Podcasting Must Fight The Battle Against Misinformation Monsters

Ashley Carman from Bloomberg has recently reported a story about how misinformation and disinformation can spread and damage people's lives, an organization's stellar reputation, and amped up hate, grievance, and rage. Carman's story also highlights a clear and present danger faced by podcasting.

As Carman relates, in January, the staff of Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, was flooded with tens of thousands of angry phone calls, all with the same concern. Calling in from as far away as Australia, the people were worried that an unvaccinated Covid-19 patient was getting a lower level of care, and wanted to ensure he would be transferred elsewhere. 

Mercy eventually transferred the patient to a Texas hospital. But in the meantime, administrators increased security, and the staff had to set up a new phone system so that unrelated inquiries about patient care could still get through, according to a person familiar 

According to Carman, the source of the outrage was a podcast called The Stew Peters Show, which, after hosting the patient’s wife, asked its listeners to call the hospital and apply “social pressure,” alleging that Mercy was treating the unvaccinated patient unfairly while pushing back against the idea that a Covid-19 vaccine could have helped with severe illness from the virus.

This happened at a time when Mercy was dealing with one of the pandemic’s worst surges of Covid-19 in the state. All beds at Mercy’s intensive care unit were in use back then, according to USA Today’s network of local newspapers.

Then, in another episode of the podcast, Peters called medical staff a “coronavirus death cult” and encouraged listeners to “flood” a Virginia hospital’s phone lines. During a third episode in January, he called a pediatrician a “murderous tyrant” while simultaneously promoting an unproven “Z-Stack Protocol”  to protect against Covid-19 vaccines that become “self-spreading bioweapons threatening the purebloods."

This podcast is distributed through major podcast platforms such as  Apple and Google. The irony here is that conservative media and politicians toss around the "fake news" barb at legitimate media outlets when those outlets are the only ones apparently doing fact checking and ensuring that their sources are truthful, accurate, and trusted.

Have these news organizations fallen short of that goal? Yes, but when they do, it’s big news, especially in the conservative media ecosystem.

But conservative podcasts like Steve Bannon and others can hide behind crackpot conspiracy theories, hate speech (Democrats should be shot), and self-actualizing cultural apparitions, from groomers infecting the schools to their kid being beaten in any high school sport because the opponent must be transgender (see Utah state championship).

Somehow, conservative podcasts like this Peters podcast have decided that fact checking and witness statements based on verifiable information are no longer necessary. Now, anyone who comes on the show with any wild theory is instantly credible because it fits their political narrative. 

Former president Trump, when cornered on one of his copious lies, always uses the same safety valve response. "Somebody told me."

You don't have to be a trained journalist to behave like one. Facebook posts are not truth. They're conjecture at best and wild, unsubstantiated accusations to curry political favor at worst. Yet, Facebook posts pass the smell test for many conservatives if those posts reinforce their world view.

Remember the torrent of June 2020 social media posts about busloads of Antifa showing up at Klamath Falls, Oregon. Never happened, No Antifa. No buses. A "nothing" burger fueled by unsubstantiated statements. People wanted so desperately to believe.

Check out this Jon Stewart interview with the Arkansas Attorney General, who pulls facts out of the air without even the semblance of verification. When Stewart calls her on her fictitious stats, the woman was not able to identify one source for her support for the ban on gender-affirming care.

Even Spotify, whose content oversight was practically non-existent, recently acquired Dublin, Ireland-based Kinzen, a global leader in protecting online communities from harmful content. Kinzen will analyze "potential harmful content and hate speech" across audio content in various languages and dialects. 

We've entered the twilight zone where the few newspapers left and broadcast networks news departments must work hard for accuracy, because to neglect that step leaves their organization vulnerable to legal action and financial penalties. 

By contrast, most of Fox News is in the "entertainment" division and as such is not considered a news source -- except, of course, to loyal viewers who swear by every bit of disinformation they spew. In fact, Fox News has won numerous lawsuits by convincing a judge that no reasonable person would believe their rhetoric.  

For example, former Playboy model Karen McDougal lost her 2020 defamation case against Fox News because the judge ruled that, "no reasonable viewer would take the network's prime-time host Tucker Carlson seriously."

Scary, right? A federal judge concludes that no reasonable person would believe Tucker Carlson and his ilk and yet millions do with no smoking gun, which is factual evidence.

Let's return to the Stew Peters podcast. Let's try to give him the benefit of the doubt. A patient's wife is a guest on his show and makes accusations about her husband's care. That could be factual, if anyone had bothered to check. His lack of care because he's unvaccinated is an opinion that perhaps could even be factual if again anyone had bothered to do any fact checking and interviews to substantiate her claim. 

Why didn't Peters conduct an investigation? Maybe he did and hasn't released the facts. More than likely, he knew that he didn't need facts. He just needed to make statements that his listeners wanted to believe. And they would. And did, based on the harassing phone calls Mercy Hospital received.

Misinformation and disinformation thrive and reproduce like spotted lanternflys because people want to believe. It's confirmation bias run wild. And that applies to both spectrums of the political landscape. 

Podcasting is such a promising medium. It would be a tragedy for it to fall victim to misinformation monsters who spawn wild conspiracy theories about bioweapons in vaccines, Italian satellites beaming up votes, or, when all else fails, assign blame to the deep state. No one can prove you wrong!

It's time for podcast networks, podcast hosting platforms, and listeners to jettison these purveyors of lies and demand some accountability. 

"Censorship is not hiding information from you. No, it's flooding you with enormous amounts of misinformation and irrelevant information until you can longer decipher the truth."