The Lies, This Time Around

It is premature to get our hopes up, but it seems to me that this past week marked a real breakthrough in American journalism. This was the first time that the mainstream US press has peeked out from under the covers to report that lies were lies.

I think this is an effect of the pressure of the social media. Even as the various Republicans were speaking at their convention, Twitter was lighting up with fact-checking, Facebook was circulating pictures with funny captions quoting the speakers, nonsense was being laughed at in public.

This ability to bring out the facts in real time issues a kind of challenge to the corporate news industry. It is very hard to keep viewers watching your whitewashed fiction when they can sit at their computers and learn the truth.

The comparison point, for me, is the 2003 build-up to the American attack on Iraq (you can hardly call it a "war," we don't even know who the enemy was supposed to be). Day after day the media giants published shocking stories about the horrors of Saddam, the links between Iraq and al Qaeda, weapons of mass destruction, nuclear threats, drones, plastic shredders, poison, torture. There were online forums and blogs on the Internet where people could discuss things and where knowledgeable journalists could present alternative viewpoints that undermined the corporate/government perspective, and these created real doubt in that small section of the population that was aware of those sites, but it was all so new and the established media paid no attention.

Remember, the worldwide web only appeared in about 1995, you never saw a web browser before then, they didn't exist -- and there were no web sites to browse, even if you did have a browser. No one knew what to use this new thing for in 2003, as the White House manufactured reasons to go to war and the corporate media repeated the press releases as if they were reporting the news. As the network's structure was just beginning to emerge, the polarizing buildup to aggression accelerated the formation of online communities where facts could be shared.

All that has been maturing over the past decade, and this might have been the week that it finally ripened. The worldwide web is now organized into clusters and subnetworks that transmit fast-moving information, top-quality journalists and experts use it to disseminate their knowledge, records can be retrieved and shared in an instant. Politicians can still lie but only the most irresponsible and disconnected citizens remain unaware when facts are in question.

As David Roberts has noted at Grist, the recent Republican National Convention moves the game to the next level, and in fact it presents a new kind of challenge to journalists.

When I originally wrote about post-truth politics, I was focused on how Obama should operate within it. But most of the recent discussion has been about how journalists should operate within it...

David Bernstein of The Boston Phoenix gets at the first in this tweet:

Dear media critics: OK, entire news media called Romney’s welfare attack a lie. Campaign still pushing it. Now what?

Fair question! The political media, at least certain quarters of it, has become more forthright about calling out lies and deceptions lately. (For some reason, the welfare attack in particular has fired them up.) But the Romney campaign doesn’t give a damn. As their pollster said the other day, “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.” A key feature of the post-truth political landscape is that there are no longer universally recognized arbiters or referees of fact. The right has their own media ecosystem. Why should they care what journos outside it say?

So what’s a journalist to do when she calls a lie a lie … and then the candidate keeps repeating it? One of the great demands of daily journalism is novelty. Reporters are supposed to write about what happened today, what’s new. Pundits and analysts hate debunking the same lie over and over again; it bores them and their readers. But if a candidate or campaign just bulls through the initial round of scolding and keeps on telling the lie, what then? The whole enterprise can seem futile, especially when none of it seems to reach or budge undecided voters. As Romney and Ryan lie with abandon, how should journalists navigate post-truth politics?

It is significant that he hangs his argument on a tweet by a journalist. Twitter is faster than published and broadcast media, and its editorial process is democratic: people retweet what they think is good, so some content spreads through the population while some -- most of it -- dies out. Twitter is able to provoke and stay on big media's back in continuous time, not having to wait through publication cycles or worry about advertisers' approval -- it was fascinating to see Twitter users' frustration at the delay in broadcasting of the recent Olympic games, a few hours was an intolerably long gap for them, it made the television audience look dull and slow. Which they are, as they sit on their couches waiting for the sponsors to spoon-feed selected information to them in prime time, when advertising rates are highest.

This week, it was impressive to see the line-up of media outlets that felt compelled to report that much of what was said at the RNC was pure fiction. I can't remember ever seeing that before, can you? It wasn't that journalists' eyes were suddenly opened -- they have to be one of the most skeptical, cynical groups of people in the world, they know when politicians are full of it -- but suddenly they realized that if they did not report on the lying they could lose their audience. Everybody else, sitting at the kitchen table with their computer, knew that the Republicans were lying about everything at their "We Built It" convention. If the media had just reported the speeches, like they usually do, with some comment on what the wives wore and the occasional shot of a dirty hippie or two protesting outside, like they usually do, their readership would have recognized it for what it is, pure sanitized propaganda.

Roberts realizes that this transition raises the next question. The traditional conservative response when their lies have been revealed is to keep repeating them until they become media "facts." No one in America was really surprised that there were no WMD's in Iraq, those were a media fact and not a real fact. Everybody knows that Obama said you didn't build the roads and bridges that bring customers and inventory to your business. The next question is how much effort the media should invest in refuting the lies.

It is probably not enough just to put Obama's full quote in context, for instance, and move on. Because the Republicans will present it out of context again and again. But the media are in fact going to bore their audience to death if every day they have to re-publish the facts that contradict the same old statements.

I think it comes down to the parties and the politicians to keep the story alive. Think, for instance, about Paul Ryan's statement that he finished a marathon in under three minutes ( see refutation by Fox News). He hadn't. He ran in one marathon, in 1990, and it took him more than an hour longer than he said. It was a big fat lie, but it quickly became part of the background fabric of our day. We are too busy to argue about it, there are more important things, and so the lie cohabitates with truth, as equals.

Compare Ryan's marathon to Al Gore's creation of the Internet. In one case a guy flat-out lied, in another, a guy's words could be twisted to make it sound like he claimed to have done something he obviously could not have done. But who is going to go on TV day after day and make jokes about Paul Ryan's marathon time? Who is going to photoshop the images that will go viral on the Internet, showing Paul Ryan running at the speed of light? What talk radio host is going to tell the story in sarcastic tones from morning till night, day after day, what television network is going to make this a talking point to bring up on every show? Answer: none, nobody, nothing, it won't happen. It's just another lie and it is something that journalists accept and that Americans expect, unless a political machine picks it up and tries to make something of it. Ryan's self-aggrandizing lie has nothing to do with jobs, the economy, foreign policy, but if the opposition party does not pick it up and nail him to the wall with it, he will get away with it and lie again when he wants.

In the end somebody will say, "Both sides do it," and will point to something a Democrat has said that was proven wrong, and people will roll their eyes and mutter about politicians, and that will be it. We're too busy to track these things down, to question each statement. Guy says he has a plan for the economy, okay, good, we need a plan, give the guy a shot at it. What? He doesn't really have a plan? Okay, uh, which guy was that again?

The media might find a new role in keeping the facts and lies separated, so the public can make complicated choices, but they need to be reinforced by their audience, the public, and by the political organizations that have a stake in distinguishing honesty from deceit.