Post-truth politics

Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics) is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. Post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of truth by rendering it of "secondary" importance. While this has been described as a contemporary problem, there is a possibility that it has long been a part of political life, but was less notable before the advent of the internet. In the novel 1984, George Orwell, cast a world in which the state is daily changing historic records to fit its propaganda goals of the day. Orwell is said to have based much of his criticism of this on Soviet Russian practices.

The contemporary origin of the term is attributed to blogger David Roberts who used the term in 2010 in a column for Grist.[1][2][3] Political commentators have identified post-truth politics as ascendant in Russian, Chinese, American, Australian, British, Indian, Japanese and Turkish politics, as well as in other areas of debate, driven by a combination of the 24-hour news cycle, false balance in news reporting, and the increasing ubiquity of social media.[3][4][5][6][7][8]

History

According to Oxford Dictionaries, the term post-truth was first used in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation. Tesich writes that following the shameful truth of Watergate, more assuaging coverage of the Iran–Contra scandal and Persian Gulf War demonstrate that "we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world."[9][10] In 2004, Ralph Keyes used the term "post-truth era" in his book by that title.[11] The same year American journalist Eric Alterman spoke of a "post-truth political environment" and coined the term "the post-truth presidency" in his analysis of the misleading statements made by the Bush administration after 9/11.[12] In his 2004 book Post-democracy, Colin Crouch used the phrase "post-democracy" to mean a model of politics where "elections certainly exist and can change governments," but "public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams." Crouch directly attributes the "advertising industry model" of political communication to the crisis of trust and accusations of dishonesty that a few years later others have associated with post-truth politics.[13]

The term "post-truth politics" was coined by the blogger David Roberts in a blog post for Grist on 1 April 2010, where it was defined as "a political culture in which politics (public opinion and media narratives) have become almost entirely disconnected from policy (the substance of legislation)".[1][2] The term became widespread during the campaigns for the 2016 presidential election in the United States and the 2016 referendum on membership in the European Union in the United Kingdom.[14][15] Oxford Dictionaries declared that its international word of the year in 2016 is "post-truth", citing a 2,000% increase in usage compared to 2015.[16]

Jennifer Hochschild, H.L. Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, has described the rise of post-truth as a return to 18th and 19th century political and media practices in the United States, following a period in the 20th century where the media was relatively balanced and rhetoric was toned down.[17] The pamphlet wars that arose with the growth of printing and literacy beginning in the 1600s have been described as an early form of post-truth politics. Slanderous and vitriolic pamphlets were cheaply printed and widely disseminated, and the dissent that they fomented led to wars and revolutions such as the English Civil War and the American War of Independence.[8]

Stephen Colbert has made additional claims in 2016 to start first using it in context of American politics under a different named called "Truthiness" that was used by his character on the Colbert Report during its run.

Description

A Vote Leave poster carrying the false claim about the EU membership fee, cited as an example of post-truth politics.[18]

A defining trait of post-truth politics is that campaigners continue to repeat their talking points, even if these are found to be untrue by the media or independent experts.[19] For example, during campaigning for the British EU referendum campaign, Vote Leave made repeated use of the claim that EU membership cost £350 million a week, although later began to use the figure as a net amount of money sent directly to the EU. This figure, which ignored the UK rebate and other factors, was described as "potentially misleading" by the UK Statistics Authority, as "not sensible" by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and was rejected in fact-checks by BBC News, Channel 4 News and Full Fact.[20][21][22] Vote Leave nevertheless continued to use the figure as a centrepiece of their campaign until the day of the referendum, after which point they downplayed the pledge as having been an "example", pointing out that it was only ever suggested as a possible alternative use of the net funds sent to the EU.[23] Tory MP and Leave campaigner Sarah Wollaston, who left the group in protest during its campaign, criticised its "post-truth politics".[18]

Michael Deacon, parliamentary sketchwriter for The Daily Telegraph, summarised the core message of post-truth politics as "Facts are negative. Facts are pessimistic. Facts are unpatriotic." He added that post-truth politics can also include a claimed rejection of partisanship and negative campaigning.[24] In this context, campaigners can push a utopian "positive campaign" to which rebuttals can be dismissed as smears and scaremongering and opposition as partisan.[2][24]

In its most extreme mode, post-truth politics can make use of conspiracism.[25][26] Fact-based criticism of a campaign is attributed to a powerful enemy – such as the Establishment, New World Order, Zionists, or the mainstream media – which is supposedly seeking to discredit it, and this in turn drives voters away from these information sources.[24] In this form of post-truth politics, false rumors (such as the "birther" or "Muslim" conspiracy theories about President Obama) become major news topics.[27]

Drivers

Several trends in the media landscape have been blamed for the perceived rise of post-truth politics. While there are many drivers of this process, one contributing factor has been the proliferation of state-funded news agencies like CCTV and Russia Today, which allow authoritarian states to influence Western audiences. According to Peter Pomeranstev, a British-Russian journalist who worked for TNT in Moscow, one of their prime objectives has been to de-legitimize Western institutions, including the structures of government, democracy, and human rights. Consequently, trust in the mainstream media, has reached historical lows in countries around the world.[15] It has been suggested that under these conditions fact-checking by news outlets struggles to gain traction among the wider public,[15][28] and politicians resort to increasingly drastic messaging.[5] Social media adds an additional dimension, as the networks that users create can become echo chambers (possibly emphasised by the filter bubble) where one political viewpoint dominates and scrutiny of claims fails,[6][8][29] allowing a parallel media ecosystem of websites, publishers and news channels to develop which can repeat post-truth claims without rebuttal.[30] In this environment, post-truth campaigns can ignore fact checks or dismiss them as being motivated by bias.[26] The Guardian editor-in-chief Katherine Viner laid some of the blame on the rise of clickbait – articles of dubious factual content with a misleading headline, designed to be widely shared – saying that "chasing down cheap clicks at the expense of accuracy and veracity" undermines the value of journalism and truth.[31] David Mikkelson, co-founder of the fact checking and debunking site Snopes.com, described the introduction of social media and fake news sites as a turning point, saying "I’m not sure I’d call it a post-truth age but … there’s been an opening of the sluice-gate and everything is pouring through. The bilge keeps coming faster than you can pump."[32]

Many news outlets are bound by rules to ensure impartiality. In some cases, this leads to false balance where minority viewpoints are given undue emphasis and exaggerations or lies told during political campaigns are not adequately challenged.[19][33] The 24-hour news cycle, which requires constant reporting and analysis, also means that news channels repeatedly draw on the same public figures, which benefits PR-savvy politicians and means that presentation and personality can have a larger impact on the audience than facts,[34] while the process of claim and counter-claim can provide grist for days of news coverage at the expense of deeper analysis of the case.[6]

Media and Politics scholar Jayson Harsin in 2015 coined the term "regime of post-truth" that encompasses many aspects of post-truth politics. He argues that a convergent set of developments have created the conditions of post-truth society: the development of professional political communication informed by cognitive science, which aims at managing perception and belief of segmented populations through techniques like microtargeting (which includes the strategic use of rumors and falsehoods); the fragmentation of modern more centralized mass news media gatekeepers that largely repeated one another's scoops and their reports; the fierce attention economy marked by information overload and acceleration, prolific user-generated content and fewer society-wide common trusted authorities to distinguish between truth and lies, accurate and inaccurate; the algorithms that govern what appears in social media and search engine rankings, sometimes based on what the algorithm thinks users want and not on what is necessarily factual; and news media that has itself been marred by scandals of plagiarism, hoaxes, propaganda, and changing news values, all of which some scholars say issue from economic crises resulting in downsizing and favoring trends toward more traditionally tabloid stories and styles of reporting, known as tabloidization and infotainment. While some of these phenomena (such as a more tabloidesque press) may suggest a return to the past, the whole effect of the convergences creates a socio-political phenomenon that exceeds a mere return to earlier forms of journalism. It is not that truth and facts have disappeared but that they are the object of deliberate distortion and struggle. Fact-checking and rumor-busting sites abound, but they are unable to reunite a fragmented set of audiences (attention-wise) and their respective trustful-/distrustfulness. Since the condition is manipulated competitively by professional pan-partisan political communication, Harsin calls it a "regime of post-truth" instead of merely post-truth politics.[35]

The rise of post-truth politics coincides with polarized political beliefs. A 2016 Pew Research Center study of American adults found that "those with the most consistent ideological views on the left and right have information streams that are distinct from those of individuals with more mixed political views – and very distinct from each other."[36]

Dissenting views

In an editorial, New Scientist suggested "a cynic might wonder if politicians are actually any more dishonest than they used to be", and hypothesized that "fibs once whispered into select ears are now overheard by everyone".[8] Similarly, Viner suggested that while social media has helped some untruths to spread, it has also restrained others; as an example, she said the The Sun's false "The Truth" story following the Hillsborough disaster, and the associated police cover-up, would be hard to imagine in the social media age.[31] Toby Young writing for The Spectator, called the term a "cliché" used selectively primarily by left-wing commentators to attack what are actually universal ideological biases, saying "We are all post-truthers and probably always have been".[37] However, The Economist has called this argument "complacent", identifying a qualitative difference between political scandals of previous generations, such as those surrounding the Suez Crisis and the Iran–Contra affair, which involved attempting to cover-up the truth, and contemporary ones in which public facts are simply ignored.[3] Similarly, Alexios Mantzarlis for the Poynter Institute said that political lies were not new and identified several historical political campaigns which would now be described as "post-truth" and that the label was in part a "coping mechanism for commentators reacting to attacks on not just any facts, but on those central to their belief system", but also noted that 2016 had been "an acrimonious year for politics on both sides of the Atlantic".[38] Mantzarlis also noted that interest in fact-checking had never been higher, suggesting that at least part of the electorate rejects "post-truth" politics.[38][39]

Journalist Sam Kriss said about post-truth: "I’m not advocating the practice of lying to people, but the power that politics offers is to think of something that doesn't exist, something that under any kind of very strict definition would be considered untrue and, and decide that you would like it to become true. [...] So I think the question is what kind of untruth we want."[40]

Uses

Post-truth politics has been applied as a political buzzword to a wide range of political cultures – one article in The Economist identified post-truth politics in Austria, Germany, North Korea, Poland, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.[3]

Britain

An early use of the phrase in British politics was in March 2012 by Scottish Labour MSP Iain Gray in criticising the difference between Scottish National Party's claims and official statistics.[41] Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy also described an undercurrent of post-truth politics in which people "cheerfully shot the messenger" when presented with facts that didn't support their viewpoint, seeing it among pro-independence campaigners in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Jeremy Corbyn supporters in the 2015 Labour leadership election, and Leave campaigners in the then-upcoming EU membership referendum.[42]

Post-truth politics has been retroactively identified in the lead-up to the Iraq War,[7] particularly after the Chilcot Report, published in July 2016, concluded that Tony Blair misrepresented military intelligence to support his view that Iraq's chemical weapons program was advanced.[43][44]

The phrase became widely used during the 2016 UK EU membership referendum to describe the Leave campaign.[14][15][7][18][45] Faisal Islam, political editor for Sky News, said that Michael Gove used "post-fact politics" that were imported from the Trump campaign; in particular, Gove's comment in an interview that "I think people in this country have had enough of experts" was singled out as illustrative of a post-truth trend.[15][45][46] Similarly, Arron Banks, the founder of the unofficial Leave.EU campaign, said that "facts don't work [...] You've got to connect with people emotionally. It's the Trump success."[24] Andrea Leadsom—a prominent campaigner for Leave in the EU referendum and one of the two final candidates in the Conservative leadership election—has been singled out as a post-truth politician,[24] especially after she denied having disparaged rival Theresa May's childlessness in an interview with The Times in spite of transcript evidence.[31]

India

Amulya Gopalakrishnan, columnist for The Times of India, identified similarities between the Trump and Brexit campaigns on the one hand, and hot-button issues in India such as the Ishrat Jahan case and the ongoing case against Teesta Setalvad on the other, where accusations of forged evidence and historical revisionism have resulted in an "ideological impasse".[6]

United States

In its original formulation, the phrase "post-truth politics" was used to describe the paradoxical situation in the United States where the Republican Party, which enforced stricter party discipline than the Democratic Party, was nevertheless able to present itself as more bipartisan, since individual Democrats were more likely to support Republican policies than vice versa.[2] The term was used by Paul Krugman in The New York Times to describe Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign in which certain claims—such as that Barack Obama had cut defence spending and that he had embarked on an "apology tour"—continued to be repeated long after being debunked.[33]

In a review for the Harvard Gazette, Christopher Robichaud, lecturer in ethics and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School described conspiracy theories about the legitimacy of elections and politicians – for example, the "birther" idea that Barack Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen – as one side-effect of post-truth politics, and contrasted the behaviour of the candidates with that following the contested result of the 2000 election, in which Al Gore conceded and encouraged his supporters to accept the result of Bush v. Gore.[17] Similarly, Rob Boston writing for The Humanist saw a rise in conspiracy theories across American public life, including Birtherism, the 9/11 Truth movement, the edited Planned Parenthood videos and movements denying climate change and rejecting evolution, which he identified as a result of post-truth politics, noting that the existence of extensive and widely available evidence against these conspiracy theories had not slowed their growth.[30]

In 2016, the "post-truth" label was especially widely used to describe the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, including by Brogan Morris writing in Salon,[47] Professor Daniel W. Drezner in The Washington Post,[15] Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian,[14] Chris Cillizza in The Independent,[26] Jeet Heer in The New Republic,[48] and James Kirchick in the Los Angeles Times,[49] and by several professors of government and history at Harvard.[17] Following the 2016 United States presidential election, President Barack Obama stated that the new media ecosystem "means everything is true and nothing is true".[50]

Environmental politics

Although the consensus among scientists is that the Earth's climate is warming due to human activities, several political parties around the world have made climate change denial a basis of their policies. These parties have been accused of using post-truth techniques to attack environmental measures meant to combat climate changes to benefit industry donors.[51] In Australia, the repeal of carbon pricing by the government of Tony Abbott was described as "the nadir of post-truth politics" by The Age.[4]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Tom Jeffery (26 June 2016). "Britain Needs More Democracy After the EU Referendum, Not Less". The Huffington Post. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Post-Truth Politics". Grist. 1 April 2010. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "The post-truth world: Yes, I’d lie to you," The Economist Sept 10, 2016
  4. 1 2 John Connor (14 July 2014). "Tony Abbott's carbon tax outrage signals nadir of post-truth politics". The Age. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  5. 1 2 Gay Alcorn (27 February 2014). "Facts are futile in an era of post-truth politics". The Age. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Amulya Gopalakrishnan (30 June 2016). "Life in post-truth times: What we share with the Brexit campaign and Trump". The Times of India. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  7. 1 2 3 Ian Dunt (29 June 2016). "Post-truth politics is driving us mad". politics.co.uk. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  8. 1 2 3 4 "Free speech has met social media, with revolutionary results". New Scientist. 1 June 2016. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  9. ↑ Flood, Alison (15 November 2016). "'Post-truth' named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries". The Guardian. Retrieved 20 November 2016.
  10. ↑ Kreitner, Richard (30 November 2016). "Post-Truth and Its Consequences: What a 25-Year-Old Essay Tells Us About the Current Moment". The Nation. Retrieved 1 December 2016.
  11. ↑ Keyes, Ralph (2004). The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life. New York: St. Martin's.
  12. ↑ Alterman, Eric (2004). When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences. New York: Viking. p. 305.
  13. ↑ Crouch, Colin (2004). Post-democracy. Cambridge, UK: Polity. p. 4.
  14. 1 2 3 Jonathan Freedland (13 May 2016). "Post-truth politicians such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are no joke". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  15. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Daniel W. Drezner (16 June 2016). "Why the post-truth political era might be around for a while". The Washington Post. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  16. ↑ Flood, Alison (15 November 2016). "'Post-truth' named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 November 2016.
  17. 1 2 3 Christina Pazzanese (14 July 2016). "Politics in a 'post-truth' age". Harvard Gazette. Retrieved 6 August 2016.
  18. 1 2 3 Ned Simons (8 June 2016). "Tory MP Sarah Wollaston Switches Sides in EU Referendum Campaign". The Huffington Post. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  19. 1 2 Peter Preston (9 September 2012). "Broadcast news is losing its balance in the post-truth era". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  20. ↑ "The UK's EU membership fee". Full Fact. 27 May 2016. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  21. ↑ Anthony Reuben (25 April 2016). "Reality Check: Would Brexit mean extra £350m a week for NHS?". BBC News. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  22. ↑ Patrick Worrall (19 April 2016). "FactCheck: do we really send £350m a week to Brussels?". Channel 4 News. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  23. ↑ Stone, Jon (12 September 2016). "Vote Leave's £350m for the NHS pledge was 'just an example', says group's chair". The Independent. Retrieved 16 November 2016.
  24. 1 2 3 4 5 Michael Deacon (9 July 2016). "In a world of post-truth politics, Andrea Leadsom will make the perfect PM". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  25. ↑ Roy Boston (22 December 2015). "Humanists and the Rise of "Post-Truth America"". The Humanist. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  26. 1 2 3 Chris Cillizza (10 May 2016). "Donald Trump's post-truth campaign and what it says about the dismal state of US politics". The Independent. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  27. ↑ Harsin, Jayson. "That's Democratainment: Obama, Rumor Bombs and Primary Definers". Flow TV. Retrieved 31 August 2016.
  28. ↑ Richard Sambrook (January 2012). "Delivering trust: Impartiality and objectivity in the digital age" (PDF). Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. University of Oxford.
  29. ↑ Gillian Tett (1 July 2016). "Why we no longer trust the experts". Financial Times. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  30. 1 2 Rob Boston (22 December 2015). "Humanists and the Rise of "Post-Truth America"". The Humanist. Retrieved 6 August 2016.
  31. 1 2 3 Katherine Viner (12 July 2016). "How technology disrupted the truth". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 July 2016.
  32. ↑ Rory Carroll (1 August 2016). "Can mythbusters like Snopes.com keep up in a post-truth era?". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 October 2016.
  33. 1 2 Paul Krugman (23 December 2011). "The Post-Truth Campaign". The New York Times.
  34. ↑ Ralph Keyes (2004). The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life. pp. 127–128. ISBN 9781429976220.
  35. ↑ Harsin, Jayson (24 February 2015). "Regimes of Posttruth, Postpolitics, and Attention Economies". Communication, Culture & Critique. 8 (2): 327–333.
  36. ↑ Amy Mitchell, Amy; Kiley, Jocelyn; Eva Matsa, Katerina; Gottfied, Jeffrey. "Political Polarization & Media Habits". Pew Research Center. Retrieved 31 August 2016.
  37. ↑ Toby Young (16 July 2016). "The truth about 'post-truth politics'". The Spectator. Retrieved 14 July 2016.
  38. 1 2 Alexios Mantzarlis (21 July 2016). "No, we're not in a 'post-fact' era". Poynter Institute. Retrieved 27 October 2016.
  39. ↑ Alexios Mantzarlis (7 October 2016). "Fact check: This is not really a post-fact election". Washington Post. Retrieved 27 October 2016.
  40. ↑ "It's Always Been "Post-Truth" Politics". WYNC. 9 September 2016. Retrieved 27 October 2016.
  41. ↑ Iain Gray (1 March 2012). "Beware the black art of post-truth politics". The Scotsman. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  42. ↑ Jim Murphy (23 September 2015). "We live in a volatile age of post-truth politics – and so Brexit cannot be ruled out". New Statesman. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  43. ↑ Max Richter (8 July 2016). "Millions of us knew the Iraq war would be a catastrophe. Why didn't Tony Blair?". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 July 2016. Blair's creative way with the facts seems in retrospect to be the beginning of the sort of post-truth politics we have seen in the recent Brexit debate, where fiction and reality were treated by Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and their like as essentially interchangeable.
  44. ↑ "Leader: The Iraq War and its aftermath". New Statesman. 6 July 2016. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  45. 1 2 Mikey Smith, Rachel Bishop (3 June 2016). "Post-truth politics: Michael Gove accused of 'importing Trump campaign' to Britain with £350m a week claim". The Mirror. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  46. ↑ Matthew Flinders, Post-truth, post-political, post-democracy: the tragedy of the UK's referendum on the European Union, OUPBlog (Oxford University Press (3 July 2016).
  47. ↑ Brogan Morris (19 June 2016). "Trump's lies aren't unique to America: Post-truth politics are killing democracies on both sides of the Atlantic". Salon. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  48. ↑ Heer, Jeet (1 December 2015), "Donald Trump Is Not a Liar; He's something worse: a bullshit artist", The New Republic, retrieved 22 July 2016
  49. ↑ James Kerchick (29 June 2016). "What Trump and the Brexiteers have in common". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
  50. ↑ OBAMA RECKONS WITH A TRUMP PRESIDENCY, The New Yorker (28 November 2016)
  51. ↑ Connor, John (November 2011). "Climate change and post-truth politics". Waste Management and Environment. 22 (10).

Further reading

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