In a recent newsletter, I fretted that disinformation experts keep failing upward into ever greater positions of prominence, even when their underlying research comes under serious scrutiny. This week, The New York Times commented on—and contributed to—the most compelling example of this phenomenon: Nina Jankowicz, who has returned from exile to launch a new disinformation-tracking organization called the American Sunlight Project.

Jankowicz, readers will recall, was hired by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2022 to head its short-lived Disinformation Governance Board. The dystopian nature of that agency's title caused widespread public criticism, followed by hasty reassurances from the feds that the board would have no authority to actually police speech. Nevertheless, Jankowicz became the subject of considerable scrutiny. Just who was this singsong academic entrusted by the federal government to distinguish truth from lies?

A close look at her record gave plenty of reasons for concern. Hunter Biden's laptop is the quintessential example of the counter-disinformation industry misidentifying a true story as false: Dozens of former national security officers and experts wrongly flagged the New York Post's Hunter Biden scoop as appearing to possess malicious Russian origins. The mainstream media—led by Politico—then intensified the error, asserting the (incorrect) claim that the national security experts had definitively judged the laptop story to be disinformation, rather than simply resembling disinformation.