Interview with Daniel Kreiss, Distinguished Professor, UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media
In conducting research for her article on disinformation, Dr. Rabkin interviewed Daniel Kreiss. The following is an excerpt of that interview.
The American public is facing a tsunami of health disinformation. In September, UNC Global Affairs and the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life (CITAP) cohosted an event called Information Warfare and the Fight for Democracy, featuring Jennifer Davis and Daniel Kreiss. On October 10. I followed up with Professor Kreiss, the Edgar Thomas Cato Distinguished Professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media and the CITAP faculty director and principal researcher. Our discussion has been lightly edited for clarity.
Health disinformation is nothing new, but it seems to be supercharged by the Trump administration and RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative. How does the current context fit into your assessment of anti-science and autocracy? What do you think about when you see anti-vaccine advocacy and conspiracy theories coming from the US government?
The first thing I’ll say is, it’s important to make the distinction between misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation does not require strategic intent. There may be all sorts of things that are not true floating around and people might be sharing them or believing in them for all sorts of reasons – – but not with any nefarious attempt to gain an advantage over others, to gain power, or to make money. Disinformation is different.
When I think about the moment, I focus on the bigger question of who health disinformation particularly serves to benefit, why these beliefs and attacks on science and knowledge-producing institutions persist over time, and why is there a link between things like anti-vaccine movements and campaigns to discredit the science on smoking, for instance.
And what I would say is, in essence, that if you look at the through-line between disinformation in this context, it has really been about delegitimizing attempts at regulation of industry and the role of the state in doing things like passing regulations to protect public health or to protect the environment. There have been very concerted efforts throughout history of people and organizations circulating various forms of disinforming claims as strategies of creating doubt about evidence. For instance, disinformation tactics to try to erase the link between things like the medical science and what researchers are telling us about smoking and cancer or the environmental science linking fossil fuels and climate change.
So that is a political tactic, designed to achieve an ideological end … a smaller state and a smaller role for the state in governmental regulation of various forms of industry. It’s a disinformation tactic that’s directed very specifically to advance a set of interests that are commercial, political and ideological.
Are there other motivations for disinformation?
Absolutely. Once you take one step beyond the ideological framework I just mentioned, there are all sorts of other motivations that exist in and around the politics but that might look a little different. For example, one reason why someone might attack science and/or health communicators is simply because they have something different to sell to the public, like supplements or other “wellness” merchandise. And in that sense, they are promoting a rival to what the health system is providing. In other cases, people might not be selling anything directly but might be selling their own brand. Think about influencers – a career that requires you to build an audience and to build a following. One path to that is by branding yourself and packaging your lifestyle as an identity that other people can learn to adopt. You make advertising revenue or develop various marketing deals off that.
All this is happening at a distinct moment in time, where we have such an explosion of sources of information and with that many rival forms of knowledge to institutional science start to take shape. It’s also developing simultaneously in a context where people increasingly have economic precarity, and grave and very real concerns about the effects of various factors on our environment on our health… while there are all sorts of new ways of communicating that fill the gaps caused by a fragmented media sector and older forms and genres of communication propagated by doctors and other sorts of science communicators.
And an additional element of this precarity is that our health system does have real challenges – many people lack a trusted primary care doctor, or they only have six minutes for a visit. They see that the system isn’t working well, or they hear that a venture capitalist bought mom’s nursing home.
We don’t have time to sit and have in-depth discussions with our doctors. And there is deep mistrust of insurance agencies and the hidden decisions that they make. Most people who have health insurance are in these large plans where there is not a lot of transparency in terms of pricing. Add all that together and these are ripe moments for conspiracy theories and other forms of direct knowledge and communication to basically start to elbow aside institutions that used to trust.
Where can people go to verify health information in a time when government websites are being purged of specific content – and even specific words?
My general response to this is that people need to evaluate not the information itself, although that’s important, but the source of the information, because it’s so hard to validate the information itself in today’s world. So, what you should look for is: what is the relationship to the public that these people have? The great thing about science is that it’s public-interest oriented. It doesn’t serve a political party. It doesn’t serve an ideology. It doesn’t serve a partisan political interest. It doesn’t serve a money interest, at least at its most ideal. It’s governed by a set of professional ethics with bodies that help ensure this. In essence we’re evaluating the source, which has a mandated relationship to the public… that’s meant to be in your interest, as a person.
I think the same way about journalists. That’s not to say that everyone lives up to these ideals all the time, but most professional journalists working for a professional news outlet are governed by a code of ethics. And there are ethics societies that lay out this commitment to the public, including professional relationships and the obligations and responsibilities that journalists have to their audience. That looks very different than what’s at CDC right now, which in essence is captured by a set of political interests.
What three books would you recommend for people who want to learn more about disinformation?
One is Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation by my colleague Dannagal Goldthwaite Young at the University of Delaware. She does both political and health communication research, and she is a psychologist. I think she has a really great argument in that book about how social identity and political identity intersect with our knowledge and beliefs, which shows us why these things are structured in particular ways.
Pointing to the work of our Center in particular, Francesca Bolla Tripodi’s book called The Propagandists’ Playbook is a really smart understanding of why propaganda takes the form that it does and looks specifically at the contemporary right.
Another one of my colleagues, Tressie McMillan Cottom has written a collection of essays called Thick, which responds in a really compelling way to your specific question about how people interact with healthcare systems and how those healthcare systems haven’t always served people like her well. No one writes better connecting bigger sociological theories with everyday lived experience with power. And if we have to think about why people don’t have trust, we also have to consider the question of why, for a long time, a lot of people had very valid reasons not to trust larger institutions. Once you set the layer of power and race and money and class into the equation, I think that cam discloses a whole bunch of other stuff that unsettles some of the comfortable assumptions we have about trust in knowledge producing.