• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 6, 2025

Well, the majority of you, anyway.

What’s that you say, “How dare you accuse me of being a misinformer?”

Well, I don’t mean it the way others do, naming individuals or entities who have had the greatest impact on misinforming others. I mean it in a way that most of us misinform ourselves by not being both open-minded and/or skeptical enough about what content we choose to inform – or as the case may be, misinform – ourselves.

Full disclosure: I should include myself, because as much as I try to think broadly and analytically, I do surround myself with my own information bubble of information sources that clearly reinforce my own confirmation bias.

Most of us do at some level, because we regard those sources as being some kind of ground truth. Or at the very least, more truthful than other sources.

And if you’re like me, and at least trying to be open-minded, you probably toggle occasionally to sources you don’t believe to be truthful under the guise of “trying to see the other side,” throw up your hands and say, “Argggggh, Fox News!!!,” before switching the channel back.

But that too is a form of confirmation bias, because you never went into the experience with an open mind in the first place.

Honestly, I do not know what the solution is, but I know it’s not about anything regulators, lawmakers, advocacy groups or media pundits will solve. It’s about us – you and me – fact-checking ourselves, having more of an open mind, and applying a smidge more skepticism to what we have already preordained to be gospel.

I’ve had a running debate with Bob Guccione Jr. about an interview he did in SPIN magazine in 2022 that was an important platform for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom I believe to be a major misinforming culprit, mainly because he just has some crazy ideas.

But as Guccione points out, there also are some very solid truths to what he has been proselytizing, like the over-prescription and overuse of certain pharmaceutical drugs, and the source of so many artificial and unhealthy ingredients in our food supply.

And as difficult as it is for me to admit it, there is some valuable information in what RFK Jr. is promoting. It’s just that it gets overwhelmed by the cray-cray parts.

I came up with my Misinformer of the Year candidate when I received a press release this morning from news veracity ratings service NewsGuard naming former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff turned prolific Kremlin propagandist its “Disinformer of the Year,” as well as Media Matters recent selection of “Anti-Media Intimidation” as its “Misinformer of the Year."

Notice, I did not use the term “disinformer” when naming you this year, because that is a willful act, and I don’t think most of us would intentionally delude ourselves.

We misinform ourselves through complacency, community, culture, and/or many reasons that have to do with our personal self-identities, but the truth is, we all do it.

It’s one of the reasons I attempted to launch a quantified self platform some years back that would have enabled users to analyzes the value exchange they derive from media. The beta launched by quantifying the monetary values we derive from using media, but the longer term goal – once we had a critical mass of users quantifying the value they got from using media – was to introduce elements quantifying the value of the information they derived from it.

Importantly, the parameters of the values – both monetary and information – were set by users themselves, but the idea was to enable people to see the actual yields they generated for them.

That venture failed, but I’d still like to see someone develop the concept in a way that actually empowers individuals to look at their own media data and to make judgments on the returns they get based on the time, money and beliefs they put into it.