When Misinformation Comes True

Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around.

The National Swine Registry had never heard of such a big pig.

There had been sizeable hogs, sure. And there were huge wild boars. But this report of a 12-foot, 1,000-pound “mutant” pig was something else.

Every facet of this hefty hoofed baconator was imposing: Its nine-inch tusks were a cross between scythes and hunting knives. Its unkept and matted hair clumped around his eyes, giving a dark and menacing stare. His mouth appeared to be covered in a perpetual foam, giving the air of a rabid and wild beast.

“His head was as big as a truck tire,” one awestruck hunter reported.

The town of Alapaha, Georgia, had been terrorized by the imposing presence of this “hog-zilla,” living in fear of his mean temper and sharp teeth. And then, they were saved. "Hog-zilla's reign of terror ended last September when veteran hunting guide Chris Griffin courageously shot the behemoth porker,” the report read.

Too big to cook or stuff, Griffin buried the chonker in the ground, erecting a simple headstone to mark where hogzilla lay. To confirm such a monumentous biological find, National Geographic had dispatched a team to review the impressive pork.

But there is no reason to let your guard down, the report continued. "The scary thing is there are others out there.”

It was a report so outrageous that most refused to believe it. Critics said that no such swine could exist, and still others accused purveyors of such a myth of being misinformation-peddlers. Newspapers had run a few stories about the freak of nature, but they qualified it with winky qualifiers like “supposedly.” They reported around the enormous find, detailing how the townsfolk had held a little festival celebrating the slaying of their mammoth tormentor. The serious journalists seemed to sniff at the idea that the simpletons would still believe in monsters.

The images of the humungous cochon had initially circulated through the internet, largely via emails that began FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:. This was 2005, and surfers of the world wide web knew enough then to know that the internet was full of fakes. But the legend’s improbability was only confirmed by this detailed reporting in the Weekly World News.

"HOG-ZILLA! Mutant 12-ft. pig killed in Georgia,” the headline screamed. The story, which featured interviews with a collection of locals who feared the pig, was sandwiched between slices of nonsense covered in mustard: “RICH MAN HAS GIANT NEEDLE MADE SO A CAMEL CAN PASS THROUGH THE EYE,” reads one. On the following page was a story about Osama bin Laden getting caught on a hot mic insulting his suicide bombers.

Weekly World News, you would know if you visited any grocery store checkout in North America between 1979 and 2007, was a satirical tabloid which made the National Enquirer look simultaneously more sane and more absurd.

The simple fact that hog-zilla appeared in the WWN’s pages was all the proof you needed that it couldn’t be true.

“Hogzilla is a phenomenon of the Internet,” Ian Frazier wrote in the New Yorker at the time. “Although he would have had a lively career in folklore even if he had existed long before.”¹

The trouble is, it was all true.

Or, true enough.

National Geographic really had travelled to Georgia to confirm the presence of the prodigious pig. They excavated the buried ham and confirmed that it was, in fact, massive — though not quite the half-ton the WWN promised. The National Geographic Society put him closer to 800 pounds and 8 feet. Still, impressive.

The hog’s unbelievable size was likely not gained from eating wayward townspeople. Scientists said he was, more likely, a kept hog — fattened in a pen, barely able to waddle his way to destruction.

While the WWN might have oversold the bacon, their premonition that more massive mammals were to come proved prescient: Hog Kong, discovered in the swamps in Florida, reportedly weighed in at over 1,100 pounds.

Frazier, the New Yorker correspondent, had confirmed the pig’s existence. In a feature about the state of the wild hog, he seemed sure these big pigs had more to say about America than this rare instance where the Weekly World News accidentally did some journalism.

“East Texas counties with chronic feral-hog problems went for [George W.] Bush at two-thirds margins and above,” Frazier wrote. “Berrien County, Georgia, the county of the storied (but probably not wild) Hogzilla, preferred Bush by 70 to 29 percent. Wild hogs seem to be everywhere that the red-state red can’t get any redder and starts to turn into a Confederate flag.”

In his home of New Jersey, Frazier wrote, they had neither feral hogs nor many Republicans. That, he wrote, worked just fine. “Every so often, though, I feel a vague curiosity about the other side of the mirror. Recently when that happened I set out to find some feral hogs.”

And so he does. And he discovers a world of wild hogs that make hog-zilla seem not so distant — a burgeoning world of feral pigs making claim to greater and greater swaths of rural America. Where once it was fairly limited to the deepest parts of the South, the pigs have ventured further and further north — keeping true to their weird correlation to conservative political ideology, they’ve even taken over part of New Hampshire.

Had the prospect of hog-zilla been unfairly written off because the northeastern liberal elite wouldn’t know a feral hog if they were being mauled by one?

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, we look at the rare times when misinformation ends up being true — or, at least, close to it — and ask ourselves: Why do we resist the giant hog?

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The Weekly World News was, despite its self-bestowed title of “the world’s only reliable news,” almost always hysterically made-up.

But not always.

Mental Floss went so far as to catalogue eight times WWN got it, more or less, right — either by reporting real events, like hog-zilla, or by conjuring a headline so stupid that it accurately predicted the future.

The occasional accurate(ish) article didn’t make up for all the coverage of the bat boy discovered in a West Virginia cave, or the fully-illustrated reportage that Dick Cheney was actually a cyborg, or the wonderful cheese of: "SEX-CRAZED UFO ABDUCTEE COMPLAINS: SPACE ALIENS ARE LOUSY LOVERS.” Weekly World News was misinformation by design, and the more real information it published, the more it risked hurting its brand.

But, speaking for myself, I love the wackiness of Weekly World News. Like so many kids of the 90s, I ran to the supermarket checkout aisle to leaf through its absurd arcanum before all of our groceries were scanned and it was time to leave. I was over the moon when Men In Black used WWN as a plot point in its 1997 debut (“Best investigative reporting on the planet. Read the New York Times if you want: They get lucky sometimes.”)

I go into this deep history of satire tabloid because it illustrates something about us, I think. We know it’s full of lies, we know that some people probably fall for it, and yet we love it. We, paradoxically, are rooting for something in it to be true. Because Weekly World News represents a future we want. It’s one where the unknown is more silly than scary, and things feel whimsical. Much like Art Bell’s midnight broadcasts from the high Nevada desert (Dispatch #51), it imagines a world beyond, underneath, and inside our own where things are just a bit stupider.

It’s a nice illustration of something I’ve been saying for awhile: Misinformation, broadly defined, is not an inherently bad thing. Our penchant for believing it is strangely human. And yet we’ve now declared war on misinformation. And in declaring war, we’ve become quite sectarian. Perhaps it’s time to relax just a bit.

Take, for example, the question around the origins of COVID-19.

Readers of this newsletter will know that I’m not a big fan of the theory that the coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab. Both the science and the circumstantial evidence backs up the idea that COVID-19 originated in the bat-lousy caves of southern China and underwent a series of mutations as it infected different mammals before finally spilling over to humans and creating its first superspreader event at a wet market in Wuhan.

But I am certainly less confident in that theory than I was in the early days of the pandemic, when heterodox feeling felt particularly inappropriate. Even dangerous.

Throughout 2020, into 2021, and occasionally in 2022, scientists, the media, governments, talking heads, fact-checkers, and social media all tried, at different times and with varying degrees of severity, to label the lab leak theory as misinformation. We heaped all this other stuff onto the early version of this theory: Blaming it for anti-Asian racism, vaccine hesitancy, and whatever else captured our fears on any given day.

As the existential threat of the virus turned into just regular dread, and we started questioning the orthodox narratives, it became clear that we shouldn’t have been quite so categorical. Even if the lab leak theory — and its more intense and implausible cousins — had been peddled by quacks and misinformation adherents, that doesn’t mean it was wrong. New evidence, albeit not super compelling evidence, has added to the possibility that the lab leak could explain the origins of the pandemic.

We’ve largely given up on fighting back against this theory. The other side, meanwhile, has done victory laps, insisting it exposes the inherent unreliability of us informational gatekeepers. They’re not altogether wrong.

And so, I think it’s really important for us to say: We, the above, were wrong to dismiss the lab leak theory out of hand. There were smart people, acting in good faith, advancing the idea that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was both engaging in risky research while ignoring critical security protocols, and that the virus spilled over into humans. We regret the error and will try to avoid such pitfalls in the future.

Being contrite instead of irrationally defensive does not mean we need to shrink away from discussing the topic altogether. In fact, finding a place to agree with our critics gives us more license to disagree with them elsewhere.²

We can say: Hey, we’re sorry we doubted your photos of hog-zilla. We believe in hog-zilla. But, also, hog-zilla was not exactly the killing machine your newspaper makes it out to be.

It also gives us an opportunity to point to all of those who got it right. The vast majority of reporting was pretty good! Counter-misinformation organization First Look wrote some fairly balanced guides on the question, for example. Outlets like the Washington Post wrote detailed fact-checks that put the facts on the table and noted that a lab leak couldn’t be ruled out.³

Calling out your own side for getting things wrong is a really critical trust-building exercise that we don’t do nearly enough. Bad-faith actors are unlikely to accept any thoughtful corrections, of course, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth doing.

It is hard to be 100% right about 100% of things 100% of the time. Even if we’re batting .300, we’re going to strike out eventually — better to own up to it when we do than to pretend like we never did. Just because the other side seems incapable of admitting mistakes doesn’t mean we need to be just as headstrong. Indeed, a commitment to the truth, even if it is inconvenient, is supposed to be a core divide between good-faith and bad-faith actors.

There are some other good examples I’ve flogged before on this newsletter: The labelling of Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation, for example. Or suggesting that Ottawa’s Freedom Convoy owed its success to Russian disinformation or seedy networks of American far-right agitators. It is easy, as we know, to believe wrong information that comports with our worldviews.

We resist calling out our own side because we fear it could worsen already-failing trust. But put yourselves in the shoes of someone who has already lost faith, convinced of conspiracies afoot to deceive. They watch the mainstream media ignore a clearly newsworthy story, then label it as misinformation, then watch it all come true, with precious little in the way of a mea culpa.

Luckily, we don’t have that many examples of this actually happening. While I’ve got a bone to pick with fact-checkers and debunkers, (Dispatches #68, #102) it’s pretty rare that they’ve confidently declared a position, only to sheepishly retreat not long after.

But, as this week has shown, we’ve just stumbled on a big one.

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There’s President Joe Biden wandering off, as his fellow world leaders are marvelling at a paratrooper who had just landed gracefully on the grass.

There’s President Joe Biden trying to sit down on a chair that isn’t there.

There’s President Joe Biden looking lost, being dragged offstage by his wife, Jill.

There’s President Joe Biden sleeping during the D-Day ceremonies in Normandy.

These videos, shared widely — both by Republicans, trolls, and supposedly-reputable news outlets, as well as by permutations of all three of those categories — were a concerted propaganda effort to make the president look hapless and senile, warping reality to make the case.

Biden, of course, had simply been talking to another paratrooper, selectively cut out of the shot. He is perfectly capable of sitting in chairs. Far from being dragged away by his wife, Biden was leading the way, stopping to chat with an array of World War II veterans. And he wasn’t sleeping, but sitting in a moment of profound reflection.

Multiple news outlets put this disinformation next to real life, letting readers see for themselves how selectively-edited videos — knighted with a new title of “cheapfakes” — were being pumped out to advance a narrative that Biden isn’t just old, but already so far gone.

Allies of the truth had learned from a nearly-identical campaign run in 2016.

While it’s hard to say who actually began the effort to suggest that Hillary Clinton was covering up a mystery illness, a confluence of bad actors rushed in to pump the narrative. Russian trolls, run out of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency, tweeted things like: “Well looks like Hillary’s pneumonia caused by Parkinsons disease.” An identical claim was made by the head of Veterans4Trump. Quack doctors peddled fake medical records. A video of Clinton coughing would go viral in an instant, with the hashtag #SickHillary.

Clinton did have pneumonia during the campaign, a fact her campaign hid until she fell ill at a 9/11 memorial event and had to be escorted into a waiting car, but it was hardly terminal. The right-wing disinformation machine, of course, didn’t actually care whether she was sick — it only mattered if they could make her look sick and secretive. When Clinton’s campaign acknowledged that she was, in fact, slightly ill, the mainstream media went into overdrive. They ran headlines like “Hillary Clinton's Health Scare: 9 Unanswered Questions” and “What we know about Hillary Clinton’s health.”

Looking back, the mainstream media got played. We threw out our normal reserved tone for reporting on relatively mundane health problems, because we took all that chemical smoke as evidence for a real fire. We inferred that the Clinton campaign’s secrecy was covering up for something larger, instead of recognizing that it was a defensive action to guard against a sustained campaign by online trolls and a hostile foreign actor to prevent her victory and sow discord.

We looked dumb. We were dumb.

And so when a similar-looking campaign rose up to target Biden, we immediately went on guard. Questions about Biden’s age have been top-of-mind since he first ran for president, but the media seemed keen to avoid being tricked into parroting bullshit. Trump’s effort to paint Biden as senile were often (not always) covered in light of Trump’s own age and penchant for going off on long, rambling tangents that could be a sign of mental decline. His age was a (mostly) thoughtful discussion, not sensational guessing game.

The White House called this “bad-faith” effort “misinformation,” and we were inclined to believe them.

And then the debate happened.

On live TV, with only two commercial interruptions, 51 million people watched the president stumble, ramble, mumble, and border on total incoherence. Trump, of course, spewed a steady stream of wrong, absurd, even offensive ideas over the course of the debate — and Biden not only proved himself incapable of calling out the former president, but stole the show by gurgling through the same old talking points that he once delivered with aplomb.

Viewers didn’t need much coaching to conclude it had been a disaster. I watched the whole debate on a train from Toronto to Montreal (Via Rail’s new trains: Great wifi!) and spent half of it with my head buried in my hands. The guy sitting across from me, watching on his phone, looked similarly horrified. Jane Fonda, at a viewing party in L.A., was reportedly in tears. The AP photographs of distraught Democratic voters sums up the mood as people watching the debate in realtime.

Suddenly, the GOP didn’t need to weaponize these ‘cheapfakes’ — Biden was now furnishing them with more useful agitprop than any selective edit could produce. And those who had been decrying misinformation suddenly didn’t know how to react. The misinformation had come true.

That, of course, doesn’t mean that the propaganda artists were right all along. Quite the opposite. They took something that was nearly true and weaponized it. Then, by their own luck, Biden’s decline was on full display for the world to see.

Most journalists were quick to react, covering the apoplectic response from many Democrats and picking up on growing calls for Biden to go. But, as Brian Stelter explains in Vox, they also noticed a ramping-up of the Democratic backlash:

Prominent journalists who were outspoken about voters’ age concerns, like New York Times podcasters Ezra Klein and Astead Herndon, were pummeled by partisans in social media comment threads. […] The tensions are still palpable this week: Every time I appear on CNN (my old home) or the BBC to discuss the Democratic Party’s post-debate state of crisis, I get messages from liberal viewers who believe I’m helping hand the election to Trump.

Dan Williams

, here on Substack, relays a similar episode with an anti-misinformation academic from late last year, who was quick to label even good-faith conversations as participating in misinformation.

Other misinformation researchers have written that “the post-debate ‘Biden replacement theory’ has all the vibes of a top-down bottom-up participatory disinformation campaign/conspiracism bubble reality,” essentially likening this conversation to the multi-polar disinformation campaign targeting Clinton’s health. A former Biden staffer said it feels “Russian-disinformation-y.”

One Substack post, which went some measure of viral, demanded the country “relax” because debates don’t matter, Trump is a traitor, and because Biden can just meme his way back into the White House through some positive social media clips. The author instructed his readers to “Google Russian demotivational propaganda.”

Other coverage implied that, if only the moderators had called out more of Trump’s misinformation, it wouldn’t have been so one-sided.

A particularly virulent line of attack online is against the media, alleging that journalists — the New York Times in particular — are conspiring to overplay Biden’s shortcomings, and excusing Trump’s threats to American democracy.

The Biden campaign is counting on exactly that kind of participatory campaign to discredit this story and the media covering it.

This is all a catastrophically bad idea. This will backfire.

Much like sniffing at the good people of Alapaha for believing in the monster pig, there is now an effort afoot to tell the American people that what they saw onstage was all a cheapfake. Or that Trump was actually worse. Or that merely talking about this is paving the way for fascism. And that the media can no longer be trusted.

Certainly, you can argue that Biden is still fit for the job. Or that replacing the jockey mid-race is too risky. Or that the discussion ought to focus more on the threat of Trump’s Agenda 2025 than on Biden’s health. But trying to discredit concerns with Biden’s health as a Russian disinformation plot, or as journalistic malpractice, or as fascism-enabling — it’s a surefire way to bludgeon an already-beaten-down trust in our media and institutions. It is crying wolf at the exact moment when the wolves really are circling the farm.

Owning up to why something may have been plagued by misinformation a few months ago, but which is now quite true — and explaining to readers what hand the media may have had in downplaying the story to begin with — is, again, uncomfortable.

But it’s necessary.

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That’s it for this week.

The pace of Bug-eyed and Shameless, I’m realizing, might be slightly slower over the summer, but rest assured that the newsletter will still deliver it’s promise of more-or-less 52 dispatches per year.

For my Canadian subscribers, you can now follow along my columns in the Toronto Star — including a rather fortuitous encounter with our environment minister last year — from my author page.

A shout-out to loyal reader and volunteer copyeditor Erwin, who helped correct typos in this piece. You can find his Substack here.

I’m neck-deep in edits on a few other pieces that I’m keen to share in the near future, so stay tuned.

1. Hogs Wild, Ian Frazier

2. Just to put a fine point on it: Many of those who are most intensely critical of the mainstream position are not, in fact, proponents of the lab leak theory. They, in actuality, believe COVID-19 was purposefully designed to infect humans by mad scientists inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology or that, perhaps, it was developed as a bioweapon. This hypothesizing ranges from good-faith investigations backed up by circumstantial evidence but aggressively contradicted by available evidence to total pseudoscience informed more by politics than virology. But regardless, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence points away from the virus being manipulated by humans. Should new evidence emerge that contradicts that, things may yet change!

3. I, out of curiosity, went back and re-read my own reporting on the topic: I was hostile to the bioweapon theory, which I still am. I was dismissive of the idea that the virus was mutated by scientists to infect humans, and I still mostly am. I mostly glossed over the idea that the virus was collected from nature and leaked from the lab, but at some point noted it as possible but unlikely. I, frankly, expected to have more particularly egregious mistakes to apologize for!