On Highbrow Misinformation

On issues like climate change, gender, race, and crime, establishment journalism and punditry are often misleading. One can acknowledge this without becoming a "contrarian", conspiracist, or bigot.

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

When confronted with the growing popularity of populist, extremist, and generally destructive ideas over the past decade or so, many establishment politicians, journalists, and experts have blamed “misinformation” (see also “disinformation”, “fake news”, “information disorder”, and “post-truth”).

Although this narrative comes in different forms, it typically involves three core ideas: (1) misinformation is widespread, (2) it is much worse than in the recent past, and (3) it is highly impactful in driving worrying political trends and developments. By duping large numbers of credulous citizens into believing falsehoods and deranged conspiracy theories, it fuels populism, support for demagogues, and hostility towards democracy and established institutions.

I’ve written about many of the problems with this narrative before. For example, it exaggerates both the quality of the past information environment and the gullibility of ordinary voters. In most cases, misinformation and demagogic politics exist because there’s an active market for them, catering to attitudes already prevalent in the population.

The narrative is also self-serving. By explaining support for populism as a result of manipulation and misinformation, it exempts establishment institutions from any blame for anti-establishment politics. It also delegitimises all populist concerns, treating the preferences of many voters (e.g., for less immigration or tougher policies on crime) as the result of simple cognitive mistakes.

Finally, the idea that “misinformation” is the kind of thing that mainstream journalists and experts can detect and regulate presupposes that misinformation is not a significant problem within their institutions. As many have pointed out, this assumption is highly questionable. There is a substantial amount of what Matt Yglesias calls “elite misinformation”.

“Elite misinformation”

So understood, elite misinformation is supposed to be different from the kind of fake news, absurd conspiracy theories, and quack science spread by “alternative media” outlets and pundits like Candace Owens, Alex Jones, Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate, Tucker Carlson, and Joe Rogan.

However, the term “elite” can be misleading in this context. A vast amount of what Donald Trump and Elon Musk say is either false or misleading. Given that the former is the world’s most powerful man and the latter is the wealthiest, it’s strange not to classify them as “elites”. Nevertheless, their falsehoods are not the kind of thing people have in mind when they speak of “elite misinformation”.

Moreover, so-called “alternative media” and “non-elite” pundits are increasingly influential in shaping the attitudes and incentives of mainstream politicians and right-wing parties. So, although there’s a familiar sense in which a college professor who occasionally eats tofu, enjoys foreign movies, and reads literary nonfiction is an “elite”, whereas influential multimillionaires like Joe Rogan and Theo Von aren’t, this is ultimately a pretty strange and objectionable use of the word “elite”.

For this reason, I prefer Joseph Heath’s term “highbrow misinformation”. This is the sort of misleading content spread and consumed by highly educated professionals within prestigious institutions (legacy media, universities, NGOs, public health authorities, etc.). In the current context, this is the most relevant kind of misinformation because it circulates among the very people and organisations most vocally concerned about misinformation. So, it’s the kind of misinformation that opens them up to accusations of bias and hypocrisy.

The main question that I want to explore here is how we should understand, evaluate, and respond to highbrow misinformation. And the main point that I want to make is that too many people either (1) deny or downplay the phenomenon, or (2) exploit its existence to favour an “anti-establishment” information environment that is much worse than what it seeks to replace. Highbrow misinformation demonstrates that our most prestigious knowledge-producing institutions must urgently be reformed, not destroyed or replaced by “contrarian”, “heterodox”, or “alternative” media.

First, though, I’ll give some examples of the phenomenon.

Highbrow misinformation

Climate change

A vast amount of energy and funding is directed at addressing the problems of climate misinformation. The overwhelming majority of the focus here is on climate denialism, a category of misinformation that exists only on the political right. This focus therefore overlooks highbrow misinformation surrounding climate change skewed in favour of mainstream progressive narratives, which tend towards alarmism and catastrophism, as well as simplistic morality tales aimed at condemning capitalism and corporations.

This highbrow misinformation includes reporting and punditry that encourage the widespread but mistaken ideas that climate change is likely to cause human extinction or civilisational collapse, that it is forecast to make the world poorer than it is now, that deaths from natural disasters have increased as a consequence of climate change, that a small number of corporations produce the overwhelming majority of carbon emissions, and that fossil fuel companies receive vast state subsidies. (Note that the links here are to sources debunking the misinformation in question. Some of the examples are explored in the article in which Joseph Heath coined the term “highbrow misinformation”.) To the extent that large numbers of people hold such beliefs, it is not because of right-wing denialists. It is because mainstream reporting on the topic is often highly misleading.

Such misleading reporting is not immaterial. For example, one survey from 2023 suggested that nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 16-25 endorsed the statement that “Humanity is doomed” due to climate change, with more than half (52%) claiming that they are hesitant to have children as a result. A study in the same year in Canada reported nearly half (48%) of young people saying that they also think humanity is doomed. I don’t know how trustworthy such survey data is. The survey questions seem quite leading and nebulous in ways that might encourage inflated responses, and some other surveys report lower figures. But people I trust also report high levels of belief in doom among young people. And even if the real numbers aren’t so high, I have personally encountered the beliefs that climate change seriously threatens human extinction or global civilisation collapse many times.

Gender