Back on Sept. 8, CBS Sunday Morning featured Celebrated Journalist Ted Koppel interviewing Yale Gadfly Lawyer Steven Brill about misinformation.

If you are not familiar with him despite his years of legal and political journalism, Brill has had a very long career of producing a wide variety of media. He founded Court TV, which oddly enough has become the very un-legal network TruTV. He created the magazine American Lawyer, which I am familiar with because a lawyer friend of mine called it “Us Magazine for Lawyers” given its kind of gossipy slant. His writing has appeared in just about any major news outlet you can think of. His most recent venture is a business that rates the reliability and honesty of any news outlet, Newsguard.

Misinformation is a worthy subject for an interview for such a person, but the execution of the segment by CBS left a lot to be desired. If you watch the video, the examples from the right are the usual suspects: Fox News, ridiculous right-wing lie mills like Before Its News, and so on. From the left, the examples included conspiracies about the first Trump assassination attempt (there was a second one yesterday, you may have heard). I get it, those are pretty reprehensible. But the others included:

• MSNBC’s Joy Reid, who is shown interviewing two people including respected economic Robert Reich
• MSNBC’s Ali Velshi
• MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell
• Non-profit news sources such as the Michigan Advance and the Pennsylvania Independent

To compare those folks with the far-right misinformation mills is ridiculous at best. For starters, the headlines in the left examples include things like Pete Buttigieg promoting Biden’s investments in infrastructure and in Ali Velshi’s case, Velshi simply stating what Project 2025 actually has in it. This is cast as the same as insane conspiracy theories such as claims that Tim Walz is banning Christians from teaching in public schools and James Comer on Newsmax declaring that the DEEP STATE colluded with the MAINSTREAM MEDIA to steal the election from Trump in 2020.

These are of course not comparable, and I want to highlight Comer, who is an elected official and the chair of the House Oversight Committee, because the examples that CBS gave were comparing apples with rotting oranges. First off, for God’s sake, Lawrence O’Donnell talking about Trump wanting to shut down MSNBC is not exactly something the Orange Nightmare has been shy about saying. It’s not really misinformation if you repeat what someone has promised to do. But I also want to point out the fact that Comer is an elected official.

A lefty TikTokker babbling about how the assassination of Trump was some “inside job” is not great! Especially if it reaches a lot of people. But it’s far less damaging than an elected official backing up the nonsense claims of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. And that is just a small example of the point I am making.

Misinformation from @leftydude49146 on TwitterX hits a lot differently than when it comes from elected officials. Because the right’s misinformation is mostly based on the kind of hate your worst racist relative spouts after downing several fingers of Jim Beam.

This includes Donald Trump and JD Vance, the most terrifyingly stupid major party presidential ticket in our history. The call is coming from inside the campaign, as it were. Instead of debunking dangerous myths like the outright lie that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets, it’s become part of their campaign platform. In fact, Vance shifted to claims that Haitians have caused a spike in HIV, something local health officials debunked. And by the way, we have reached the stage where Vance himself admits it’s all bullshit, but it’s NECESSARY bullshit to get people to listen about immigration, which is simply insane.

I can also point you to Adrastos’ Malaka of the Week, a batshit conspiracy theorist who is also now Trump’s closest campaign confidante.

So the argument here is not that there isn’t any misinformation on the left, but that the right’s version is much more prevalent and much more dangerous. We’ve seen it lead to an actual coup attempt and specific groups ranging from Haitians to trans people being targeted for harassment and violence. I don’t know of an actual example of left-leaning conspiracies leading to a college shutting down campus for a week like what is happening in Springfield. Nor can I think of a Democratic candidate for president, when being told his lies are hurting an entire community, just shrug and basically say “tough shit.”

Both-siding this is not just wrong, but it’s dangerous. We can’t give undecided voters permission to look at what Trump and Vance are saying and say “Well both sides are just as bad so that stuff doesn’t matter, maybe I’ll just vote for Trump.” The stakes are too high.

The last word goes to The Pixies.