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David Miller
Professor Beth Caruso
UWRT 1103
29 September 2015
Misinformation and the Media
Controversial is a term that is often used in association with the mainstream media outlets. It
can describe a news story that they are reportingreport or the organizations themselves for how they
handle themselves. One reason that this term can befall major news outlets, like Fox News or MSNBC,
is that some of their storiesreports they present can contain some incorrect information that is
revealed to thewhich, in turn, can deceive the public. If these organizationscompanies makeearn money
by presenting stories onsimply reporting current events that multiple people can attend, then why does
such a large volume of misinformation in the media exist todayexist in the media?
First, we must define what constitutes misinformationmisinformation must be defined. As the
name implies, it deals with factually incorrectthe falsifying of information. However, there are two
different types of thisfalse information: misinformation and disinformation. Disinformation is
generally defined as deliberate falsification by an institution that has the intent of spreading a false
story. Misinformation, on the other hand, is generally considered to be accidental distortionfalsifying
of information (Accuracy in the media). A misinterpretation of a statement by a politician or other
celebrity could be considered misinformationan example of this accidental occurrence. However, if that
statement was an entity purposely misinterpretsed or perverts the truth to defame or lie about a person
or corporation, it would be considered disinformation.
Misinformation seems like the lesser of two evils and the easiest to amendeasiest of the two
types to fix in the news. Preventing basic errors, such as the validity ofunchecked sources or an
accidental typo and typos, seems simple enough but that has not stopped the mistakes from occurring

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fairly frequently in the modern media yet the amount of these types of errors prevalent in the news is
unchanged. Some of the mistakes occur simply because some humans are lazy. For instance,
immediately afterfollowing the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings that occurred in 2012,
several mainstream media outlets reported several incorrect facts, including the wrong type of gun
used, identifying the wrong man as the assailantassailant's brother as the attacker and even
thoughtreporting that the attacker's mother worked at Sandy Hook (Phillips, A Brief and Incomplete
History). While this data may seem unimportant, especially given the emotional heaviness of this
particular event, allowing the press and television networks to be careless on one story is opening the
door for the same attention level on the next one. Laziness andor human errors isare not the only
factors that can causecontribute misinformation in the media. News organizations try to report new
developments as soon as they can to maintain their viewership levels and this desire to be quick can
facilitate misintrepation. The Affordable Care Act's individual mandate, as an example, was recently on
trial in the Supreme Court for supposedly being unconstitutional. After the decision was announced,
which upheld the act, Fox News and CNN both mistakenly reported that it was struck down before
correcting it minutes later (Silverman, The best (and worst) media errors). The Supreme Court had
said, in layman's terms, that enforcing the mandate through one of the powers of Congress, the
Commerce Clause, was unconstitutional but that it was perfectly valid to enforce under Congress'
power to tax. Fox News and CNN both jumped the gun after the first statement and assumed that the
act was being struck down, when in reality they misinterpreted what the justices were saying without
allowing them to finish.thorougly examining the decision. Misinterpretation, laziness and other factors
like personal bias can both cause networks and newspapers to unintentionally feed the public false
information. Without trying to purposely distort facts, reporters and anchors can interpret and apply
their own personal bias to the situation without consciously making that effort.
While misinformation deals with the unintended falsities that can occur, disinformation is the

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intentional distortion and manipulation of information to convey to other people and groupsto affect the
public's knowledge. In order to better understand the extent of disinformation in the modern media, one
has to understand the motivation behind it. What is the motivation behind purposely changingaltering
the truth? The most blatant is monetary gain and it occurs at every level of a news organization. At the
lowest level, Iinvestigative reporters may exaggerate or exclude certain details to make their story more
likely to be airedincrease the entertainment value or generate interest in an otherwise dull story
(Charles, Why does the mainstream media lie?). After all, if a reporter is not producing any
newsworthy information, how would they keep their job? This is not always the case but is a situation
that can occurSometimes, however, the newsworthiness of a story or development is determined by the
specific agenda of each media outlet. One reporter that pursued honesty over money was Jane Akre.
The lawsuit by Jane Akre most clearly demonstrates this idea. Jane Akre and her husband, working for
a small Fox News affiliate, were creating an investigative news report on bovine growth hormone
(rbGH). During their investigation, they discovered that rbGH could potentially be a huge public health
hazardrisk. Before their report was aired, Monsanto, a company that was producing said chemical,
contacted Fox News and implied that, if the news report aired, Fox may lose funding from Monsanto.
As a result, Fox News tried to push a more positive (from Monsanto's point of view) story onto Akre
and her husband, but they refused to report anything but the truth, especially since it could have been a
public health issuegive in especially considering the potential health risk to the public. Needless to say,
the report was pulled and never aired. Akre tried to fight for her news report to be shown to the public
but was eventually released for no specific reason (Smith, Monsanto Forced Fox TV). At the risk of
losing Monsanto's donations, Fox manipulated the truth: first by attempting to distort some of the
truth then eventually deciding to not tell the truth at all.Because Monsanto was a major contributor to
Fox News, the channel felt the obligated to manipulate then omit the truth from the news. While not
airing a story is not necessarily disinformation, deciding to not airpull a story for monetary gain (or to

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negate monetary loss) can be considered selective omission which is a form of manipulating the news.
Disinformation can occur at any level and the driving motivation is usually money though political bias
and other smaller factors can contribute to the problem.
Misinformation and disinformation are very different but can they both occur simultaneously in
one piece? Let us take a look at a well-known controversial piececontroversy and find traces of both.
This particular pieceThe controversy is NBC Anchor Brian Williams' supposed ride in a chopper in
Iraq; he claimed he was riding in a helicopter that was shot at with a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG).
As the story goes, he claimed that he was in a helicopter and he was either shot at with an RPG or he
looked down the tube of an RPG that struck an allied helicopter (Feldman, Brian Williams in
2007). He eventually admitted that he lied about some details of the event, which is clearly
disinformation, and this was later confirmed by one of the pilots on the mission. However, memory is
as incorruptible as a government official. A National Geographic series, entitled Brain Games, explores
how the mind works and perceives informationA National Geographic television series, entitled Brain
Games, best presents this fact. The premise of the show is to analyze how our brain perceives stimuli
and processes them. One episode in particular, called Remember This!, explores the memory of the
human brain. One test from this episode is particularly interesting: a group of ten random strangers
witness a (staged) pickpocket attempt in the park involving three men and a woman. After one or two
minutes, a detective arrives to question the witnesses. The surprising part is that only two or three
witnesses managed to give a fairly correct summary of what happened. The rest of the people made
some slightly major errors, such as wrong color of clothing and hair, to some witnesses getting the
gender of some of the participants mixed upDuring the questioning, most of the witnesses could not
accurately recall certain details that would seem to be easy to remember, such as color of a coat or
gender of an assailant. If the human memory could distort a major event as soon as two or three
minutes later and in such a drastic way, what memories can anybody be sure of? Was Brian Williams

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lying to purposely to further himself and his show? Yes, as his confession indicates, but could he also
have been unintentionally lying about some aspects that he believed to be true through memory
distortion and corruptionsuggestion? It is very possible. As shown by memory corruption, Tthe line
between disinformation and misinformation is not set in stonecan be very murky and sometimes
impossible to define, though this would be a very rare case. In general, these two concepts are very
easily differentiable. As with beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder, or their rival networks.
If misinformation and disinformation are so easily discovered, why are they allowed to still
exist in the mediatoday's society? The simple fact is that people allow them to exist. Most people are at
least a little aware of the fact that the media has at some times lied or manipulated the news, yet not
everybody wants to keep the different outlets accountable.tries to bring the networks to justice. Why do
people not stand up for the truth more often? Because of the idea of selective exposure (Mooney,
Science of Fox News). Selective Exposure is an unofficialunscientific term that basicallysimply
means people would prefer to hear information that supports their beliefs than information that
challenges them. The idea is that once someone adopts a core belief, as Mooney puts it, any
challenge to that belief would effectively challenge that person's way of thinking and cause that person
to most likely become defensive and unwilling to accept that challenge as fact cause someone to feel as
if there very being is under scrutiny versus one of their beliefs. This results in that someone becoming
very defensive of their belief and unlikely to seriously consider any information that is skeptical of it.
This explains why Fox News constantly states that their viewers vote them as the most unbiased
network. Their viewers are most likely to be conservative, since it is a conservative network, and
therefore be less likely to find any fault with their reports or coverage whereas viewers of liberal
networks would be constantly challenged by Fox News' conservative agenda and therefore believe Fox
is challenging their own personal beliefs. Basically, because people would rather hear affirmations that
their beliefs are correct than the truth, the real cause of the problem is the public's complacency with

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the amount of misinformation and disinformation that large media outlets put out. Sure the networks,
newspapers and other organizations may publish the falsified news but we are the ones who decide to
accept it without question. Basically, the real problem with the existence of misinformation is the
public's willingness to accept any info, no matter how accurate, that affirms their personal beliefs.
Misinformation will always be a problem in modern mediasociety, especially in America where
the First Amendment protects our freedoms of speech and press. There is no way to stop everybody
from lying because, as Thomas Hobbes believed, humans will do anything, no matter how wicked, to
achieve a goal or improve their standing in life. The solution is not to fix those people. The solution is
to stop listening to those people and learn to stop being complacent with being told what we want to
hear instead of what we should hear: the truth.with hearing reassuring lies rather than the truth, no
matter how inconvenient.

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Works Cited
Accuracy in the Media: Misinformation, Mistakes, and Misleading in American and Other Media.
Air University. Air University, 6 April 2005. Web. 20 Sept. 2015.
<http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/state/media_accuracy.htm>.
Charles. Why does mainstream media lie? Yahoo Answers. Yahoo, 23 Feb. 2013. Web. 22 Sept.
2015. <https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20130223125647AA3ogu4>.
Feldman, Josh. Brian Williams in 2007: I Looked Down the Tube of RPG in Iraq. MediaIte. 7 Feb.
2015. Web. 25 Sept. 2015. <http://www.mediaite.com/online/brian-williams-in-2007-i-lookeddown-the-tube-of-rpg-in-iraq/>.
Mooney, Chris. The Science of Fox News: Why Its Viewers are the Most Misinformed. Alternet.org.
Alternet, 8 April 2012. Web. 21 Sept. 2015. <https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?
qid=20130223125647AA3ogu4>.
Phillips, Brad. A Brief and Incomplete History of Media Mistakes. Mrmediatraining.com. Mr. Media
Training, 17 April 2013. Web. 22 Sept. 2015.
Remember This! Brain Games. National Geographic, 2011. Netflix.
Shah, Anup. Media and Advertising. Global Issues. Global Issues, 4 March 2012. Web. 18 Sept.
2015. <http://www.globalissues.org/article/160/media-and-advertising#Politicalinfluence>.
Silverman, Craig. The best (and worst) media errors and corrections of 2012. Poynter. Poynter, 12
Dec. 2012. Web. 17 Sept. 2015. <http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/197279/the-best-andworst-media-errors-and-corrections-of-2012/>.

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Smith, Jeffrey. Monsanto Forced Fox TV to Censor Coverage of Dangerous Milk Drug. Huffington
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<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-smith/monsanto-forced-fox-tv-to_b_186428.html>.
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism. Dir. Robert Greenwald. Brave New Films, 2004.
Youtube. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P74oHhU5MDk>.