Over the past two years, it has proven to be clear that misinformation is extremely dangerous. Misinformation has wormed its way into many places by making its way through different social media platforms, and that is a problem worth your concern. However, that is not the subject of this article. In recent years, misinformation regarding elections has wreaked havoc on democracy. It has continued from helping incite the Capitol Insurrection on January 6, 2021, all the way to conspiracy theories about fuel that circulate today. All of that being said, social media misinformation involving Joe Biden is nothing new.
However, the thing that is most concerning is the continued escalation and desensitization that the prevalence of misinformation and disinformation is bringing. This is not about more disinformation involving Jan. 6, nor is it about the election. Last week, Fox News was found to have published video clips that were edited to make President Biden look lost and imply that he is unfit to do his job as president. Those video clips allowed Tucker Carlson to do a segment where he uses a graphic that shows former President Obama wearing a crown, and Laura Ingraham played another deceptively edited clip on her show. But this is not the first time, and will most likely not be the last time, that Fox News has run edited video clips of President Biden, considering how last November they ran clips that were edited to make him look racist. And hopefully, nobody remembers the time that Fox News photoshopped a man with a gun into pictures of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone during the summer of 2020. Lambasting Fox News for their lack of ethics is nothing new.
The clips that Fox News ran came from a Twitter account called RNC Research, and the account’s bio clearly states that it is managed by the Republican National Committee. The link in the account’s bio directs users to the GOP’s research articles, which mostly seem aimed at lambasting President Biden rather than providing any real solutions to the problems that they blame on the President. While they could be proposing policy changes that would help stop inflation, they use their research articles to lambast the president rather than actually provide viable solutions. Instead of proposing policies that would help their voters, they spend their time and money editing videos of the President in order to make him look unfit for office. This does not come as a surprise, but it shows how American politics as a whole has changed over the past five years, and not for the better. America has moved past polarization into something worse. Something where one side’s goal is not to govern, but to make sure that they do everything in their power to prevent the other side not just from governing effectively, but from governing at all.
