There's an interesting article by Matt Yglesias at his Substack site today. The topic is what he calls "elite misinformation." 

Yglesias states up front that he's not a big believer in the idea that misinformation of the variety that seems to worry misinformation experts is a major driver of political outcomes. Elections probably aren't being won or lost based on whatever people are saying on X.

That said, there is a type of misinformation that Yglesias believes does have a big impact on people, it's just not coming to them from online memes. That elite misinformation is mostly coming through the elite media. And here he offers an example. These are all articles published last year about fossil fuel subsidies:

• “Why Are Taxpayers Propping Up the Fossil Fuel Industry?” — NYT

• “Why Are Governments Still Subsidizing Fossil Fuels?” —Washington Post

• “Explainer: Global fossil fuel subsidies on the rise despite calls for phase-out” —Reuters

But if you really dig into these stories you find out they are all coming from the same place:

They’re based on an annual report put out by the International Monetary Fund, whose most recent edition is headlined “Fossil Fuel Subsidies Surged to Record $7 Trillion.” That’s a lot!...

The vast majority of the “subsidies” are “implicit subsidies,” which include “undercharging for environmental costs.” In other words, they are characterizing governments’ failure to impose a carbon tax as a “subsidy” for fossil fuel use...

In the context of misinformation studies, it probably wouldn’t count as misinformation if someone believed, because they read a New York Times write-up of an IMF report, that “Around the world, taxpayers are helping to support fossil fuels through subsidies when their money could be funding green energy transitions instead.” And, in fact, to the credit of the New York Times article in question, the ninth paragraph of the story does explain what’s going on. But the whole beginning of the article makes it seem like we’re talking about direct subsidies...Similarly, the IMF explains what they mean right there in the fine print of the chart. They’re not lying, exactly. But it’s hard to understand why the IMF would do this, unless they thought it was a good idea to trick people.

They're not lying exactly since you can figure out what's really going on if you read closely, but they do seem to be more than willing to mislead people who don't read closely.

The last section of his piece has a subhead that reads "Lying to people is bad." I agree but I think at this point Yglesias underestimates what capable liars some people are. He writes, "the political system is too large...to operate on a conspiratorial basis." Maybe that's true on a longer time scale but I've personally seen the left try to operate on a conspiratorial basis too many times to shrug off the possibility that it can work sometimes.

I won't rehash the old days at great length but Democrats did their very best to trick Americans into accepting a version of Obamacare that was intended to lead inevitably to a single-payer program that progressives really wanted. Within their own ranks they were explicit that this was their goal, but to Americans in general they just lied. There was a genuine conspiracy to mislead people. Instead of telling the truth they went with "if you like your plan, you can keep it."

And frankly, you could look at the more recent claims about Donald Trump and Russia. The Steele Dossier was given credibility by a lot of reporters who later walked away from it when it became clear it was mostly a dumpster fire of misinformation funded by the Hillary campaign as an October surprise. But for at least two years a lot of people were leaning hard on it.

One of the most significant examples of elite misinformation over the last decade were the various cases that helped launch Black Lives Matter. Remember "Hands up, don't shoot?" To this day, the things many people believe about the deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland and Jacob Blake are not true. You can find the truth if you dig into it, but a lot of people don't. That seems like another very intentional case of elite misinformation, one that set the groundwork for the riots of 2020, the push to defund police, etc. 

For goodness sake, just a few years ago we shut down schools and had people wearing cloth masks and standing six-feet apart for about a year and it turns out none of that was really supported by evidence. Elite misinformation is a lot more rampant than an IMF story about fossil fuel subsidies.

So, yes, it's bad to lie to people, but I think Yglesias underestimates the degree to which elite misinformation has worked out pretty well for progressives over the past 15 years. When you really get the media whipped up on a left-wing cause, you can maintain the lies long enough to get the results you want. You can do this because, at heart, most in the media want to believe these stories.

Frankly, I think we're still playing this game right now. "There is nothing wrong with Joe Biden" is elite misinformation. If Biden loses the election, I suspect the truth will start leaking out a year or two later as people on the left finally admit they could tell Biden had lost a step but didn't want to give aid and comfort to the enemy by saying so.