If you’re a journalist, you might think about this a lot, even if you don’t know the name for it.

It’s called the liar’s dividend, and it’s an unwelcome side effect of debunking misinformation. Exposing hoaxes and propaganda for the manipulative nonsense that they are serves a counter purpose. As Poynter Institute Senior Vice President Kelly McBride wrote recently, the theory goes that “debunking efforts actually legitimize the debate” over whether or not something is true.

Doubting reality takes the guise of a reasonable position, reinforcing what’s fake and paying a dividend back to the original source of the misinformation.

McBride brought up a classic example of the liar’s dividend, which goes back to early reports that cigarettes were linked to cancer. In response, the tobacco industry relied on journalism’s honorable tendency to report “both sides of the story,” and went on to suggest there were legitimate doubts about the validity of that scientific research. During the last several decades, this tactic was repeated effectively by the oil and gas industry to seed doubts about climate change research, as demonstrated in this episode of WNYC’s United States of Anxiety from 2017.

Like a lot of problems facing the journalism industry, we don’t have concrete solutions to issues like the liar’s dividend. For instance, take McBride’s list of suggestions on how to avoid playing into the liar’s dividend: collaborate with other media orgs, disclose when you receive phony tips, reduce reliance on aggregation, and acknowledge how the drive for pageviews impacts journalistic decisions. These are great ideas for dealing with misinformation in general, but they fall short of addressing the causes and outcomes of a liar’s dividend scenario.

Perhaps that’s because the only way to prevent the liar’s dividend is to not factcheck things in the first place – a foolish proposition. The liar’s dividend is a natural byproduct of language, logic and how we approach journalism.

The thing is: Our industry won’t begin to deal with big issues like this until every nonpartisan journalist at the national level buys into the notion that misinformation is a real threat. In an abstract yet superficial way, they get this, but a huge disconnect persists when it comes to how seriously some of the most experienced and most prominent journalists in the industry take propaganda and hoaxes.

I wrote earlier this month that nonpartisan journalism gatekeepers played and continue to play a role in allowing misinformation into the national dialogue. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the false equivalency thing that makes the liar’s dividend work is a big factor. Perhaps because gatekeepers don’t know anyone personally who has fallen for misinformation, there also seems to be serious doubt that anyone could believe something egregiously false. And if they do, what’s the big deal?

Consider last week’s debacle over a video edited to make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appear drunk at an event, struggling to discuss policy. Facebook stood by its decision to leave up the doctored video, and as of Monday afternoon, it had 2.8 million views.

Yet Dave Weigel, a national political reporter for The Washington Post, said on Twitter: “I’m not sure I understand the panic over the edited Pelosi video; people edit videos to make opponents look bad. Certainly, it does complicate the theory, being debated in the D primary, that removing Trump would ‘break the fever’ and make politics nice.”

So, Weigel’s deepest takeaway from this video was that it broke with the not-so-complex idea that politicians are polite when Trump isn’t around? Politicians didn’t make the video – a conservative Facebook group did. The fact that it reached so many people, was utter bullshit and was allowed to remain on Facebook despite its status as utter bullshit, somehow fell under the category of irrelevant, unnecessary “panic” according to Weigel.

Panicking is not the same thing as acknowledging that misinformation and propaganda are a problem. This shouldn’t be a controversial viewpoint. It should be something people with giant megaphones are trying to fight, not dismissing as traditional politics.

Misinformation bounces around partisan media and on social media, but if you look, you’ll also see it in state and local politics. If you live in a conservative place, you’ll hear it in conversations with friends or family or strangers. It’s not a tiny, harmless thing, and after knowing enough people who have been manipulated or brainwashed by absolute nonsense, if not propaganda and conspiracy theories, it doesn’t feel tiny or harmless to me. It feels big, like something that’s always around but so pervasive that we forget it’s there.

These concerns that stemmed from watching misinformation manipulate loved ones’ worldviews is part of why I started Big If True. Perhaps Weigel has never known someone who fell down a rabbit hole, and maybe I shouldn’t expect that of anyone. But from journalists at the largest and most prestigious publications in the country, I do expect some baseline understanding that the problem of widespread misinformation is here stay and that it is a problem. We’ll deal with the liar’s dividend after we get this part down.

Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

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