The lie as a political tool has been with us since the first group of humans huddled together for protection against danger from outside the group, village, or tribe. A leader would have come to the fore; someone seen as wise and capable, someone who could make the decisions necessary to perpetuate the continued existence of his followers. What kind of promises did he make to secure his exalted position? What kind of lies-and-or-facts were told to acquire the consent of the ruled?
From that ancient past until January 22, 2017, American
politicians strived to appear as men and women of integrity; leaders who could
be trusted to make the hard decisions required for the continued existence of
the group and its way of life. On that date, a politician uttered a provable
falsehood about the crowd size of Donald Trump’s 2017 presidential inauguration
crowd size. When a reporter challenged the White House’s numbers, advisor to
the president Kellyanne Conway said the crowd size put forward were
“alternative facts,” thus ushering in the post-truth era.
Nazi Germany had offered a variation on the alternative fact
with Adolf Hitler’s invention of “The Big Lie” as a propaganda technique in
which a lie is so bold that its audience is to assume it’s truth that no one
“could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Then,
Norman Mailer coined the term “factoids” for which he described as "facts
which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper." The
Oxford English Dictionary online takes the definition a step further: “An item
of information accepted or presented as a fact, although not (or not
necessarily) true; spec. an assumption or speculation reported and
repeated so often as to be popularly considered true; a simulated or imagined
fact “
An additional doctrine of the post-truth era came from UK
journalist Damian Thompson who in 2005 coined the term “counter-knowledge,”
defined as “misinformation packaged to look like fact and that some critical
mass of people believes.”
Those four words and phrases for “lie” merged into one
reality with the Fox News broadcast of Sunday Morning Futures, which
ignored Rupert Murdoch’s suggestion to avoid talk of Donald Trump’s claims of
election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Because the show’s host
mentioned Dominion Voting Systems by name, she opened Fox to a
multi-million-dollar lawsuit.
As a result of the “Big Lie” promoted by Donald Trump and
echoed by the Conservative media, between 2,000 and 2,500 rioters attended the
pro-Trump election conspiracy theory insurrection on January 21, 2021, causing
$2.7 billion in damage and four deaths on the day of the attack, plus four
suicides by Capitol policce in the days and weeks following.
Fox is not alone as the right-wing voice in American media. A
2007 joint study by the Free Press and the Center for American Progress found
that “On the 257 radio stations owned by the five largest owners of commercial
stations, 91 percent of weekday talk programming is conservative.” The study
reported that 2570 hours of conservative programming filled an average weekday,
while “progressive” talk broadcasted only 254 hours. That is not to say that
the entire conservative media is pouring out lies to boost the right-wing
ideology but that a tremendous amount of conservative spin is being dumped on
the American people. It surprising that the GOP has not won every election they
have entered.
Conservative media outlets are not the sole purveyors of right-wing
and fake news. Their audience also spreads the word. A subgroup of
conservatives known among researchers as “Low-Conscientious Conservatives”
(LCCs) were found to be the largest body of people engaged in spreading
disinformation,[1] a phenomenon the result of “the Fox News Effect.” But what
good is having extensive media power if they cannot use it to push their
audience into hating the same people they hate? That is not to say that
progressive media does not employ the same kind of emotional trigger headlines
that has made right-wing media so ubiquitous. But so much of the left-wing
media still seems to focus of intellect over emotion. They have not yet learned
that Americans do not think with their prefrontal cortex, but with the limbic
system, the areas of the brain responsible for critical thinking and emotional
response, respectively.
We are inundated with incessant nationalist claims of
patriotic love of country from the media-outraged Right, but what do they love?
Not the Constitution, as we have seen with the current administration’s
shredding of that document. Not the people, with the constant trashing of
people who use government benefits to subsist—at one end of the public welfare
scale, or to pull themselves out of poverty, at the other end. I touched on the
hate Americans feel for other Americans in a previous mini essay (see
“Wealthfare”). Hate has become the political currency of the far Right: hate
for Hispanics, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, Palestinians, blacks, the poor,
feminists, urbanists, transsexuals, homosexuals, and so on. And so on. The
poor, though, occupy a special place in the American hierarchy of hate.
The U.S. initiated massive economic relief for the millions
of job losses during the COVID pandemic. That government aid lifted a wide
swath of Americans out of poverty, most notably among children. Child poverty
was cut by half.
Cause for champagne and confetti, right?
Wrong.
Not even the good news could sway some members of Congress,
the conservative media, and LLCs who went to work to accuse the poor of
laziness. The message went out across the country: the poor will not work if
they can receive government assistance. Ronald Reagan’s Big Lie continued to
find traction in 2025, almost half-a-century after he engaged in a brand of
synecdoche in which he used a single case of welfare fraud to paint all welfare
recipients as lazy moochers. Facts, though, get in the way of his contempt for
the poor and the ideologue’s victim-blaming. When states stopped some or all
the emergency benefits that were put in place during the COVID pandemic, there
was no increase in employment. Millions of beneficiaries of those emergency
relief efforts did not flood the job market when their unemployment checks
stopped. Those states that cut unemployment benefits did, however, find a
significant drop in consumer spending and a slowdown in the economy.
Professor Andrew Cline of Washington University in St. Louis summed up the turn from news-as-information presented with reason to propaganda presented for an emotional response with his four “rules for modern American pundits:”
1.
Never be dull.
2.
Embrace willfully ignorant simplicity.
3.
The American public is stupid; treat them that
way.
4.
Always ignore the facts and the public record
when it is convenient to do so.
That well sums up
political the political media today.
[1] There is, of course, some controversy over the claim of
the significance of LLCs in the spreading of fake news, and some researchers
challenge even their existence. See the August 21, 2023 paper from the National
Library of Medicine at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37602992/
#
Bibliography
Alternative Facts: Bradner, Eric. “Conway:
Trump White House offered ‘alternative facts’ on crowd size.” CNN, Jan.
23, 2017. https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/22/politics/kellyanne-conway-alternative-facts
Factoid: In his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe, (Marilyn,
A Biography, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973) Norman Mailer gave us
“factoid,” which he described as "facts which have no existence before
appearing in a magazine or newspaper."
A 2007 joint study; conservative programming: Pierce, Charles P. Idiot America: How Stupidity Became A Virtue in the Land of the Free. New York: Anchor Books, 2017. 103.
See Desmond, Poverty, By America,
85-87 for comments by prominent Americans asserting dependency on government by
the poor, or laziness of the poor. In general, those comments were right-wing
propaganda.
Professor Andrew Cline: Pierce, Charles
P. Idiot America: How Stupidity Became A Virtue in the Land of the Free.
New York: Anchor Books, 2017. 104.
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