Abstract

President Ronald Reagan's Radio Address of February 15th, 1986 illustrates how public identities, understood as a network of publicly accepted stereotypes, contribute to systemic disinformation. In this paper, I argue that the public identity of the "welfare queen" in President Reagan's address reveals an understudied tension in disinformation studies: Disinformation can be something that individuals disseminate intentionally while it can also be defined as broadly accepted but oppressive "knowledge." Finally, I show how theories of compassion can cut through some of this tension by addressing both the individual and systemic aspects of stereotyping that the term "public identities'' encompasses.