Election 2024 putting trust under an unusual strain

It has often been said by advocates for both major political parties that the General Election of November 2024 is the most important in generations. The claims may be partly fueled by partisan hysteria, but this campaign season is certainly distinguished as one of the — please pardon the use of a term that has taken on its own singular political connotations — weirdest in modern memory.

The fundamental challenge is trust — and that quality is being attacked from multiple directions. The U.S. Justice Department says it blocked a complex Russian effort to disrupt the 2024 election called “Doppelgänger” and has separately charged two employees of Russian national media with attempting to fill social media sites with disinformation intended to influence American attitudes toward Russia and Ukraine.

Federal officials have cited concerns about similar web-oriented fraud schemes targeting the U.S. elections coming out of China and even Iran.

Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump, who has built much of his campaign about distrust of the 2020 election that he lost, has insisted that virtually any result of this year’s election in which he does not win cannot be valid, all while advancing wild, often debunked, theories about issues without the remotest shred of evidence. For example, his repetition during his nationally televised debate with Kamala Harris of a bizarre claim that Haitian migrants were eating pet cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, resulting in the city being besieged with death threats.

Lies, distortions and misrepresentations are realities of nearly every election and come from candidates of every party and persuasion, so wise voters take precautions to be skeptical about claims that sound too outlandish to be true, to seek information from a variety of sources and to examine political claims from a variety of perspectives.

Even the most trustworthy sources can be targeted. The Daily Herald, was duped just last Friday by a supposed magazine publisher in New Berlin, Wisconsin, that produced a special advertising section that we accepted for insertion in some of our editions. The publication claimed to focus on outdoor activities like hunting and fishing, but buried in its last pages were graphic pictures of animals and outrageous political claims and conspiracy theories that would not meet the Daily Herald’s standards of acceptable advertising material. Our company was angered by the deception, and it moved us to install new oversight procedures to ward against the possibility of such an abuse of our standards happening again.

And it reminds us just how fragile our information systems can be, and how vigilant responsible media companies must be to ensure that the material they publish represents all sides fairly and accurately. That mission is always tested during heated political campaigns. It is being put under special strain in 2024 — and, considering the vulnerabilities of social media, will likely continue to be so for many years to come.

All of which serves as a reminder to readers and voters of some foundational election advice. Be careful what you believe. Use sources that value your trust above all else and seek to earn it. And include a variety even of those.

We can’t promise this campaign or any others will not have their weird elements. But we do promise to do all we can to help you sort through the nonsense to find what is accurate and meaningful about the issues important to you.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His new book “Conversations, community and the role of local news” is available at eckhartzpress.com.