A persistent irony in the modern media is that the self-professed fighters of “disinformation” are often themselves the worst purveyors of disinformation.

Here’s just one small example, based on a publicly measurable statistic: Gallup released new data this week showing nearly 70 percent of Americans believe “transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender.” This marks an increase from the 62 percent who had said the same in 2021.

“Likewise,” Gallup noted, “fewer endorse transgender athletes being able to play on teams that match their current gender identity, 26 percent, down from 34 percent.”

But following the midterm elections, NBC News disinformation reporter Ben Collins, in spite of data available even then, suggested that Republicans underperformed because they sided with the popular position opposing trans-integrated sports. Or, as he put it, in his very biased formulation, “being cruel to children for no reason whatsoever.”

So we have wild speculation, contrary to available evidence, helping to create a narrative unmoored from reality. I’m pretty sure there’s a word for this sort of thing. 

There’s much more where this comes from. Collins tends to work hand-in-hand with another NBC News disinformation reporter named Brandy Zadrozny. Together, they have produced an impressive body of misinformation and disinformation in their capacity as the internet’s hall monitors.

Elsewhere, MSNBC legal analyst and self-described disinformation expert Barb McQuade has authored a book titled, “Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America.” McQuade, by the way, is one of the many Trump-era cable news “experts” who spent years hyping stories that went nowhere, most of which were based on likely falsehoods, and making major predictions that never came true.

She promised, for example, that the so-called Steele Dossier — a deeply flawed, error-riddled work of Democratic opposition research alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to steal the 2016 campaign — would prove “correct as facts emerge over time.”

The Steele Dossier was hopelessly sloppy and possibly itself the product of a Kremlin-backed disinformation campaign.

“Hey, Mueller,” McQuade said elsewhere, referring to the former FBI director then investigating the matter as special counsel. “Look over here. [Rachel Maddow] has found the collusion. Follow the sanctions. If this whole cable news thing doesn’t work out for you, Rachel, you have a real future in the FBI.”

Mueller’s investigation, which included 40 agents, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants and 500 witness interviews, could not “establish that the members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Anyway, we will know more about how “disinformation is sabotaging America” when McQuade’s book is published, since it will surely represent a solid example.

Another genre of “disinformation” reporting is the ironically incorrect disinformation “fact-check.” Here, the bungling doesn’t always come from the self-appointed saviors of truth on the internet. Sometimes, it comes in the middle of an innocuous news report.

In its coverage of U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty’s injunction barring federal officials from coordinating with social media companies to censor online speech, the New York Times spread disinformation in a rather crude attempt to discredit the judge. The story’s eighth paragraph stated that Doughty “has previously expressed little skepticism about debunked claims from vaccine skeptics,” and that in “one previous case, Judge Doughty accepted as fact the claim that ‘COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent transmission of the disease.'”

As I write, it is mid-2023. Surely, someone at the New York Times is aware by now that the COVID-19 vaccines do not, in fact, prevent transmission of the disease. Isn’t the paper of record spreading disinformation or misinformation by suggesting otherwise?

The disinformation, it turns out, really is coming from inside the house.

Becket Adams is a writer in Washington and program director for the National Journalism Center.