. This was deliberate, Hayden writes, because it was useful “to treat disinformation not as a categorical matter (definitively false), but as a place on a spectrum (relatively deceptive).”(p.2)
The result is an unhelpful word salad of terms, each of whose discrete meaning is ignored and whose location on the “spectrum” is ambiguous. How is a lie different from a hoax? Is a false claim to the left or the right of misinformation on the spectrum? What about distortion and inaccuracy? Fake news?
This lack of clarity will likely frustrate students seeking to grasp the consequential differences among these concepts and think critically about a subject that is of significant importance. However, chapters and incidents focusing on LGBTQ community, immigrants, women, and other groups would make good jumping off points for discussions about contemporary coverage of these and other issues, the ways in which they have and haven’t changed, the role of technology in news gathering and distribution, and journalistic practices that inform coverage.
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