National File by Ben Bailey
Last week, several prominent members of corporate media outlets held a seminar on “disinformation” at the University of Chicago. The symposium, called “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy”, featured media figures such as CNN’s Brian Stelter, The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, and The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg. The premise of the conference was to emphasize the need for a trustworthy media and to show how “disinformation” is dangerous for democracy.
Members of the University of Chicago’s right-of-center newspaper, The Chicago Thinker, attended the event and grilled the hosts about their own deviation from the facts. Daniel Schmidt, a U of Chicago freshman and writer at the newspaper, asked Applebaum about mainstream media’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story, adding that those outside of the “Fox News bubble” likely did not have a strong understanding of the situation and that it likely affected people’s voting decision in 2020. “Do you think the media acted inappropriately when they instantly dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation, and what can we learn from that to ensure that what we label as disinformation is truly disinformation, and not reality?”, Schmidt asked…
