How Do You Know
What's True?
That's the premise behind "Disinformation" - with award-winning Evergreen host Paul Brandus. Get ready for amazing stories - war, espionage, corruption, elections, and assorted trickery showing how false information is turning our world inside out - and what we can do about it. A co-production of Evergreen and Emergent Risk International.
The Eye of The Hurricane - Disinformation During A Climate Crisis
| S:2 E:7"... this is a Doom Loop: authorities screw up, people die, trust is eroded."
In this podcast episode, host Paul Brandus discusses the dangerous spread of false narratives during natural disasters and crises. He highlights the devastating impact of Hurricane Adelia on Cedar Key, Florida, and the disinformation that followed, causing confusion and undermining trust in authorities. He also discusses the phenomenon of disinformation during other crises, such as wildfires and hurricanes, including Hurricane Katrina. Just as the erosion of our environment during a climate crisis threatens our physical world, the erosion of faith in public institutions during these events can be just as damaging, and sometimes longer lasting. Brandus and his guests explore the breakdown of communication and trust that occurred during Katrina and how it continues to affect public perception. The episode emphasizes the importance of reliable sources of information and the challenges of navigating the flood of information in a crisis. Social media also plays a role in disseminating both accurate and inaccurate information during emergencies.
[00:02:43] Fact-checking and disinformation.
[00:05:26] Disinformation during crises.
[00:12:57] Communications breakdown during Hurricane Katrina.
[00:13:24] Erosion of public trust.
[00:18:10] Social media in crisis situations.
Got questions, comments or ideas or an example of disinformation you'd like us to check out? Send them to [email protected]. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Special thanks to our guest Ashley Goosman, founder of Disaster Empire, CEO of Emergent Risk International Meredith Wilson, our sound designer and editor Noah Foutz, audio engineer Nathan Corson, and executive producers Michael DeAloia and Gerardo Orlando. Thanks so much for listening.
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00:05 clip audio Our entire downtown is underwater. Part of a whole hotel just broke apart and went into the Gulf.
00:12 Paul Brandus Michael Bobbitt, a resident of Cedar Key, Florida, talking to the BBC about Hurricane Adelia, the storm's wet and windy punch devastating his town in late August.
00:24 clip audio It's it's real, real bad.
00:26 Paul Brandus Also real, real bad is the fact
that some people, for various reasons, choose to take advantage of a
natural disaster like a hurricane to spread false narratives about it.
At the very moment when people in harm's way need reliable, trustworthy
information, they could be getting exactly the opposite. False
narratives deliberately designed to perhaps scare, sow confusion,
undermine trust in government and other authorities. There is another
word for this sort of appalling activity, disinformation. I'm Paul
Brandus, and that's the name of this award-winning podcast series,
Disinformation. As usual, I'll be joined by Meredith Wilson, Chief
Executive Officer of Emergent Risk International, a global risk advisory
firm.
01:26 clip audio -- Let's go! --
01:38 Paul Brandus A life or death moment in Maui as three men tried to escape the recent fires there. The panic clearly evident in their voices. The video, by the way, showing flames towering just yards from their vehicle. The cause of the disaster remains under investigation, but Why let that stop some irresponsible citizens from claiming otherwise? Even as the fires blazed, claims sprouted on social media saying that they were caused by a, quote, directed energy weapon, in other words, a laser. There were even photos. But fact checkers at the Associated Press quickly established that one photo was actually A, the launch of a SpaceX rocket, B, from a California military base 3,000 miles away, and C, five years ago. The AP said the other photo showed A, a flare from a controlled burn at an oil refinery, B, in Ohio, and C, also in 2018. But the problem with fact-checking is that it's always too late. The phony claims racked up millions of views anyway, once again proving Mark Twain's purported claim that, quote, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. Take Hurricane Harvey back in 2017. Remember that one? A Category 4 monster that tore through Louisiana and Texas, putting much of Houston, the country's fourth biggest city, under as much as 30 inches of water. Some 100 people were killed, the damage estimated at around $125 billion. In circumstances like that, and human nature being what it is, it can be difficult, Meredith Wilson says, to know what is true and what is not.
03:37 Meredith Wilson Information abhors a vacuum. And it's, you know, especially in the time of crisis, people are always looking for a guiding light. And whether it's, you know, what they need to know next or it's simply for reassurance that, you know, things are going to be okay. They're always looking for information and particularly the people outside of the crisis are also looking for information. Wow, something bad happened, you know, and so a lot of times they'll grab on to the first thing they see. Sometimes it is, you know, I remember during Hurricane Ike, and subsequent hurricanes like Harvey, we saw things like sharks swimming down I-10 and waves that were up below the traffic signs. And I remember looking at them and going, wow, that's crazy. But there was so much craziness going on, too, that was real, like cows going down the main street of Houston. And that was real. So part of it is separating fact from fiction because things are so crazy. But a lot of it is people looking for leadership and looking for good information on which to make decisions to. And so sometimes in the absence of that, or in the absence of the ability to access that, people find themselves falling for things that just simply aren't true.
05:09 Paul Brandus Ashley Goosman is founder of Disaster Empire, a two-decade veteran on subjects like business resilience and crisis communications. I asked her, why does disinformation rear its ugly head during a crisis?
05:26 Ashley Goosman Well, I think there are a lot of reasons for that. And I think I'll start with from a crisis management perspective and being part of crisis teams, emergency management teams, and leading them for close to 20 years now. I think a lot of it has to do with The challenge of disasters right the disaster environment, as you will, or the crisis environment where starting off with you know there is information coming at a crisis team from many, many perspectives and leadership and companies or. leadership in public organizations as well, government officials. And I think in that, I'll call it kind of the fog of war, which I think is a relatable term for a lot of people, even if you haven't been in the military. There is, it's hard to vet that information. And I think one of the greatest challenges for those of us in the profession, either providing recommendations or making decisions in a crisis event, is really being able to filter through that information to understand what's real.
06:36 Paul Brandus And that's the challenge, determining what's real. Even in normal times when everything's okay, we're bombarded with information. TV, radio, newspapers, websites, social media, text messages, on and on and on. It's just too much. As I often do, I want to emphasize the difference here between misinformation, which can be an honest, inadvertent mistake, and disinformation, which is the deliberate manufacturing and distribution of false information, doctored photos, audio, and so forth, in a malicious attempt to confuse us, sow distrust in government, distrust in media, and so forth. And yet, from the standpoint of people consuming that information, whether an honest mistake or something more malicious, the net effect sometimes can be quite similar. Goosman says that trust in media is a particularly vexing problem, more from our conversation. Now, put yourself in the shoes of just not necessarily a company, Ashley, but just to say a person at home, an ordinary person, and they know a storm is coming. They distrust the media. They don't know where to turn from an individual standpoint. Folks are bombarded with all kinds of information. How do they know what to trust these days when there's distrust of media? A lot of stuff that comes out, as you say, is not even accurate. What is an individual to do in a case like that?
08:11 Ashley Goosman I think that's challenging. My best recommendations is to go to the media sources that you, you trust the most. Right. And I think a lot of that ends up being local. information. A lot of our local authorities do work with vetted sources at the government level. So whether that's NOAA, right, for weather information, or whether that's, you know, getting through FEMA, I think it's PAWS, or there's a variation of that, right, where you're getting some information that is vetted. So usually that's coming through your local authorities. They have the best, typically, on-the-ground information that is available. I think those can be helpful. I think there are good systems in place. I know that we've worked with utilities right over the last several years to get out tornado alerts and and other those sources of information. But I think the other piece that I would suggest to an individual person is to do your research, to listen to several sources of information, and then try to understand what's coming through and what is maybe most consistent, and go from there.
09:25 Paul Brandus Let's take a short break. More in just a moment.
Welcome back that sound from Hurricane Katrina back in 2005, an NBC camera crew hunkering down in a hotel to capture powerful images and sounds of mother nature at her worst. Unfortunately, there have been plenty of devastating storms, their names dotting the history books over the years. Camille, Andrew, Michael, Ian. I mentioned Harvey earlier. Just two weeks ago, there was Lee. But Katrina is still regarded as the mother of all hurricanes, in modern times at least. It was a monstrous storm that killed more than 1,800 people and caused as much as $145 billion in damages. Meredith Wilson says what compounded the tragedy of Katrina was a communications breakdown before, during and after the storm slammed into Louisiana, Mississippi and other parts of the Gulf Coast.12:57 Meredith Wilson Hurricane Katrina actually was a probably a much more devastating example of how that can go so wrong. Right. And I don't remember I don't know if you remember, but, you know, back in 2005, part of the problem was that the local authorities did not notify people in time that it was coming. And they weren't able to get out because not everyone could just get in their car and go. A lot of them require actual buses to evacuate or whatever. And that was a really good example of how a failure of local information then leads to a crisis where people die.
13:35 Paul Brandus And as if Katrina's communications breakdown wasn't bad enough, among its after effects, Meredith says, was an erosion of public trust, which lingers to this day.
13:46 Meredith Wilson In the aftermath of situations like that, people lose trust, too. And once they lose trust, it's really hard to gain it back. And, you know, and even in that case, you know, the failures were across the board. It was local authorities, it was federal authorities. And, you know, it took months of remediation just to get things to a, you know, state of normal again, because there were so many failures across the board. But I'm sure that a lot of people that lived through that will really struggle to trust local authorities again for a very long time. And once that happens, that's where the disinformation comes in, right? That's where you start to get people saying, well, I don't trust that politician. We saw this very clearly during the pandemic, right? When those kind of scary days right before we declared a state of emergency, when we started the real lockdown and everybody had to stay home, you saw very clearly the politicians people trusted and the politicians they didn't really impacted what they did in those days, whether they wore masks, whether they didn't wear masks, whether they actually stayed home, whether they ignored lockdown. Those kinds of things impacted what they did and quite likely impacted their health in the aftermath of that.
15:03 Paul Brandus You know, when you think about it, this is a doom loop. Authorities screw up, people die, trust is eroded. And when the next crisis comes along, citizens, some of them anyway, will be less willing to listen to the authorities. Meredith calls this a political problem.
15:20 Meredith Wilson You know, I think it, you know, it's political in that this is where the trust factor comes in. And so your politicians, for better or worse, are often in charge of response to these things or they are the figurehead. They are the person who's speaking about it. And the fact of the matter is that in this country and in most countries now, we are so fragmented and so divided that people are unwilling to place their trust in politicians that they don't like or that don't identify with their party. And we've done this to ourselves. There was a time where this was not the case. But in the last 20, 30 years, it really has become a if I don't trust you, I'm not going to do what you say sort of situation, or I'm going to trust my own sources. Why it's political, I guess that's because politics are what lead our society, but it is painfully obvious when we have a crisis and we don't respond well because of it.
16:29 Paul Brandus Like I said, a doom loop. The bonds of trust break down, the cycle repeats. Earlier, Ashley Goosman mentioned the fog of war. I'd like to come back to that for a minute. When a disaster is unfolding, there are lots of variables. Stuff can be happening in numerous places. It's not reasonable for someone to presume that they're going to get the full picture at any given time. This adds to the challenge of communicating with the public in a fast-moving crisis. Goosman says that social media, which allows anyone to say anything, can add to this fog, but it can also play a constructive role as well.
17:10 Ashley Goosman There were only several, you know, media outlets when I was growing up, and those are the ones NBC, ABC, I think we all know what those were. PBS, you know, you know, those were the ones that you knew, and they were, besides the print media, That's what you had to go to, you know, I think, which is why even back then you saw the rise of people listening to police scanners, right? Because that was a modality so that they could get more information about what was happening in real time than getting that additional filter from, you know, journalists and from the media. So I think that was an early precursor to what we see today, which is people using various social media platforms. to share information. And I have to say there's some value to that as well, because there have been certain circumstances, and I'm thinking back to the earthquake in Haiti, where people were actually able to get information out about their own status and situation and reach out to an NGO like the American Red Cross directly at times. And it's not a laughing matter, but that was the best and fastest venue for them to get assistance versus going through any type of infrastructure because the infrastructure had failed. So I think that is something to consider as well.
18:24 Paul Brandus There will be more hurricanes, of course. There will be tornadoes and wildfires. And those so-called hundred-year floods seem to happen a lot more often than that. There will also be earthquakes. We've been hearing for years that California is overdue for what some call the big one, a major rupture of the fabled San Andreas Fault, parts of which seismologists tell us have not ruptured in over 200 years. We don't know when these crises will occur or, in most cases, where. We do know, however, that dealing with them, minimizing the loss of life and property, will result in no small part from just how well authorities and experts communicate with the public and the degree to which that public is inclined to trust them. Have a tip, idea, or an example of disinformation you'd like us to check out? Contact me personally, pbrandus at gmail.com. That's P-B-R-A-N-D-U-S at gmail.com. Thanks to Ashley Goosman of Disaster Empire, sound from the BBC and NBC, our sound designer and editor Noah Fouts, audio engineer Nathan Corson, executive producers Michael Dealoia and Gerardo Orlando. And on behalf of Meredith Wilson, I'm Paul Brandus. Thanks so much for listening.
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