![]() ![]() On Wednesday, October 22, this was the subject of more than a hundred newspaper stories. The story had amazing specificity: the date of the accident (just ten weeks after the last concert), the manner of death (decapitation) the clues were everywhere, from stray comments on or lyrics in some songs (John Lennon does seem to say “I buried Paul” just after “Strawberry Fields Forever,” apparently because he worried he had played over the work of his bandmate on that take) to other tracks that needed to be played backward. In October 1969, the western world was swept by a story that Paul McCartney had died in an automobile accident three years earlier, been secretly replaced by a double chosen in a lookalike contest, and that clues to this were strewn throughout recent Beatles albums. How could we think about disinformation outside the context of our current political polarization? Then I remembered: “Paul is Dead.” Part of the challenge in understanding this, as people are increasingly recognizing, stems from the fact that an enormously disproportionate amount of the nonsense is coming from one side of the political spectrum. Unsatisfying because significant efforts, private and public, in the press and by government, to expose and refute the nonsense doesn’t seem to be slowing the proliferation. Fashionable because the stuff seems to be proliferating, among other things inhibiting the vaccinations we need to stem the pandemic, and bolstering claims that the clear loser of the last presidential election somehow didn’t lose at all. It’s become both fashionable and unsatisfying to worry about disinformation and misinformation.
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