Taibbi: "Anti-Disinformation" is a Partisan Con

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As I tried to explain to three journalism profs who gave a talk on the subject to students last year. This is the way things work at universities. Talks are given, classes are taught, "student affairs" events are held. Some of them overtly push the leftist worldview. Most, however, just presuppose it or keep it thinly concealed just barely to the side or in the background. In this talk, for example, the election fraud conspiracy figured prominently, as did a few other left-friendly/right-unfriendly examples. When it came to the token right-friendly/left-unfriendly example, it was really about vaccine skepticism generally...so a fringe left view, not a central one...and a view that is now strongly associated with the right as well because of COVID. They also offered advice like: go to the Washington Post Fact-Checker. After the talk, I told them what I thought about the "disinformation" biz, and I politely suggested that their talk had a clear left lean. I said that I thought it was clear that the Washington Post leans left...and that the Washington Post "fact-"checker was basically just more Washington Post. I went to the site and searched for Trump, and showed them that the first page of the search results was composed almost exclusively of rulings against Trump statements about Russiagate...basically all of which he'd turned out to be right about. I got some weak concessions after ten minutes of arguing. But without me there, there'd have been no pushback. And even with me there, it was difficult to extract concessions, and it happened only after the students were gone. 

   Though I will say that the thing was less overtly biased--far less--than I'd predicted. And that's important.