“LIES ARE NOT AN ALTERNATIVE: COMMUNICATION AND PUBLIC RELATIONS PEDAGOGY AS AN ANTIDOTE TO THE CONSPIRACY CULTURE” by Barna W. Donovan, Ph.D. Professor – Director of the Graduate Program in Communication and Public Relations Saint Peter’s University
Conspiracy theories kill. In 2018, Europe saw an unprecedented outbreak of the measles. According to the World Health Organization, 41,000 people had come down with the illness in the first half of the year. Thirty-seven of them had died. In France alone, 2500 people had contracted the disease.1 Romania is close behind those statistics with 1198 cases.2 But measles is a disease that should have been all but eradicated with the development of the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine…in 1963! Certainly underdeveloped, impoverished nations have seen measles outbreaks and deaths over the years, but there the causes are attributable to severely lacking healthcare systems. But the recent European measles epidemic should not be happening. Europe, however, is also in the grip of another destructive epidemic: an antivaccination movement founded on conspiracy theories. When a certain population’s immunization rate falls below a 95 percent minimum— called “herd immunity” by epidemiologists—diseases can run rampant.3 This is the case in Europe, where vaccine skepticism is the highest in the world. Not surprisingly, both France and Romania have less than 85 percent of their populations vaccinated today.4 As a result, people— especially infants below the age of immunization and those with immune systems compromised by illness—are getting sick and dying. These are hard, sobering facts. They should be
frightening. What many in these countries choose to be afraid of instead are unsubstantiated conspiracy theories on the Internet and social media. Vaccines, some of these frightened Europeans believe, are made of mercury and thus poisonous. Others refuse to immunize their children out of a fear of vaccines causing autism. Governments, these people have been convinced by YouTube videos and Facebook pages, know of this autism-vaccine link but world leaders choose to cover up the facts because they are under the thumb of “Big Pharma.” Other vaccine opponents believe that MMR vaccines are made from the cells of aborted fetuses. Some have been convinced that vaccinations are the lethal tools of a genocidal global cabal bent on reducing the world population.5 Those who believe this health crisis is isolated to Europe, however, should think again. Today diseases can spread just about as quickly as all the farrago of conspiratorial nonsense on the Internet. In 2018 the number of confirmed measles cases in the United States was at 220. In 2017 those cases numbered at 120. In 2016 the number was 86.6 That trend is not looking very good. Moreover, recent years have seen other conspiracy beliefs in the United States take a near deadly turn. On December 4, 2016, in an incident that would be dubbed “Pizzagate,” a man brandishing an assault rifle entered a Washington, D.C. pizzeria and discharged his weapon in an attempt to “investigate” whether the establishment was a front for a child sex-slave ring operated by high-ranking members of the Democratic party. The sex-slave operation, the attacker, Maddison Welch, was convinced after spending too much time on the Internet, reached as high as Hillary Clinton herself.7 Although the Pizzagate allegations have been thoroughly debunked, an online community of conspiracy theorists calling themselves “Qanon” is still very much active, attempting to win
converts to their cause: that a global Satanic sex-slavery cabal whose members include the Clintons, Barack Obama, Tom Hanks and numerous other high-profile liberal politicians and Hollywood celebrities, must be stopped at all costs.8 An equally insidious effect of conspiratorial thinking can be seen at work in the climate science debate in the United States. Eighteen percent of Americans today believe that climate change is a hoax, a part of a grand conspiracy of scientists and a global socialist plot to destroy American industry. In the wake of the recent California wildfires, the Internet was flooded with conspiracy theories claiming that the conflagrations that have cost upward of $800 million in damages and claimed 84 lives so far were really started on purpose by laser weapons fired from top-secret military aircraft. Among the reasons conspiracists cite for the theory is a plot to clear land for a high-speed train system and to help bolster belief in the lies about global warming and its effects on the environment.9 Conspiracism, it must be recognized at this point, is more than just the colorful guesswork of eccentrics looking for a second gunman on the grassy knoll or aliens in Area 51. It goes far beyond that one off-the-wall relative everyone has, the crazy uncle spinning yarns during Thanksgiving dinner. This is an ever more dangerous belief system that has very real social import. Moreover, most of the conspiracy beliefs today can be found among young people, a generation that is spending, not surprisingly, more and more time online and exposed to the Internet’s underbelly of paranoia.10 A generation that educators hope will soon take on the challenges of the world, that will tackle its myriad of social, political, economic, and environmental problems, are more cynical and disenfranchised than before. A diet of rococo, illogical conspiratorial fantasies are proving research about conspiracism and social engagement true.11 The more committed people are to a conspiratorial world view, the less inclined they are
to be socially and political active. What use is there, after all, in voting, in engaging in any sort of civic activity when everything in the world is controlled by and has been preordained by the shadowy forces of the Illuminati and the Freemasons? So what is the solution to this culture of distrust that denies any kind of a consensus reality? What can educators do in a world that is growing ever more hostile to academics, that glorifies anti-intellectualism? What can be done in a cultural atmosphere where, as National Security Affairs professor Tom Nichols argues, “people have lost faith in experts. We’ve developed a kind of reverse snobbery that says if you have a great deal of education, if you’re at a well-known institution, by definition you must be a liar.”12 Could the solution be, as some have suggested, to not even challenge the 9/11 “truthers,” the flat Earth conspiracy theorists, the “crisis actor” conspiracy theorists who claim that mass shootings were government-orchestrated hoaxes? Might answering the claims of these fringe movements somehow serve to legitimize their claims, to bring attention to them? Is a scientist disputing the claim that military-controlled weather satellites created Hurricane Sandy merely “feeding the trolls?” Or is the answer to the culture of conspiracy only to be found in the hard sciences? Is it only the prevue of physicists, astronomers, and biologists to prove adequately that the Earth indeed is a globe, that we did land on the Moon and that vaccines do not cause autism? As Benjamin Radford, research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, writes about how to deal with pseudoscientific claims of the paranormal, “people will often assume that if they are not hearing a solid, categorical rebuttal that it’s not because scientists and skeptics think it’s too silly to bother with but instead they can’t or won’t address the claims.”13 Therefore, ignoring the conspiracist trolls can feed them much more than disputing their arguments.
Furthermore, our schools and universities are already staffed by excellent faculty who can teach the basics of genetics, physics, and explain evolution and why the Earth is neither flat nor only six thousand years old. But the problem is that so many young Americans have become so alienated from so many forms of authority, from any organizations—be they academic or governmental—that they will choose to believe that the findings of empiricism and the scientific method are merely tools of a vast conspiracy. The data in medical journals, in other words, have merely been doctored by “them,” by the “shadowy forces” of the New World Order to make it seem like dangerous, poisonous vaccines are really safe. To combat this corrosive culture of conspiracism, we need to turn to the fields of communication, media literacy, and public relations. Students, from elementary school to college and graduate school need, first and foremost, to understand all of the tactics used by unethical communicators. By thoroughly understanding the communication process can we recognize the differences between honest discourse, between honest message-construction and underhanded manipulation. Media literate students, for example, will be able to recognize such unethical argument-construction tactics as the use of the reverse scientific process. They will see how someone who is determined to find evidence of a Freemasonic plot to destroy the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11 will be able to pick and choose random events and facts and make spurious connections between them to create the appearance of a conspiracy. The communication-savvy student will be able to spot how the use of this reverse scientific process willfully ignores facts that contradict the desired, preconceived theory. Such a student will be able to see through the tactics of demagogues and charlatans who demonize their opposition, who blur the lines between supposition and provable facts.
Students of media literacy will be able to evaluate sources of information. They will understand why a multimillion-dollar conspiracy industry thrives in the form of web pages, social media, self-published books and “independently” produced videos that purport to reveal the secrets of the “Insiders” and the hidden history of the world…all for a reasonable price. A student well-versed in the tools of message construction, who understands the economic structures of communication industries will, guided by ethical principles, be able to see where all of today’s myriad of mass communication and social media tools are being misused and put at the service of fear, distrust, and division. Finally, the tools of mass communication and public relations must now be put in the service of reason and rationality. Public relations practitioners are skilled in the most effective way organizations can communicate with their publics, the most effective way to advocate for a mission and a set of values. Today it is absolutely crucial for our society that skilled communicators start advocating the importance of intellectualism, a respect for education, critical thinking, and for reason- and evidence-based belief systems. 1
Leslie Nemo, “Are Antivaxxers to Blame for Europe’s Current Measles Outbreak?” LiveScience.com, https://www.livescience.com/63951-anti-vaxxer-measles-outbreak-europe.html, (October 29, 2018). 2 Joanna Kakis, “The Story Behind the Worst Measles Outbreak in the European Union.” NPR, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/11/24/669228140/the-story-behind-the-worst-measlesoutbreak-in-the-european-union, (November 24, 2018). 3 Bruce Y. Lee, “2018 Surges in Measles in Europe and U.S. Show Importance of Herd Immunity,” Forbes.com, https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2018/11/24/2018-surge-in-measles-in-europe-and-us-show-importanceof-herd-immunity/#579cd3e56cdc, (November 24, 2018). 4 Kakis, “The Story Behind the Worst Measles Outbreak in the European Union.” 5 Ibid. 6 Lee, “2018 Surges in Measles in Europe and U.S. Show Importance of Herd Immunity.” 7 Michael Sebastian, “Even the Pizzagate Suspect No Longer Believes the Conspiracy Theory,” Esquire, (December 5, 2016). 8 Julia Carrie Wong, “What is Qanon? Explaining the Bizarre Rightwing Conspiracy Theory,” theguardian.com, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/30/qanon-4chan-rightwing-conspiracy-theory-explainedtrump, (July 30, 2018). 9 Anna Merlan, “California’s Wildfires Have Spawned a Truly Weird New Conspiracy Theory,” Gizmodo.com, https://earther.gizmodo.com/californias-wildfires-have-spawned-a-truly-wild-new-con-1830418656 (November 16, 2018).
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Natasha Galliford & Adrian Furnham, “Individual difference factors and beliefs in medical and political conspiracy theories,” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, (August 7, 2017). 11 Daniel Jolley & Karen M. Douglas, “The social consequences of conspiracism: Exposure to conspiracy theories decreases intentions to engage in politics and reduce one’s carbon footprint,” British Journal of Psychology, 105 (2014) 12 Nichols is interviewed on the CBS Sunday Morning program: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-flat-earthmovement-a-society-of-disbelievers-in-scientific-fact/ His arguments about the decline in respect for expertise can be found in his book, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 13 Benjamin Radford, “Legitimizing Woo,” Skeptical Inquirer, (November/December 2017).