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Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying
“… the
leader becomes the only reliable source of truth; a familiar phenomenon in an
authoritarian state, but a radical departure from the norms of a democratic
society. The battle over truth is now central to our politics.”
By CHARLES J. SYKES | FEB. 4, 2017
MILWAUKEE — If President
Trump’s first tumultuous weeks have done nothing else, at least they have again
made us a nation of readers.
As Americans grapple with the
unreality of the new administration, George Orwell’s “1984” has enjoyed a
resurgence of interest, becoming a surprise best seller and an invaluable guide
to our post-factual world.
On his first full day in
office Mr. Trump insisted that his inaugural crowd was the largest ever, a
baseless boast that will likely set a pattern for his relationship both to the
media and to the truth.
At an event marking Black
History Month last week, the president took a detour from a discussion of
Frederick Douglass — he described the abolitionist as “an example of somebody
who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more” — to talk
about the press. “A lot of the media is actually the opposition party — they’re
so biased,” he said. “So much of the media is the opposition party and
knowingly saying incorrect things.”
Mr. Trump understands that
attacking the media is the reddest of meat for his base, which has been
conditioned to reject reporting from news sites outside of the conservative
media ecosystem.
For years, as a conservative
radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the
mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to
be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to
delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity
to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical
audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an
audience that could be easily misled.
The news media’s spectacular
failure to get the election right has made it only easier for many
conservatives to ignore anything that happens outside the right’s bubble and
for the Trump White House to fabricate facts with little fear of alienating its
base.
Unfortunately, that also
means that the more the fact-based media tries to debunk the president’s
falsehoods, the further it will entrench the battle lines.
During his first week in
office, Mr. Trump reiterated the unfounded charge that millions of people had
voted illegally. When challenged on the evident falsehood, Sean Spicer, the
White House press secretary, seemed to argue that Mr. Trump’s belief that
something was true qualified as evidence. The press secretary also declined to
answer a straightforward question about the unemployment rate, suggesting that
the number will henceforth be whatever the Trump administration wants it to be.
He can do this because
members of the Trump administration feel confident that the alternative-reality
media will provide air cover, even if they are caught fabricating facts or
twisting words (like claiming that the “ban” on Muslim immigrants wasn’t really
a “ban”). Indeed, they believe they have shifted the paradigm of media
coverage, replacing the traditional media with their own.
In a stunning demonstration
of the power and resiliency of our new post-factual political culture, Mr.
Trump and his allies in the right media have already turned the term “fake
news” against its critics, essentially draining it of any meaning. During the
campaign, actual “fake news” — deliberate hoaxes — polluted political discourse
and clogged social media timelines.
Some outlets opened the door,
by helping spread conspiracy theories and indulging the paranoia of the fever
swamps. For years, the widely read Drudge Report has linked to the bizarre
conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who believes that both the attacks of Sept. 11
and the Sandy Hook shootings were government-inspired “false flag” operations.
For conservatives, this
should have made it clear that something was badly amiss in their media
ecosystem. But now any news deemed to be biased, annoying or negative can be
labeled “fake news.” Erroneous reports that the bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office or misleading reports
that sanctions against Russia had been lifted will be seized on by Mr. Trump’s
White House to reinforce his indictment.
Even as he continues to
attack the “dishonest media,” Mr. Trump and his allies are empowering this
alt-reality media, providing White House access to Breitbart and other
post-factual outlets that are already morphing into fierce defenders of the
administration.
The relationship appears to
be symbiotic, as Mr. Trump often seems to pick up on talking points from Fox
News and has tweeted out links from websites notorious for their casual
relationship to the truth, including sites like Gateway Pundit, a hoax-peddling
site that announced, shortly after the inauguration, that it would have a White
House correspondent.
By now, it ought to be
evident that enemies are important to this administration, whether they are
foreigners, refugees, international bankers or the press.
But discrediting independent
sources of information also has two major advantages for Mr. Trump: It helps
insulate him from criticism and it allows him to create his own narratives,
metrics and “alternative facts.”
All administrations lie, but
what we are seeing here is an attack on credibility itself.
The Russian dissident and
chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process
when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or
push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
Mr. Kasparov grasps that the
real threat is not merely that a large number of Americans have become
accustomed to rejecting factual information, or even that they have become
habituated to believing hoaxes. The real danger is that, inundated with
“alternative facts,” many voters will simply shrug, asking, “What is truth?” —
and not wait for an answer.
In that world, the leader
becomes the only reliable source of truth; a familiar phenomenon in an
authoritarian state, but a radical departure from the norms of a democratic
society. The battle over truth is now central to our politics.
This may explain one of the
more revealing moments from after the election, when one of Mr. Trump’s
campaign surrogates, Scottie Nell Hughes, was asked to defend the clearly false
statement by Mr. Trump that millions of votes had been cast illegally. She
answered by explaining that everybody now had their own way of interpreting
whether a fact was true or not.
“There’s no such thing,
unfortunately, anymore as facts,” she declared. Among “a large part of the
population” what Mr. Trump said was the truth.
“When he says that millions
of people illegally voted,” she said, his supporters believe him — and “people
believe they have facts to back that up.”
Or as George Orwell said:
“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass
into history.” But Ms. Hughes’s comment was perhaps unintentionally insightful.
Mr. Trump and company seem to be betting that much of the electorate will not
care if the president tells demonstrable lies, and will pick and choose
whatever “alternative facts” confirm their views.
The next few years will be a
test of that thesis.
In the meantime, we must
recognize the magnitude of the challenge. If we want to restore respect for
facts and break through the intellectual ghettos on both the right and left,
the mainstream media will have to be aggressive without being hysterical and
adversarial without being unduly oppositional.
Perhaps just as important, it
will be incumbent on conservative media outlets to push back as well.
Conservatism should be a reality-based philosophy, and the movement will be
better off if it recognizes that facts really do matter. There may be
short-term advantages to running headlines about millions of illegal immigrants
voting or secret United Nations plots to steal your guns, but the longer the
right enables such fabrications, the weaker it will be in the long run. As
uncomfortable as it may be, it will fall to the conservative media to police
its worst actors.
The conservative media
ecosystem — like the rest of us — has to recognize how critical, but also how
fragile, credibility is in the Orwellian age of Donald Trump.
Charles J. Sykes
(@SykesCharlie), a former talk-show host in Wisconsin, is the author of the
forthcoming “How the Right Lost Its Mind.”
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