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A couple dozen people gathered recently in an elegant Kalorama backyard to fête “The Death of Truth,” Steven Brill’s new book about how bad information on the internet is polarizing the world.

Truth was not dead in this backyard, here among the servers filling wine glasses and restocking the platter of mini lobster rolls. “I trust institutions,” the veteran journalist told the typical Washington book party crowd of journalists, political staffers, communications consultants. “This isn’t a problem for the people who are assembled here.”

The issue was other people. Brill had in mind people like Dustin Thompson, a Columbus, Ohio, man who grew up middle class, graduated from Ohio State, and worked in the pest control industry until he lost his job during the pandemic, at which point he spent a lot of time at home, online.

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“Long story short,” Brill told his book party guests, “by January 6, he was in the Capitol wearing a bulletproof vest and wielding a coatrack as a weapon.”

Brill, 73, entered the journalism industry in its energized post-Watergate years and emerged as a serial entrepreneur. He founded the American Lawyer magazine in 1979 and Court TV a decade later, which treated law not merely as a profession but as a business and as entertainment. In the late 1990s, Brill made media itself the focus for his next start-up, founding Brill’s Content, a glossy monthly devoted to media analysis and criticism, its debut issue attempting to unmask the secret sources behind Washington coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

The magazine folded after a couple years — Brill said it was hard to find advertisers — and his next few start-ups, which aimed to capitalize on the digital publishing revolution, were less successful. In 2018, he co-founded NewsGuard, a company that assigns credibility ratings to websites to help brands decide where to spend their online advertising dollars.

How’s everyone doing? Using what the company touts as proudly apolitical criteria, NewsGuard scored Fox News at 69.5, Breitbart scored 49.5, the New Republic 92.5, Mother Jones scored 69.5, The Washington Post received a 100. NewsGuard recently downgraded the New York Times’s credibility score from a perfect 100 to 87.5 — not because its explosive reporting on sexual violence during Hamas’s attack on Israel came under sharp scrutiny and prompted questions about editorial process and ideological bias — but because it doesn’t handle “the difference between news and opinion responsibly.”

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In a statement, a spokesperson for the Times said “our news and opinion coverage are now, and have always been, clearly presented as distinct.” Brill remains concerned.

“The thing they're not grasping,” he said in a phone call after the book party, “is that so much of their opinion, like the 1619 Project, is not labeled as opinion.”

News and opinion, facts and truth, are simple matters for Brill, scorable, living comfortably outside of political processes. He recalled being on a panel with the managing editor of a now-defunct local news website in D.C. dedicated to the intersection of politics and the Black community, who he said repeatedly referred to “her” truth.

“It started to really p--- me off,” he said. “I finally asked, ‘What are you talking about your truth? It’s not your truth, it’s not my truth, it’s the truth.’”

Brill’s book attributes the death of this singular truth to the rise of misinformation on the internet. Speaking at the book event, Brill explained that someone like Thompson was “susceptible” to it because of his circumstances and then “really honestly believed” that the election had been stolen.

“These mass broadcasters of misinformation and disinformation … are clearly what pushed Thompson to leave Columbus and storm the Capitol,” Brill writes. “Why else would he have not believed the election results?”

But did Thompson pick up the coatrack because of a bad media diet? Or did he have a bad media diet because it was embedded in a set of political commitments that he was willing to defend with a coatrack?

That’s how Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, an associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown who has written critically about identity politics, frames the discussion. Professing to believe certain things, like the Earth is flat, he said, is a way to identify as a certain kind of person.

“What people are doing when they contest the truth and falsity of narratives coming from their political or cultural opponents is opposing those people,” he said in an interview. “They’re not really taking truth stances in a conventional way.”

Táíwò agrees that the loss of trust in institutions is a problem, but questions what it means to say someone is “susceptible” to misinformation.

“Here’s misinformation: Pop-Tarts are filled with nacho cheese,” he said. “Does losing your job make you susceptible to that particular falsity? No, losing your job makes you susceptible to particular kinds of false narratives — ones that offer you an explanation, and maybe a politically convenient set of cathartic emotional targets.”

These narratives, Táíwò notes, are often rooted in class antagonism and racism. But in his book, Brill addresses this at a run — noting that the largely White Jan. 6 participants were “most likely to come from counties where the non-White population had grown and the percentages of Whites living there had declined” — before returning to examinations of the “media diets” that influenced them.

The book, published in June, picks up a narrative that’s become something akin to liberal gospel since 2016: Bad information online is eroding trust in institutions and polarizing the world. It’s an argument that has birthed cottage industries of think tanks, nonprofits and media fact-checking operations that seek to counter disinformation — all in hopes of cleaning up the internet and bringing truth back to life.

Brill offers what he calls “practical solutions” — making it easier to sue tech companies for the false content posted on their platforms, waging legal campaigns against social media companies for violating their own terms of service, banning anonymous posting online and funding media literacy programs.

Táíwò is all in favor of making reliable information more available to people, especially in news deserts. But he doubts that “we’re a few true news articles away from ameliorating” the information crisis.

“When there are deep political divides, people will gravitate toward — will demand, in an economic sense — the kinds of narratives that cohere with their preexisting worldview,” he said. “I think the solutions would have to address the underlying resentments.”

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Brill acknowledged that many factors contribute to the information crisis, not just the scourge of Bad Media. “That’s why the last section of my book is about ending partisan primaries,” he said.

As a lifelong journalist and media entrepreneur, Brill possesses the rationalism of the former and the certainty of the latter that facts are what move the world. Sure, maybe we need to tweak the political system to encourage moderation and compromise and “restore the center,” as he puts it in his book. But maybe after a career spent thinking about media, analyzing and profiting from media, you’d be inclined to think the problem had to be media as well.

That perspective seemed to be shared in the Kalorama backyard. An event planner pondered buying a copy of Brill’s book for her Trump-supporting family member. A Politico reporter declared her faith in institutions. An executive from Semafor — a media start-up with an aim of overcoming polarization — handed out business cards. They were all in agreement with the information they had just heard. Maybe they were susceptible to it.

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