In the wake of J.D. Vance openly admitting that he is “creating” stories about Haitian migrants to garner attention, we need to have a conversation about how the media should cover disinformation campaigns.
When one presidential campaign explicitly admits that they’re creating lies, we in the media should cover these lies as intentional disinformation campaigns, especially when it comes to lies that dehumanize and target entire groups of people.
Not only did Vance make that admission, we also now have a new report from The Wall Street Journal that revealed Vance’s team was explicitly told by a city manager the day before the debate last week that there is no evidence of Haitians eating pets. Vance continued to spread those lies anyway, and Trump went on to spread them to tens of millions of Americans on the debate stage.
As I outlined in my newsletter this week, there is only one way to frame this: the Trump Campaign is knowingly exploiting migrant lies to try and fearmonger their way into office and to justify cruel, dehumanizing policies. This is all very clearly an intentional disinformation campaign based on historic authoritarian playbooks.
Now that evidence has definitively proven that this is an intentional disinformation campaign, the media should cover it accordingly.
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How The Media Should Cover Trump & Vance's Disinformation