SPECIAL DELIVERY: About a month back the Biden Administration launched the Orwellian “Disinformation Board,” ostensibly to combat Russian propaganda. But we all know this song — and it’s a bad song. After two years of increasingly-normalized political censorship, federalization of truth arbitration alarmed every sane person in the country (along with all the crazies). Fury was immediate, and profound. The Ministry of Truth has since collapsed, Nina Jankowicz, the would-be TikTok-star-turned-Chief-Censor has resigned, and the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz has once again made herself part of the story.

I hit up Santi Ruiz for details on Jankowicz, and a look at the bizarre parallels between subject and reporter in this ongoing bleed between the worlds of press, government, and technology.

-Solana

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Washington Post “technology and online culture” columnist Taylor Lorenz broke a juicy story this morning: the Executive Director of the newly created DHS Disinformation Governance Board, Nina Jankowicz, is resigning, and the Board has been “put on hold” indefinitely. The thrust of the column was straightforward: “Coordinated,” “bad-faith” disinformation attacks caused a feckless administration to hang a talented professional out to dry. Disinformation wins the war on disinformation. 

Topline takeaways are clear to anyone who paid attention to the broader story since the Board was announced just three weeks ago. Jankowicz was manifestly unqualified for a role that was itself a bad idea in the first place, Lorenz is a hack, and public outcry at obvious government overreach is a feature, not a bug, of American democracy. But the Washington Post story was an almost too-perfect example of the incestuous media memeplex and the vacuity of the “disinformation” frame. Let’s go to the tape.

Lorenz called Jankowicz “a well-known figure in the field of fighting disinformation and extremism,” and claimed “Within the small community of disinformation researchers, her work was well-regarded.” This is bogus: Jankowicz has barely over a year of Washington postgraduate experience, and her professional reputation relies on one relevant book, 2020’s “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict,” and one tract about harassment on the Internet. 

Other disinformation professionals thought Jankowicz was a rube, and said so publicly. In a fine-toothed analysis for The Bulwark, actual EU diplomatic professional Monika Richter broke down claims in Jankowicz’s book on Russian disinformation. The piece is worth reading in full. Jankowicz consistently gets basic facts wrong, not just out of laziness, but because two of her seven interview sources are themselves actual Russian disinformation.

Jankowicz has a track record of being suckered by false, debunked claims about disinformation — that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian plant, or that the Trump pee tape was real. None of this made its way into the Washington Post piece. Lorenz, of course, has a track record of false claims.

A layer deeper, there are interesting psychological resonances: Lorenz, millennial Tiktok reporter, breathlessly reporting the fall of Jankowicz, millennial TikTok poster. The subtext is barely subtext. The whole piece leverages fears of malevolent, state-fueled disinformation to defend individuals doing bad things from public, ground-up criticisms. Lorenz quotes a propaganda researcher, Mark Jacobson, at length: “You never want to be silent, because then the people putting out disinformation own the narrative.” Is this about Jankowicz, or about Lorenz’s constant battle with newsroom editors upset that her relentless defensive tweeting tarnishes legacy brands? We report, you decide.

It gets balder. The subhed of the piece tells us that “Nina Jankowicz was the victim of coordinated online attacks as the administration struggled to respond.” Lorenz herself left the New York Times in a huff over the Gray Lady’s purported failure to protect her from online criticism. Mark Seibel, the Washington Post’s Technology Policy editor, someone who would have had his hands on the crafting of this piece and missed at least two obvious copy errors, tweeted, “Unfortunately, it is not just the federal government that doesn’t understand how to respond to such attacks.” Cough, cough.

And a layer below one finds the class dynamics. Fellow journos rallied around the reporting immediately. New Yorker staff writer: “Revealing and sobering on so many levels.” Senior Internet, Platforms, Politics Reporter for NBC: “Cannot overstate the importance here.” Even Dave Weigel, a fellow Washington Post journalist who was publicly chastised by Lorenz for suggesting vaccines work, bent the knee and called out Lorenz’s critics: “If people don’t like how Lorenz frames a story, they could scoop her. Easier said than done.” Of course, there are many ways to get a scoop, but most involve convincing someone that giving you, specifically, non-public information is in their interest. It helps if you’re ideologically aligned with your source, and promise to slant the reporting in a way they like. No prizes for guessing how this particular scoop was secured. 

The framing of the story shouldn’t be a surprise. Lorenz and Jankowicz both come from theater kid culture, where being on the side of good is more important to the story than competence, accuracy, or public oversight. (In fairness, Jankowicz has got a great voice and stage presence: her cabaret-style performance that circulated when the Board was announced was unjustly maligned. The Tiktoks are far worse.) The kinds of people who get picked to head a “Disinformation Governance Board” don’t need deep area knowledge. They just need to be on the right side. 

But it’s not just that the main characters of the drama are ideologically and personally aligned. Lorenz relies throughout the Post piece on research from Advance Democracy Inc. to prove that criticism of Jankowicz was coordinated. She cites a finding from the “nonpartisan” organization highlighting how often the Board came up in Fox News coverage the week after its announcement. The twist: the man behind Advance Democracy, Daniel Jones, funded the man behind the Steele dossier (the source of the Trump pee tape disinformation). Jones, a former top aide to senile CA Senator Dianne Feinstein, helped create one of the biggest pieces of electoral disinformation of the past ten years.

To repeat: the formally nonpartisan expert on disinformation quoted helped manufacture disinformation.

The Board was actually relatively anodyne, while the Post coverage, and its use of “nonpartisan” experts, is far more representative of how public discourse control works in daily practice. Jankowicz was easy to ridicule, but got pushed out because, on some level, the feds are responsive to public outcry. Senate Democrats abruptly canceled a hearing with Jankowicz last week, with aides acknowledging she was a political liability. However attenuated, there is a connection between people getting upset and political outcomes. Lorenz is the same type and performs the same intended role of narrative control, but she’s made of Teflon: lie regularly at the Times? Swap outlets to find an editorial team that will protect you.

Recently, the Times published a piece about Elon Musk’s childhood in South Africa, in which the reporter described Apartheid government propaganda as “the dangers of unchecked speech.” That same two-step is the whole point of the Board and the coverage of it: your online takes and enemy regime campaigns are the same thing and should be fought with the same tools. When right-wing media outlets mine “past social media posts and publish articles to generate controversy,” it’s disinformation. When we do it, it’s journalism. The Theater Kid Occupied Government is entitled to put out a unified, coordinated propaganda line through its public and private vectors. At least this time it’s funny.

-Santi Ruiz