If you read The Washington Post, you might have been concerned this week for the plight of the poor nature enthusiasts who are now at risk of locking themselves in the bathrooms at Yosemite National Park with no one to rescue them.

The media’s info op du jour is that the national parks are in disarray because President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE are terminating “potentially thousands” of America’s beloved park rangers.

That sounds kind of bad, until you realize this is the kind of situation reporters are panicking over:

At California’s Yosemite National Park, the Trump administration fired the only locksmith on staff on Friday. He was the sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms.

If only one of the more than 1,000 people who work at Yosemite has the “institutional knowledge” required to unlock a bathroom door, Trump should maybe consider firing more of them and replacing them with people who know how to make copies of a key.

An upside-down American flag — which I was reliably informed was a symbol of Jan. 6 sympathies — hung from a cliff at Yosemite to bring “attention to what’s happening,” according to one of the employees who hung it. What is happening, exactly? Including the locksmith, 11 of the 1,151 employees who work at Yosemite during the winter were let go, as Chris Bray pointed out in a Sunday Substack post. I’m sorry for them, but a park losing 1 percent of its workforce isn’t exactly the next Watergate.

The national parks panic is one of several information operations the legacy press has launched over the past month of Trump 2.0. Another one from this week is the idea that Republicans are returning home to “a barrage of frustration and anger” from constituents who are supposedly very upset about Trump’s actions as president, a narrative which is easily contradicted by recent polling.

If you want to be able to spot the next info op, here’s what you need to know.

The most important thing to understand is not how the media deploy info ops but simply that they do it. If you are aware that legacy media outlets are not impersonal transcription services but active partisans with their own motives and ends, you will be much better at seeing through their tactics.

You are in an information war environment. Don’t believe me? Think about the media’s role in Russiagate. The Kavanaugh rape hoax. The smears about Pete Hegseth. They’re the ones who told you that the Hunter Biden laptop was almost certainly Russian disinformation, that Trump called American soldiers “suckers” and “losers,” that Covid definitely didn’t escape from a lab, that Trump wanted to execute Liz Cheney by firing squad, and that J.D. Vance was weird.

Whatever you hear from corporate media, you should assume until proven otherwise that the opposite is probably true. This small act of caution will save you untold embarrassment, as you wisely do some vetting before joining in the latest panic.

To do that vetting, it helps to study previous info ops that have been debunked and identify the red flags that gave away the game from the get-go. If you’re unfamiliar with any of the info ops listed above, start there. The first thing you should do is note which reporters and pundits participated in some of the worst ones and never trust those people ever again.

A great place to start is with the Russia collusion hoax, in which the media uncritically regurgitated sensational allegations that Trump was in cahoots with Russia in 2016, based on a dossier that was commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign and shopped to the FBI. Here are just some of the people who participated in that lie:

If you noticed Natasha Bertrand on that list, you might also remember she was the one through whom 51 “former intel officials” laundered their statement denouncing the Hunter Biden laptop as likely Russian disinformation. We now know, according to one of its signers, that the letter was crafted to help Joe Biden discredit reporting about the Biden family’s overseas influence-peddling that was sourced to the laptop.

Every time you read a news article, you should ask yourself: “Why might the writer want me to believe this?” When the legacy news media reached the sudden and unified conclusion that the Hunter Biden laptop was not worth paying attention to, on the eve of the 2020 presidential election, it was terribly convenient for their Democrat allies.

Everyone has his own agenda, and when a story affirms a reporter’s agenda, he will be more motivated to run with it. That’s one of the reasons so many people fell for the Trump-Russia collusion lie — it soothed their preexisting feelings about Trump and the 2016 election.

And don’t just pay attention to a writer’s motives; pay attention to his sources. The “former intel officials” who pimped out the laptop disinformation lie included deep staters like Obama-era Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan. Both men have lied under oath about spying on Americans and both used their positions in the intelligence world to help spread the Russia collusion hoax. Their signatures were a giant clue that the letter disparaging reporting about the Hunter Biden laptop was a partisan info op.

On the subject of sources, another great indicator that should ping your info-op radar is when an explosive story exclusively cites anonymous sources, especially when those anonymous allegations are refuted by on-the-record rebuttals.

That’s exactly what happened when Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg published a sensational, anonymously-sourced rumor in 2020 that Donald Trump had referred to soldiers interred at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery as “suckers” and “losers.” The media ran with the tale despite the fact that 25 people — 14 of whom were with the president in France — went on the record refuting it.

One election cycle later, in October 2024, Goldberg tried the same tactic, accusing Trump of speaking disrespectfully of murdered Army Specialist Vanessa Guillén after meeting with her family and offering to help with funeral costs. Guillén’s sister, the family’s attorney, Trump’s chief of staff who was present for the conversation in question, and a handful of other parties all denied Goldberg’s story.

The ineffectiveness of last-minute lies about Trump during that election showed how much the media has been weakened. But until they are truly powerless, they will keep trying to claw back influence by deploying new narratives and supposed scandals.

The thing about info ops, of course, is that they’re only effective as long as people believe them. By understanding how their game works, you can make yourself invincible — and make the media that much weaker.

Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women's Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.