In the age of Trump, facts are fungible things — or alternate things, or imaginary things.
Some are unimportant. We spent a lot of time on crowd size and hand size during and after the campaign, for instance. Some, however, carry much greater weight — characterizations of Mexicans and Muslims, intimations that we are experiencing a new crime wave or that government labor statistics have been rigged.
Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump advisor and spokeswoman, even defended the administration’s tendency toward fiction with the phrase “alternative facts.”
This approach carries with it potential dangers. To paraphrase an overused and often mis-attributed quotation, if there are no facts, then everything is fair game.
But we should not be so quick to solely blame Donald Trump, his surrogates or his supporters for the erosion of trust in what is true. It is both a part of human nature to believe what we already believe and a long-standing political practice to massage data so that it fits the public’ preconceived notions of the truth. Add to this the media’s obsession with the new and the shiny and it is clear we have been on this trajectory for a long time.
Consider this argument from Tristan Bridges at Business Insider, which focuses on “a concept social scientists call the ‘backfire effect.'”
As a rule, misinformed people do not change their minds once they have been presented with facts that challenge their beliefs. But beyond simply not changing their minds when they should, research shows that they are likely to become more attached to their mistaken beliefs. The factual information “backfires.” When people don’t agree with you, research suggests that bringing in facts to support your case might actually make them believe you less.
In other words, fighting the ill-informed with facts is like fighting a grease fire with water. It seems like it should work, but it’s actually going to make things worse.
If this frightens us, it should. The implication is that we are wired to seek confirmation for our own beliefs rather than seeking to challenge them. And if this is true — and I think it is — then it underscores just how difficult it is and will be to challenge political campaigns that ignore factual evidence and rely on popular mis-perceptions.
We knew this, of course. We’ve lived it before — repeatedly. The Bush WMD narrative, for instance, was never based on fact and, instead, relied on the public’s belief that Saddam Hussein was a far stronger tyrant than he actually was. Ronald Reagan expertly manipulated the public’ fear of the other and its underlying racism — the same exact cocktail served by Trump — in his attacks on public housing and welfare cheats. Bill Clinton’s entire political career was based on chasm that separated his “feel your pain” personal appeals and his conservative political reforms (ending welfare, attacking Social Security, deregulating Wall Street — enacted with GOP assistance). And Barack Obama — a rather conventional left-of-center Democrat — built a persona based on his own soaring rhetoric to sell voters the notions of hope and change.
I know this paints all of them in a negative light, which may not be fair. I don’t mean to elide the other aspects of their personalities or their political philosophies and terms in office. My point is, however, that all political actors are, well, actors. They engage in myth-making that relies on our preconceived and tightly held beliefs, which often have been crafted independent of the facts. Trump has done the same, though in a much more far-reaching way.
The gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands over this by journalists like me, and those of us who profess enlightenment ideals, sometimes make this feel like a wholly new phenomenon, that the retreat from reality began when the real estate mogul first threw his hair into the electoral ring in 2015. But Trump is not an anomaly so much as a symptom and the culmination, just the most pernicious variant of the disease.
And while journalists are finally standing up and attempting to fight back — some are, while much of the mainstream broadcast press has acquiesced — few seem willing to accept that we helped create an environment in which facts are treated as just so much noise. Les Moonves, chairman of CBS, was roundly — and rightly — panned when he offered his crass take on the Trump phenomenon early in the campaign, admitting the network was as concerned if not more concerned with ratings than with providing voters with useful information. But the critiques were ahistorical and lacked self-awareness. Moonves just made public the philosophy that has long controlled decision-making by news operations.
Our approach to coverage has long been built on clicks — even before we moved from print and broadcast to the web. The phrase “if it bleeds, it leads” as a rallying cry was designed to juice TV ratings, but it also created a false impression of the extent criminal activity. Turn on any local news show and the hard news portion will be focused almost exclusively on crime stories.
The same goes for so-called “trend” stories, which are based on what are really rare occurrences (remember the knock out game?). Jack Schafer has written extensively about this.
In both cases, the new, the sensational, the scary drive coverage. If 11 minutes of a 22-minute newscast are devoted to random crime stories from a region that encompasses significant parts of three states and often reaches beyond the region, and this is the diet presented night after night after night, what impression does that leave? And how will the viewer of this steady diet of uncontextualized crime respond when a boring numbers piece is presented explaining that crime is down, especially if both local and national politicians like Trump run with the “American carnage” trope?
We, in the media, help create this false impression. Viewers then use these often isolated incidents — on crime, on immigration — to confirm their biases, making them even more vulnerable to charlatans like Trump, and possibly to the kind of misinformation and scapegoating used by fascist regimes to consolidate power. We are not likely on the road to fascism, even if Trump and Trumpism exhibit some characteristics of its early stages. But we should not pretend that it can’t happen — human nature is such that we seek saviors, that we look to individuals who exhibit strength. Our political system, with its checks on power, should be strong enough to withstand such an assault, but only if we as a people remain committed to democratic self-government and the rule of law.
As for journalists, we need to ask ourselves what we can do better. We are like a dog chasing its tale. Clicks and ratings are our collective tale and the distortions we unleash on the public are the result of this dizzyingly foolish pursuit. This needs to change — though, I fear that our existing business model, which is based on century-old assumptions, has us locked in our circular pursuits.
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Hank Kalet 