In a September 10, 2016 article The Economist declared that we have entered ‘The post-truth world’:
It is thus tempting to dismiss the idea of “post-truth” political discourse—the term was first used by David Roberts, then a blogger on an environmentalist website, Grist—as a modish myth invented by de-haut-en-bas liberals and sore losers ignorant of how dirty a business politics has always been. But that would be complacent. There is a strong case that, in America and elsewhere, there is a shift towards a politics in which feelings trump facts more freely and with less resistance than used to be the case.
Mind you, The Economist still needed to indulge in just a touch of ‘both-siderism’, and ‘every politician does it’, as if the Democrats— any Democrat— could reasonably be compared to the spew of falsehoods that emit from Trump and his lackeys, or the studied mendacity of the GOP over the past half-century (and yes deceptiveness and the purveying of falsehoods to further political ends is as old as the existence of organized government), but ultimately, a crucial observation emerges:
Political lies used to imply that there was a truth—one that had to be prevented from coming out. Evidence, consistency and scholarship had political power. Today a growing number of politicians and pundits simply no longer care. They are content with what Stephen Colbert, an American comedian, calls “truthiness”: ideas which “feel right” or “should be true”. They deal in insinuation (“A lot of people are saying...” is one of Mr Trump’s favourite phrases) and question the provenance, rather than accuracy, of anything that goes against them (“They would say that, wouldn’t they?”). And when the distance between what feels true and what the facts say grows too great, it can always be bridged with a handy conspiracy theory.
As with almost every other aspect of what is despicable about the modern GOP, the basic disregard for any semblance of the truth, of facts, of evidence, there is a parallel, and connections, to be found with Putin’s Russia:
Then there is Russia, arguably the country (apart from North Korea) that has moved furthest past truth, both in its foreign policy and internal politics. The Ukraine crisis offers examples aplenty: state-controlled Russian media faked interviews with “witnesses” of alleged atrocities, such as a child being crucified by Ukrainian forces; Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, did not hesitate to say on television that there were no Russian soldiers in Ukraine, despite abundant proof to the contrary.
Such dezinformatsiya may seem like a mere reversion to Soviet form. But at least the Soviets’ lies were meant to be coherent, argues Peter Pomerantsev, a journalist whose memoir of Mr Putin’s Russia is titled “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible”. In a study in 2014 for the Institute of Modern Russia, a think-tank, he quotes a political consultant for the president saying that in Soviet times, “if they were lying they took care to prove what they were doing was ‘the truth’. Now no one even tries proving ‘the truth’. You can just say anything. Create realities.”
I happen to disagree that Russia is the archetype of this approach to ‘managing the message’ by outright fabrication; the GOP cultivated this approach during the Reagan administration, and raised it to a high art during the Bush/Cheney years, beginning with their response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11:
''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."
That's the famous quote wrested by Ron Suskind from a "senior adviser" to president Bush. We have long thought of it as a coda to the refusal to see reality in the fiasco of the Iraq war (and the failure of the Afghanistan war). But, in retrospect, it might also tell us something about the real point of the torture program. If the CIA were telling Cheney that Zubaydah, for example, had told everything he could know, and Cheney had not secured the informtion linking Saddam to 9/11, torture was an obvious next option. It could "create a reality" that comported with what Cheney already believed as a matter of faith. If you want to "create" such a reality, you can "fix" the intelligence to make the case for war, as we now know happened; but if you want to "create" the original intelligence, you need to torture. Specifically, you need to craft torture techniques designed to procure false confessions. Ta-da! We have SERE, inversely adapted from Communist totalitarian methods for producing propagandistic false confessions.
What has become clear since Trump became a candidate for president, is that the GOP as a whole— the organization, its leadership, its elected officials at every level, and its rank and file voters (who represented 90% of his votes)-- have fully embraced fiction as both the conceptual framework of the entire conservative political enterprise, and as the primary mode of communication. It is equally clear that ‘mainstream’ broadcast and print media are complicit in merging fiction with reality, having perpetuated the ‘let all sides be heard’ model of journalism (using the term loosely), whether willingly, or over time being bullied by conservatives with yet another fiction— that of the ‘liberal bias’ in the media:
“The facts have a well-known liberal bias,” declared Rob Corddry way back in 2004 — and experience keeps vindicating his joke. But why?
Not long ago Ezra Klein cited research showing that both liberals and conservatives are subject to strong tribal bias — presented with evidence, they see what they want to see. I then wrote that this poses a puzzle, because in practice liberals don’t engage in the kind of mass rejections of evidence that conservatives do. The inevitable response was a torrent of angry responses and claims that liberals do too reject facts — but none of the claims measured up…
Yet another factor may be the different incentives of opinion leaders, which in turn go back to the huge difference in resources. Strange to say, there are more conservative than liberal billionaires, and it shows in think-tank funding. As a result, I like to say that there are three kinds of economists: Liberal professional economists, conservative professional economists, and professional conservative economists. The other box isn’t entirely empty, but there just isn’t enough money on the left to close the hack gap.
Finally, I do believe that there is a difference in temperament between the sides. I know that it doesn’t show up in the experiments done so far, which show liberals and conservatives more or less equally inclined to misread facts in a tribal way. But such experiments may not be enough like real life to capture the true differences — although I’d be the first to admit that I don’t have solid evidence for that claim. I am, after all, a liberal.
Unlike Krugman, I do believe there is evidence to support the notion that conservatives are much more inclined than liberals to dispense with factual reality when reality refuses to conform to their worldview, and have addressed this in a number of previous diaries; for example:
Persuading conservatives with appeals to facts and logic: Good luck with that.— Part 3 (March 15, 2017)
This third installment of an intermittent series (parts 1 and 2 found here and here) focuses on two features of conservatives’ tenuous relationship with empirical reality (perhaps it’s better to say they’re estranged from empirical reality, and are filing for divorce):
1) their disavowal of science
2) their capacity to filter their own experience solely through the lens ofideological correctness (my term, I think, since I don’t remember seeing it anywhere else, but I’ll give credit if someone coined it before me).
The refusal of conservatives to ‘accept’ anthropogenic climate change (carbon combustion, primarily oil, coal and natural gas, heating the air, oceans, and soil, with destructive consequences for weather, ecosystems, disease, crops, etc.) serves as a useful prism for examining the psychology of those that espouse conservative views.
By ideological correctness I mean an individual assessing information in terms of their worldview and identity, which for conservatives have become inextricable from core premises about the world and other people, and so are not subject to challenge or even scrutiny. This tendency has been shown generally to distinguish progressives from conservatives— progressives will change views and conclusions when data require it, conservatives will not…
As summarized in the excerpt above, because of ideological considerations, conservatives will simply deny a problem exists, and refuse to consider that any change in their views or conduct is necessary. (Note as well the elements of fundamentalist Christian views of the relationship between humans and the environment: humans have dominion over the earth, because they were granted this by God; this view overlaps with the purely capitalist view that the earth is a repository of resources to be exploited, and the libertarian view that those who are most deserving take what they wish from the world and other people; it is not coincidental that Christianists, free market zealots, and corporatists all find a home under the umbrella of conservatism and the GOP).
From such a perspective, a progressive initiative to promote remediation of environmental harms caused by human activity will always seem to a conservative to be a political ploy, and the imposition of a progressive scheme on conservatives who are just going about their own business, as opposed to the lifestyle promoted by conservatives, and the practices of industry, are imposing catastrophic health effects and environmental degradation on everyone.
An article published on-line in the journal Climatic Change on March 13, 2017 looks at just these features of conservative attitudes about climate change…
In fact, attempts to ‘educate’ conservatives, perhaps trying to find ‘language they will hear’ and ‘terms they understand’ will the opposite of the intended effect, if the intended effect is to get conservatives to see climate change as a problem:
“Several empirical studies have analyzed interaction effects between political orientation and various social structural and cognitive variables. For example, Hamilton et al. (2012) study of polar-region warming concern demonstrated that among ideological conservatives, greater scientific understanding predicted lower levels of concern” (Bohr, pg. 3)
Reflect of this for a moment.
The more information a conservative has about the science of climate change, the less concerned they are. It’s not about information, or understanding, it’s about ideology…
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see also:
Reality matters. But not to everyone. (June 25, 2017)
the US is, far and away, the primary purveyor of climate change denial:
American climate change deniers have been remarkably successful in confusing public opinion and delaying decisive action. They receive considerable media attention and enjoy access to key Washington power brokers.
This is on full display not just in Beltway debates and demonstrations, but in local decision making:
On the Delaware Bay, N.J. town struggles against sea rise.
People who live in these communities don’t all agree with scientists who say they are on the front lines of climate change. Some insist it’s a temporary phenomenon that could be endured with enough effort and money.
Downe Mayor Robert Campbell discovered the township on a Sunday drive 35 years ago, fell in love with it, and stayed.
Now, Campbell, also a GOP candidate for state Assembly, is fighting to keep Downe’s six communities — which also include Fortescue, Dividing Creek, Newport, and Dyer’s Cove — viable. Scientists, he says, just don’t get it.
“There is no sea-level rise, and it’s a bunch of hogwash,” Campbell says.
This bayside community, whose homes are literally becoming submerged as sea-levels rise, elected as their leader— the person who will represent their interests with the state and federal governments— someone who believes climate change and sea-level rise is ‘hogwash’.
Even those that acknowledge the problem have been cowed into a ‘neutral’ stance when it comes to the reality of climate change...
Among the problems we, as progressives, need to acknowledge and address is that there is a cohort among our fellow citizens who are, have been, and will continue to be receptive to the messages of Authoritarians (my apologies, no links for the cited excerpts from Hannah Arendt, below):
Selected excerpts from Hannah Arendt’s February 25, 1967 New Yorker article ‘Truth and Politics’:
The hallmark of factual truth is that its opposite is neither error nor illusion nor opinion, no one of which reflects upon personal truthfulness, but the deliberate falsehood,or lie. Error, of course, is possible, and even common, with respect to factual truth, in which case this kind of truth is in no way different from scientific or rational truth. But the point is that with respect to facts there exists another alternative,and this alternative, the deliberate falsehood, does not belong to the same species as propositions that, whether right or mistaken, intend no more than to say what is, or how something that is appears to me. A factual statement – Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 – acquires political implications only by being put in an interpretative context. But the opposite proposition, which Clemenceau, still unacquainted with the art of rewriting history, thought absurd, needs no context to be of political significance.It is clearly an attempt to change the record, and as such, it is a form of action. The same is true when the liar, lacking the power to make his falsehood stick,does not insist on the gospel truth of his statement but pretends that this is his“opinion,” to which he claims his constitutional right. This is frequently done by subversive groups, and in a politically immature public the resulting confusion can be considerable. The blurring of the dividing line between factual truth and opinion belongs among the many forms that lying can assume, all of which are forms of action.
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Contemporary history is full of instances in which tellers of factual truth were felt to be more dangerous and even more hostile, than the real opponents.
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It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism – an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything,no matter how well this truth may be established. In other words, the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed.
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The telling of factual truth comprehends much more than the daily information supplied by journalists, though without them we should never find our bearings in an ever-changing world and, in the most literal sense, would never know where we are. This is, of course, of the most immediate political importance; but if the press should ever really becomes the “fourth branch of government,” it would have to be protected against government power and social pressure even more carefully than the judiciary is. (emphasis added)
Excerpts from ‘Hannah Arendt: From an Interview’, which appeared in the New York Review of Books, October 26, 1978:
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
In my view, no one has so fully and accurately described as Arendt the role of destroying the truth-- destroying the very notion that there is a truth to be found— in establishing and maintaining a totalitarian state, and an Authoritarian culture.
I’ve previously addressed the role of Authoritarian personality in those who align themselves with the conservative worldview, in this diary:
The Authoritarian Personality and Trump voters: conservatism’s true face is fascism. (Dec. 1, 2016)
Theodore Adorno’s research on Authoritarian Personality seems remarkably dead on today, with sixty million Americans voting for Trump, as it did over six decades ago. See if this sounds like any conservative politician or voter you’ve know your whole life:
a. Conventionalism. Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values.
b. Authoritarian submission. Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the ingroup.
c. Authoritarian aggression. Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values.
d. Anti-intraception. Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender- minded.
e. Superstition and stereotypy. The belief in mystical determinants of the individual's fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories.
f. Power and "toughness." Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness.
g. Destructiveness and cynicism. Generalized hostility, vilification of the human.
h. Projectivity. The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.
i. Sex. Exaggerated concern with sexual "goings-on."
These variables were thought of as going together to form a single syndrome, a more or less enduring structure in the person that renders him receptive to antidemocratic propaganda.
These are not psychological features that are amenable to patient listening and reasoned discourse— in fact, patient listening and reasoned discourse are precisely the sort of displays that a conservative proto-fascist will respond to with disgust and hostility— (see items d., f. and g., above).
Try to understand them, reason with them, and you will be met with either dismissive contempt, or violent hate.
These are sixty million of your fellow citizens, and they don’t think any of us, not one person who calls themselves a progressive-- especially those who are not white heterosexual Christian males --deserve any place in society, are entitled to political representation, or equal protection of the law.
And also:
Listen to Trump voters? Listen to Gessen, Eco and Canetti first: learning the lessons of history. (Nov. 14, 2016)
Elias Canetti, in his epic work, Crowds and Power, showed us how fragile our perceived triumphs in creating a more progressive, pluralistic nation, a more inclusive and just society— from FDR’s New Deal, Social Security, though The Voting Rights Act and Great Society programs, to the election of President Obama and the landmark that was Obergefell --did nothing to change the beliefs of those who had so virulently and violently opposed these efforts every step of the way:
Now no one has ever really believed that the majority decision is necessarily the wiser one because it has received the greater number of votes. It is will against will as in war. Each is convinced that right and reason are on his side. Conviction comes easily and the purpose of a party is, precisely, to keep this will and conviction alive. The member of an outvoted party accepts the majority decision, not because he has ceased to believe in his own case, but simply because he admits defeat. It is easy for him to do this because nothing happens to him: he is not punished in any way for his previous opposition. He would react quite differently if his life was endangered. What he anticipates, however, is future battles, and many of them; in none of them will he be killed. (pg 189, emphasis added)
Those insisting that we seek to identify the message that Trump voters might have wanted to hear, or suggesting a different messenger (anybody but Secretary Clinton) would have reached them, choose to ignore the obvious— they voted for Trump because they liked his message in content and in tone, and they wanted him to be that messenger.
Perhaps those advising ‘listen to Trump voters’ simply can’t imagine that 48% of voters would really think that way, but in any case they can indulge in such comforting musings from a position of perceived safety. Like those that voted for Trump, for those that say ‘hear them out’: ‘What he anticipates, however, is future battles, and many of them; in none of them will he be killed.’
We cannot wish this ugly reality away. And there is nothing mysterious about it, unless we simply disregard what is plainly in front of us...
It is not only the case that the Authoritarian party in our midst (the GOP) has its willing recruits in its rank and file; Authoritarian governance is ascendant worldwide, here in the US, certainly, as well as Russia and China, but also well beyond the obvious dictatorships like Syria, and a totalitarian nightmare like North Korea; almost anywhere we choose to look, democracy is eroding in the face of an onslaught of Authoritarian nations, as I described in this previous diary:
Surviving and resisting fascism reading list: organized opposition in Trump’s America. — #2 (Dec. 30, 2016)
Historically, right-wing and left-wing authoritarian regimes could be distinguished to some degree by the merging of the state apparatus with business interests— Soviet Russia, Communist China and Cuba are the primary examples of left-wing authoritarian regimes that made business enterprises state enterprises-- but this distinction no longer appears meaningful in the 21st century. Central state control of business interests has diminished in each of these countries, while political control remains absolute in the hands of leadership (Putin in Russia, Raul Castro in Cuba, the Central Party Committee in China).
In this way, it is now increasingly difficult to distinguish the model of governance in Cuba from that in Qatar, or China from Singapore and Egypt. Greater ability to engage in business enterprises, perhaps, with primary benefit to the ruling class, but with little or no attention given to civil liberties.
Few modern authoritarian regimes fit the definition of fascist. However, it is useful to look to those who have lived under authoritarian governments, and those who study them, to learn how we may resist the rising tide of fascism in the US, embodied in the GOP at the state and federal levels.
A relatively recent conceptualization of modern authoritarian regimes is that of ‘hybrid’ or ‘competitive authoritarian’ regimes. This is described by Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way in their article The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism:
In recent years, many scholars have pointed to the importance of hybrid regimes. Indeed, recent academic writings have produced a variety of labels for mixed cases, including not only “hybrid regime” but also “semidemocracy,” “virtual democracy,” “electoral democracy,” “pseudodemocracy,” “illiberal democracy,” “semi-authoritarianism,” “soft authoritarianism,” “electoral authoritarianism,” and Freedom House’s “Partly Free.”1…
This article examines one particular type of “hybrid” regime: competitive authoritarianism. In competitive authoritarian regimes, formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority. Incumbents violate those rules so often and to such an extent, however, that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy. (pp. 51-2, emphasis added)
One does not have to stretch too far to see that the GOP fits this definition of a hybrid, competitive authoritarian regime…
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There are some questions that naturally come up when thinking about authoritarian regimes, and building a resistance movement from within:
Has authoritarian governance diminished globally since WWII?
What constitutes meaningful opening of authoritarian regimes to democratic reforms and civil liberties?
What time frame is plausible for non-violent change (as opposed to armed revolution) under an authoritarian regime?
A realistic survey of events since WWII offers no reason to be optimistic.
The Economist’s Intelligence Unit produces an annual
Democracy Index. By their criteria, half of the world’s population live under some form of authoritarian rule, and another 40% live in ‘flawed democracies’, with less than 10% living in reasonably functioning democracies:
Almost one-half of the world’s countries can be considered to be democracies, but, in our index, the number of “full democracies” is low, at only 20 countries; 59 countries are rated as “flawed democracies”. Of the remaining 88 countries in our index, 51 are “authoritarian” and 37 are considered to be “hybrid regimes”. As could be expected, the developed OECD countries dominate among “full democracies”; there are two Asian countries, one Latin American country (Uruguay) and one African country (Mauritius), which suggests that level of development is not a binding constraint, but is a constraint, nevertheless. Slightly less than one-half (48.4%) of the world’s population lives in a democracy of some sort, although only 8.9% reside in “full democracies”.
Given what we witnessed in this election, what we are seeing currently in North Carolina, and red states across the country, calling the US a ‘flawed democracy’ would be generous.
How does this compare to ten, twenty and fifty years ago? There was optimism about the spread of democracy following the defeat of fascism in WWII, and again after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, that optimism (much like the optimism that bigotry was on the wane in the US) has proven misplaced—
progressive democratic governance is in retreat globally. This is described in a series of articles in the April 2015 issue of the
Journal of Democracy, which are found in a section entitled
The Authoritarian Resurgence. The following is from Javier Corrales’ examination of Venezuelan ‘autocratic legalism’…
Authoritarian rule extends over as much of the globe as it did in 1939, and ethno-nationalism is becoming a destabilizing presence throughout Europe, and to a lesser extent in Africa, and Latin America. (It is fair to say ethno-nationalism never receded, or even became obscured, in the Middle east and Southeast Asia.)
Human Rights Watch produces an
annual report, and the picture is grim:
In Europe and the United States, a polarizing us-versus-them rhetoric has moved from the political fringe to the mainstream. Blatant Islamophobia and shameless demonizing of refugees have become the currency of an increasingly assertive politics of intolerance. These trends threatened human rights in two ways, one well known, the other less visible. The high-profile threat is a rollback of rights by many governments in the face of the refugee flow and the parallel decision by the self-declared Islamic State, or ISIS, to spread its attacks beyond the Middle East. The less visible threat is the effort by a growing number of authoritarian governments to restrict civil society, particularly the civic groups that monitor and speak out about those governments’ conduct. The Western governments threatening to curtail rights include many of the strongest traditional allies of the human rights cause. Their voices are needed to counter the broader effort in countries throughout the world to squeeze civil society, jeopardizing human rights and efforts to uphold them. (pg. 1, emphasis added)
As Arendt warned, autocratic governments, by definition, must destroy the truth if they are to remain in power, because they must maintain their base of support among followers who will accept blindly the ‘truth’ as given to them by the autocrat (which is why the GOP has so patiently inoculated generations of its conservative base with dose upon dose of falsehood). To destroy the truth, the autocratic government begins with attacking those institutions whose purpose is to present facts— the press, universities, science itself.
Trump’s oft repeated verbal tic— ‘fake news’— has distilled to its simplest form the message conservatives, through their media shills and ‘think tanks’, have used deliberately to infect the
information ecology of modern society. This infection of distrust in the press, and sources of factual information like scientists and governmental research offices, is reflected in increasingly virulent, often violent attacks on the press worldwide:
Selected excerpts from Reporters Without Borders 2017 World Press Freedom Index – tipping point
Donald Trump’s rise to power in the United States and the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom were marked by high-profile media bashing, a highly toxic anti-media discourse that drove the world into a new era of post-truth, disinformation, and fake news.
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“The rate at which democracies are approaching the tipping point is alarming for all those who understand that, if media freedom is not secure, then none of the other freedoms can be guaranteed,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said. “Where will this downward spiral take us?”
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Media freedom has never been so threatened and RSF’s “global indicator” has never been so high (3872). This measure of the overall level of media freedom constraints and violations worldwide has risen 14% in the span of five years. In the past year, nearly two thirds (62.2%) of the countries measured* have registered a deterioration in their situation, while the number of countries where the media freedom situation was “good” or “fairly good” fell by 2.3%.
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Selected excerpts from Heidi Taksdal Skjeseth’s All the president’s lies: Media coverage of lies in the US and France. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford (2017):
To spread lies, create uncertainty and saw doubt is an efficient strategy to avoid a fact based debate. The so-called weaponised relativism tactic was developed by the Russian intelligence organization KGB in the 1970’s. 6 By offering many and competing alternatives to the truth, the truth eventually becomes blurry. It also directs the media’sand hence the public’s attention away from facts and towards doubt. The traditional definition of propaganda is information with the intent of making the public believe a specific event or ideology. The International Encyclopaedia of Propaganda uses a more comprehensive understanding, and looks at propaganda simply as a means of persuasion through communication.7 In this case, a conscious use of falsehoods to spread doubt could be said to be a type of propaganda. (pg. 6)
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There are many questions regarding the media coverage of the US general election campaign in 2016. The sheer amount of coverage of the Republican candidate,particularly in the early stages of the campaign, has received deserved criticism. The same has the question of false equivalence. But there were also a lot of good reporting and serious investigation this campaign. But what were the consequences? As a reporter from the Washington Post states in this report: “We exposed his lies. They still wanted Trump.” If accountability does not follow exposure and transparency, this is a cause for worry. (pg. 6)
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While political lies are not new, neither in the US or overseas, the share range of falsehoods and incorrect information coming from first candidate Trump and now president Trump and his staffers is changing the relationship between politicians and political journalists in the US. There are many reports documenting Donald Trump’s uneasy relationship with the truth, counting the number of Trump’s lies, falsehoods or exaggerations. After Donald Trump’s first 33 days in office, the Washington Post published a thorough analysis of all of the president’s lies. 15 According to the newspaper, Donald Trump lied every single day, often many times in one day,throughout his first month in The White House. (pg. 11)
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Trump is not the first president to be at odds with the press, but the amount of lies he delivers and his aggressive attacks on and constant undermining of the legitimacy of the media, is unprecedented. This is changing the relationship between political journalist sand the president, a relationship that has been built on a certain amount of trust and mutual respect. One thing is the amount of falsehoods. Another aspect is how Trump responds to journalists who try to hold him accountable. In the words of David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post, who won a Pulitzer prize for his work on the Trump Foundation:“Trump would do something scandalous. He would insult congressman John McCain or the judge with Mexican heritage. But instead of focusing on it and talking about it, he would do something scandalous again the next day and leave no time to focus on the first scandal. I don’t think the news media was ready to cover the amount of scandals coming from Trump.”He says the media had trouble with the amount of lies coming from the campaign, both from Donald Trump himself as well as the people close to him.“We had trouble with the amount of lies. We were not used to politicians not telling the truth all the time. We also had this assumption that the public would be outraged,” says Fahrenthold.
They were not.
This last, bolded statement shows the limits of ‘fact reporting’ in influencing someone who, because of worldview and disposition, is inclined to believe the lies of the leaders and groups they align with.
It is not entirely accurate to say ‘the public’ was not outraged— it was the GOP base, it’s leadership, and many conservative pundits and commentators that exhibited no outrage; they were inured to the most grotesque statements, the most obvious, absurd falsehoods.
Thus have the efforts of conservatives over several decades borne fruit, with the creation of not merely tolerance of, or acquiescence to, a bigoted autocrat, but enthusiastic support of him and the party he is the embodiment of.
This is not an optimistic picture I’ve presented, not for the future of democracy here in the US, nor anywhere in the world.
If there is any reason to be hopeful, it is in the fact that most Americans do not align with the authoritarian cult that is the GOP, not that current members of the cult can be reached in meaningful numbers.
The truth is not assured resuscitation during our lifetime; we can’t simply assume ‘the truth will win out’. If you doubt that, consider the ‘debates’ about the cause, and meaning of The Civil War.
We may be in the midst of a second Dark Age, with no guarantee that a new Enlightenment will follow.
But if there is to be a new Enlightenment that dispels the darkness of ignorance, fear and bigotry, it must begin with preservation and defense of the truth. For inspiration, perhaps we might turn to the great tradition of scholarship and science of the Islamic world, without which, there would not have been the European Renaissance.