Kate, Katie, and our losing war on disinformation | Will Bunch Newsletter

There’ve been maybe a dozen true “holy you-know-what” moments in my lifetime, and Monday marked the fourth anniversary of one of them: the night when Tom Hanks announced he had the novel coronavirus (the name “COVID-19″ was still unborn), the NBA suspended all its games, and Donald Trump gave a typically muddled speech that made me wonder if a family member traveling in Iceland would ever be allowed to come home. Remember what March 11, 2020, felt like the next time a politician asks if you were better off four years ago.

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I know you’re not supposed to say this in 2024 and be taken seriously as a journalist, but I still have kind of a thing for conspiracy theories. When your very first political memory is the JFK assassination and you came of age during Watergate, it’s hard not to be suspicious of the official government story. I do get more discriminating as I get older, and so the low rumble of rumor about Britain’s Catherine, Princess of Wales — or, the Photoshop artist formerly known as Kate Middleton — and her absence from public view since Christmastime wasn’t doing it for me.

Until just after 6 p.m. Sunday night.

At first there were bizarre posts on X/Twitter that the Associated Press, Reuters, and other top news agencies were spiking a just-released-by-Kensington-Palace photo, purported to show the princess and her three kids celebrating British Mother’s Day, because they were concerned that the picture had been “manipulated.” I got hooked on the story.

What started as a royal family spin-control operation — posting the photo on Instagram with a perky note from “C” (for Catherine) and the seeming goal of quieting rumors that have grown louder the longer that Kate, said to have undergone abdominal surgery in January, has avoided the public eye — instead spiraled madly out of control.

Sunday night, much of America had one eye on the Oscars and the other on viral tweets that cropped and analyzed the tiny details of the clearly altered photograph as it were the UK version of the Zapruder film. Indeed, who needs the grassy knoll or “the umbrella man” when you can obsess over why the photo shows daughter Princess Charlotte with one high-heeled shoe and one flat, or the lack of continuity with her sweater and skirt, or the mismatched pattern of Prince Louis’ sweater or his bizarrely contorted finger, or at least a half-dozen other crazy clues of inauthenticity. Not to mention why Kate wasn’t wearing a wedding ring in a shot supposedly snapped by her husband Prince William, next in line to the throne.

But wait, on Tuesday there was an explanation, as Kate returned to Instagram to apologize and explain, “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing.” Sure. I mean, like so many amateur neuroscientists, I do occasionally experiment with brain surgery. OK, that last sentence was ridiculous, but only slightly less so than the new palace PR. Instead, the weird patterns and alien-bent fingers have all the hallmarks of AI, or artificial intelligence.

That’s the reason I’m writing about this, and not my newfound prurient interest in a royal scandal (well ... mostly not.) Because this beyond-strange story feels like the big moment that experts have been warning about for years, when the 21st century gusher of disinformation grows so insidious and so toxic that the masses truly do not know what, or who, they can believe anymore. It was less than a decade ago that the term “fake news” was coined to describe teens in a Macedonian basement scamming pennies from made-up news articles.

Now, the computer-generated fake calls are coming from inside the palace. Or inside the U.S. Senate.

Our modern world of runaway disinformation — from “flooding the zone” with garbage to Russia’s fake American news sites to the death of authority and the rise of rampant racism and misogyny on Elon Musk’s X — has rapidly devolved to the point when everything becomes so unbelievable that public officials are hoping that you’ll believe anything.

It feels like no accident that Kate Middleton’s photo doctoring unraveled on the same day that Alabama Sen. Katie Britt’s widely watched — and widely mocked — response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address also fell apart, in equally spectacular fashion. Indeed, all the hullabaloo about Britt’s bizarre horror-movie delivery from a creepy kitchen backdrop obscured, for a time, the more salient fact that the centerpiece of her speech to the nation was a lie. (Yes, it’s been a rough week for the Katies, or as one internet wag called the besieged women, “the Britts.”)

Britt’s central anecdote aimed to tear down Biden’s border policies with the teary story of her personal meeting with a woman who’d been sex trafficked by smugglers bringing her to the United States during this moment of surging migration. Thanks to fact-checking by independent journalist and author, Jonathan M. Katz, we now know that while the woman was real, the supposed emotional meeting was just a widely attended news conference, and the key details were just wrong. It’s not clear that the assaults on this woman that occurred in Mexico have anything to do with border policies, and anyway they happened in the 2000s when George W. Bush was president.

Simply put, Biden had zero to do with this women’s suffering. There ought to be serious consequences for a U.S. senator so blatantly lying to the American people in such a high-profile setting — maybe even an ethics investigation. But that’s not how we roll, not in 2020s America. Instead, Britt went on America’s Disinformation Clearinghouse, a.k.a. the Fox News Channel, to explain her old lie about Biden by telling a new one.

Increasingly, it’s clear that our 2024 presidential election is, indeed, a choice between democracy or dictatorship. And now the increasing mountain of fake news, fake pictures, AI deepfakes, and the Steve Bannon-esque mound of baloney is tipping the scales toward autocracy. The old days of political lying to win over the public, like LBJ’s famous “credibility gap,” have become quaint. The goal of today’s strongmen, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or his best buddy Donald Trump, is to obliterate the truth so that nothing matters anymore. And they are winning.

The confluence of Britain’s royal “photoshopping” and Britt’s bald-faced lie ― which, press critics noted, went undetected in large newsrooms like the New York Times and Washington Post for a couple of days ―should be seen as an urgent warning to elite U.S. journalism. It’s time to invest a lot more resources in real-time fact checking and in fighting a disinformation war that looks pretty one-sided right now, and a lot less on narratives about Biden’s favorite four-letter words or Trump’s promised “pivot to the issues” that never seems to come.

Look, I have no idea what happened to Kate or why she’s been laying low these days — maybe it’s something trivial, or maybe this finally brings down the monarchy. But I do know that it matters when society’s big-shots — whether it’s a politician or a president or a princess — create an increasingly fictional world where facts are drowning in a sea of lies. Maybe democracy doesn’t die in darkness, but with a few dozen photo edits.

Question: Curious about your thoughts on Saquon [Barkley, the Eagles’ new main running back signed on Monday]. — Denis McDowell (@mcdowell_is) via X/Twitter

Answer: Well, Denis, I do feel bad taking the superstar player away from my dad’s beloved New York Giants — but not that bad, because I like this move a lot. I’m aware of the risks in signing a running back — even a two-time All-Pro who’s both a slashing runner and a skilled pass receiver — at age 27, when many top rushers begin to slide downhill. But what I really like about Barkley, Lehigh Valley high schooler and Penn State icon, coming here is that it shows that the Eagles’ brain trust is willing to try something different. Howie Roseman and Co. have historically devalued the running back position, but adding Barkley to the backfield could give QB Jalen Hurts a whole new look in what should be a bounce-back year. I am all in.

I expected and got quite a few responses to last week’s question about whether readers plan to vote for renegade Democratic Sen. John Fetterman the next time around. His rabid pro-Israel perspective on the Middle East war seems to have alienated many readers, and for a few folks it’s a political death sentence. Asks Matthew Sullivan: “What young liberal or leftist wants to knock doors for politicians who are complicit in the mass death of innocents?” But others liked his positions on other issues, or just like having an iconoclast on Capitol Hill. “I appreciate that he has a mind and chooses what to do and say,” Brian Donnelley wrote. “If the boot-lickers on the right have an overriding moral fault, it is in not thinking for themselves.”

📮This week’s question: The House is voting this week on a bill aimed at either forcing a sale of TikTok or banning the wildly popular app because of national security fears over its Chinese ownership. But should we ban TikTok? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “TikTok” in the subject line.

New York officials ought to listen to themselves more often. Early last week, New York City’s police-obsessed ex-cop mayor, Eric Adams, did a victory lap celebrating the Big Apple’s latest stats. “Overall crime is down,” Adams crowed. “Double-digit decreases in subway crime in February 2024.” But apparently New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul — like Adams, a Democrat — didn’t get the memo. Just 24 hours later, Hochul made the stunning decision to send 750 National Guard troops into the New York subway system, to make a statement about safety as they aid city police in opening the bags of random passengers. Sending in the troops was just part of a draconian plan by Hochul that also calls for banning violent offenders from riding the rails for three years. New York’s accidental governor, who so far has put the conservative in “conservaDem,” didn’t want to entertain questions about the move, pegged to a few TV-sensational crimes and a blip in attacks on transit workers.

“I’m not here today to talk to you about numbers and tell you stats and statistics about what’s going up and what’s going down,” the governor said at a news conference. “I’m here to take action.” No matter that serious crime in the New York subways has dropped a remarkable 63% since 1997. Hochul went on to say that stories about specific violent crimes have a “psychological impact” on straphangers — as if the sight of camouflaged soldiers brandishing long guns (banned after a couple of days) on their morning commute to work wouldn’t have an even worse impact.

The governor of this region’s largest state is sending in the troops based on vibes. But history has shown again and again — most famously in Wilmington after the unrest that followed 1968′s MLK assassination, when a military occupation dragged on for more than nine months — that mostly bad things happen when soldiers are asked to become cops.

The Hochul maneuvers come at a time when many of us have been banging the drum that a Donald Trump presidency would bring aspects of fascism, including plans for calling up the military to put down Inauguration Day protests or sending troops into large, Democrat-run cities to fight crime. Now it turns out we should have been worrying about Democrats like Hochul who are more than happy to impose a police state without bothering to wait for the GOP. The dollars that New York is wasting on this military show-of-force could have addressed some of the quality-of-life problems, like Adams’ cuts to libraries and other public services — the deficits that actually make cities less safe in the long run. Maybe some day we’ll elect politicians with courage, who don’t hide behind M-16s.

Have you ever looked back on something you wrote and cringed? On this date seven years ago, I was enthralled by the notion of a “woke Bob Casey” — the notion that the dullest senator on Capitol Hill for his first decade in office had found his (still slightly somnambulant) voice in taking on then-new President Donald Trump. On March 11, 2017, I praised Pennsylvania’s senior senator as a man who had “relentlessly criticized and hectored the new president and his team over everything from Team Trump’s ties to Russia to cutting billionaires’ taxes while ‘decimating’ health care.” Since then, Casey toned down that hectoring, even as he did become a reliable liberal vote. But the term “woke” has since been hijacked by ill-meaning conservatives, and some progressives — like the folks at the William Way Center — might question how “woke” Casey ever got. Read the piece — “How America’s dullest senator became Woke Bob Casey” — and decide for yourself.

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