Last week, McClatchy newswire ran a story that was just a day late to be an April Fool’s prank. According to two unnamed sources, part of Trump’s 2020 campaign will be touting his environmental achievements. Seems that even the Trump campaign recognizes that the vast majority of Americans support environmental policies, because no one thinks hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses, every year, is a future we want.
The bad news: that’s the future Trump’s pointing us towards. Not only did Trump’s campaign manager go on the record to claim the story is “100 percent fake news,” but more importantly, Trump’s agenda is the opposite of the general public’s nearly universally held policy preference of not being sickened or killed by pollution. Unfortunately, as Paul Krugman put it succinctly last week, Donald Trump is trying to kill you.
Does that mean reporters should just ignore these sorts of obviously bogus claims? Probably not, since what the most powerful person in the country is going to say and do is newsworthy. So should media report on the mismatch between Trump’s supposed green thumb with his blood-red hands?
Bloomberg’s coverage gave ample space to environmental voices pointing out how “the administration cynically plans to take credit for achievements driven by policies put in place by his predecessors -- including regulations his agencies are now attempting to undermine or overturn.”
One word jumped off the page at us: “undermine.” Embracing the language of some positive ideal in the service of attacking that very concept is literally the definition of propaganda, where language is used as a strategy, and you emulate to undermine.
While that’s plenty obvious, there are also more subtle but still intentional forms of propaganda happening on the right. As the Green New Deal has put climate policy on the table, and as the GOP recognizes that climate and environment are winning issues, deniers are feeling squeezed. As David Roberts writes in Vox this week, the GOP has turned to “innovation” as the newest “smokescreen” for denial. Roberts concludes that the way to spur innovation is through regulation--the exact set of policies the right has steadfast opposed since its takeover by the fossil fuel industry.
The language we use, how we use it, and who uses it matters. When dealing with the erosion of Louisiana’s coastline, for example, it’s important to recognize that the issue is not a passive one. As New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Bob Marshall wrote Sunday, euphemisms about how the land is “vanishing” or “disappearing” beneath the water hides a vital point. Thousands of miles of coastline are underwater, but that didn’t just happen. The oil infrastructure’s assault on the fragile ecosystem was, in Marshall’s words, “a brutal assault, a battery, a vicious mugging.”
“This was no gentle, whispering vanishing act,” Marshall continues, “it was a noisy, diesel-fumed mauling of a pristine ecosystem we claim to love.”
And though he doesn’t name it, by pointing out that “we claim to love” this ecosystem even as we benefit off of its destruction, Marshall so perfectly describes the insidious nature of propaganda.
By co-opting language that reassures the intended audience that there’s no need to worry, this is all for the best, it provides cover for humanity at its worst.
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