We’ll stop worrying and learn to love the misinformation bomb

2026 will be the year that we stop worrying and learn to love the misinformation bomb. We will end our pious incantations about post-truth and halt the witchfinder searches for inaccuracy, bias, and offense.

The problem is not fake news, it’s that no one believes — or rather listens, and pays attention — to liberal mainstream media verities.

Back in 2016, we thought that all those graphs showing the spread of false information must explain the election of Donald Trump (see also: Orbán, Brexit, etc.). Subsequently, we doubled down on blaming the algorithms of social networks and the lack of “media literacy” for the polarization and populism spreading across Western politics like an electoral zombie apocalypse. Now generative AI and the tech bros have arrived to continue carrying the can.

In some quarters, the intellectual tide has turned on this. No one would say that fact-checking, verification, and evidence-based reporting are bad things in themselves. Good journalism is accurate, is evidence-based, and thinks critically. But direct counter-disinformation measures don’t seem to be working. The backfire effect combined with audacious political rhetoric that wallows like the proverbial pig in partisan confirmation bias shows that it is not enough to tell people they are wrong. It seems that people choose the bad news, though luckily it has less impact than we feared beyond the zealots.

So what works better than revealing their lies? You have to show what is right, believable, relevant, and positive. You have to be as authentic, accessible, and aware as that guy from the alt-right.

Perhaps the biggest journalism success story of the last decade or so has been the success of extreme conservatism in reinventing political journalism. Liberal journalism has withered while theirs has soared. It’s not easily replicable for the liberal/left, but lessons should be learnt. And they haven’t been. Time for a rethink in 2026.