Public ignorance and media pseudo-objectivity enable Trump’s lies
The elaborate contortions the corporate media will go through to appear even-handed never cease to amaze me. In this presidential campaign, they have had to make more twists and turns than ever. That’s because, while not a perfect person, politician or candidate, Hillary Clinton is way, way more qualified, trustworthy, honest, decent and dignified than Donald Trump. And that is as true as the fact that light travels at 186,000 miles a second.
Big Media just can’t come out and report that as a plain, hard fact and not just not an opinion or a Clinton talking point. For that would violate the unwritten rule of “on the one hand this, on the other hand that.” So the media are covering the presidential campaign as if it were a contest between two equally credible candidates with equally plausible views of reality. And that is as “objective” as the medieval Church’s insistence that the Earth is the center of the universe.
The same thing has happened in several past elections. Gore and Kerrey, honorable men, were smeared through campaigns of lies and innuendo insufficiently debunked by the media, and lost their races to George W. Bush, an ignoramus and, in my opinion, the worst president in U.S. history.
Bush started the Iraq War in violation of international law, a disastrous adventure in every way imaginable, including opening a Pandora’s box out of which emerged all the demons that had been kept bottled up in the Middle East for decades. In a recent special issue of the New York Times (NYT) Sunday magazine that focused on what went wrong in the Middle East, the people of the region overwhelmingly identified the U.S. invasion of Iraq as the trigger.
Elections decided by deception and mass delusion, accepted by the media as plausible, can produce tragedies the consequences of which can last decades.
The way it works is that the Republicans and their allies, the conservative cranks like Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge, put out lies, rumors, shreds of facts and whatever else might be useful to discredit the Democratic candidate. Much of the media repeats and disseminates the garbage uncritically. It then becomes part of the large fund of misinformation, counterfactual beliefs, crazy conspiracy theories and plain lies that pollute the minds of too many Americans.
In an August 27 column (NYT), Timothy Egan gave several examples of this phenomenon. A survey showed that 40 percent of Trump supporters in Texas believe that ACORN is going to steal the election. ACORN, a community action organization focused on the poor, went out of business six years ago after a vicious right wing campaign to discredit the organization.
Other examples:
“If Trump supporters knew that illegal immigration peaked in 2007, or that violent crime has been on a steady downward decline for more than 20 years, they would scoff when Trump says Mexican rapists are surging across the border and crime is out of control.”
“If more than 16 percent of Americans could locate Ukraine on a map, it would have been a Really Big Deal when Trump said that Russia was not going to invade it—two years after they had, in fact, invaded it.”
Then there is the rumor spread by the social media right wing hit man Matt Drudge that Clinton is suffering from a serious undisclosed illness. In fact, while Trump has not made public almost anything about his health status except a letter from his doctor who wrote it in five minutes, Clinton has disclosed extensive medical records. But since you can’t prove a negative—that Clinton is not sick or that the Loch Ness monster really does not exist—some people will believe the rumor and disregard the facts.
The vilification of Hillary Clinton has led some to feel, as Emily Bazelon puts it in this week’s Sunday NYT magazine, “that Hillary must be hiding something.” But what? Clinton, for instance, has released her tax returns. Trump, after having said that if he ran for president he would release his tax returns, in fact has not. This makes him the first presidential candidate in decades to fail to do so.
Trump has spewed out so many false promises, inaccurate assertions, and outright lies that he can’t keep track of them. Any rookie cop knows that self-contradiction is suggestive of lying. Or, as Shakespeare wrote: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we first practice to deceive.” Yet it is Hillary who must be hiding something and who is seen by the public as more untrustworthy than Trump.
Public ignorance is bliss—for Trump. That ignorance is enabled by the pseudo-objectivity of the media and by what can only be described as the willful resistance to facts by a portion of his supporters. Egan: “Last year was the hottest on record. This July just passed was earth’s warmest month in the modern era. Still, Gallup found that 45 percent of Republicans don’t believe the temperature. We’re not talking about doubt over whether the latest spike was human-caused—they don’t accept the numbers, from all those lying meteorologists.”
In November, citizens should fulfill their responsibility by voting with their head. For what remains of the race, the media should enable voters to make an intelligent choice by reporting the truth. On this issue, I give Paul Krugman the last word:
“I would urge journalists to ask whether they are reporting facts or simply engaging in innuendo, and urge the public to read with a critical eye. If reports about a candidate talk about how something ‘raises questions,’ creates ‘shadows,’ or anything similar, be aware that these are all too often weasel words used to create the impression of wrongdoing out of thin air.
“And here’s a pro tip: the best ways to judge a candidate’s character are to look at what he or she has actually done, and what policies he or she is proposing. Mr. Trump’s record of bilking students, stiffing contractors and more is a good indicator of how he’d act as president; Mrs. Clinton’s speaking style and body language aren’t…and the contrast between Mr. Trump’s policy incoherence and Mrs. Clinton’s carefulness speaks volumes today.”
