Post-truth politics
[6][4][7] Popularized as a term in news media and a dictionary definition, post-truth has developed from a short-hand label for the abundance and influence of misleading or false political claims into a concept empirically studied and theorized by academic research.
Distrust becomes the bearer of post-truth politics, since citizens cannot verify claims firsthand about world events and usually lack expert knowledge about subjects being reported factually; they are faced with the choice of trusting news providers and other public truth-tellers.
Tesich writes that following the shameful truth of Watergate (1972–1974), more assuaging coverage of the Iran–Contra scandal (1985–1987)[16] and Persian Gulf War (1990–1991) demonstrates that "we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world.
[23] More recently, scholars have followed Crouch in demonstrating the role of professional political communication's contribution to distrust and wrong beliefs, where strategic use of emotion is becoming key to gaining trust for truth statements.
Philosophers tend to cite media and communications changes but claim that academic movements themselves, such as postmodernism, have influenced society, resulting in a situation where feeling and belief create an epistemic crisis for politics.
[40] The "circumstances" surrounding post-truth (politics) noted by the original Oxford Dictionaries' definition have been expanded to denote a historical period, defined by the convergence of numerous empirically documented shifts.
[46] The concept refers to a convergent set of historical developments that have created the conditions of post-truth society and its politics: the 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;[47][48] the fragmentation of modern, more centralized mass news media gatekeepers, which have largely repeated one another's scoops and their reports;[49][50] the attention economy marked by information overload and acceleration, user-generated content and fewer society-wide common trusted authorities to distinguish between truth and lies, accurate and inaccurate;[51][52] the algorithms which govern what appears in social media and search engine rankings, based on what users want (per algorithm) and not on what is factual; and news[53] media which have been marred by scandals of plagiarism, hoaxes, propaganda, and changing news values.
[7] While some of these phenomena (such as a more tabloidesque press) may suggest a return to the past, the effect of the convergences is a socio-political phenomenon which exceeds earlier forms of journalism in deliberate distortion, error, and cultural confusion.
Other scholars, such as the philosopher Lee McIntyre (2018), who focuses on "post-truth" generally and not politics specifically, argue that rising social distrust of scientific expertise and postmodern academic discourse, allegedly promoting a devaluing of or disregard for truth, have combined with cognitive biases to produce conditions where feeling triumphs over facts.
McIntyre sees public relations efforts to undermine scientific truths, on, for example, the effects of tobacco, as important factors (in addition to the alleged influence of academic postmodernism on conservative politics, though this link is not empirically established).
As another specific example of corporate interests undermining truths for which there exists scientific consensus, McIntyre cites previous donations of BP to organizations which deny climate change.
[35] However, public relations is just one part of a larger culture of promotionalism (consumer capitalism),[60] where truth has long been the last concern in strategies to influence people to feel positively or negatively towards brands as businesses, countries, products, parties, and politicians.
Furthermore, the scandals in journalism around plagiarism and "cheerleading" for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq,[61][62][22] combine with promotional culture, ethically questionable professional strategic political communication, potential viral mediascapes, algorithmically customized presentation of information, among other factors to reproduce various forms of specific and generalized distrust—trust being crucial for recognition of legitimate public truth-tellers.
This was the case around the disinformation campaigns of the UK and US in promoting the US invasion of Iraq (Saddam Hussein/Al Qaeda "ties" or "links" and Weapons of Mass Destruction), which have been described as watershed moments of the post-truth era.
According to Peter Pomerantsev, 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.
[80] 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 and which are 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.
Some also argue that the abundance of fact available at any time on the internet leads to an attitude focused on knowing basic claims to information instead of an underlying truth or formulating carefully thought-out opinions.
[96][97] In 2017, a rise in national protests sparked against the 2016 United States presidential election and the victory of Donald Trump was attributed to fake news stories posted and shared by millions of users on Facebook.
[107] 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, contending that "[w]e are all post-truthers and probably always have been".
[108] The Economist has called this argument "complacent", however, 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.
For Mantzarlis, the "post-truth" label was—to some extent—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".
While it has helped some untruths to spread, it has also restrained others; as an example, she said 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.
[112] In December 2016 "postfaktisch" (post-factual) was named word of the year by the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (German language society), also in connection with a rise of right-wing populism[113] from 2015 on.
Their research aimed to dissect the post-truth strategies employed by Ghanaian politicians affiliated with these two prominent parties, as manifested in their respective politically aligned newspapers, namely The Daily Statesman and The Enquirer.
Yoseph Wihartono, researcher in crimonology at the University of Indonesia, identified social media outlets and "internet mobbing" as sources of post-truth dynamics that have potentially "opened wide" the opportunity for religious populism to expand.
"[78] 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,[78] especially after she denied having disparaged rival Theresa May's childlessness in an interview with The Times in spite of transcript evidence.
[26] 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 defense spending and that he had embarked on an "apology tour"—continued to be repeated long after they had been debunked.
[153] In the wake of the 2016 election, the United States saw numerous climate change deniers rise to power, such as new Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt replacing Barack Obama's appointee Gina McCarthy.
Political scientists Alfred Moore (University of York), Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti (City University of New York), Elizabeth Markovits (Mount Holyoke College), and Zeynep Pamuk (St John's College), evaluated American historian Sophia A. Rosenfeld's book, Democracy and Truth: A Short History (2019) and its potential solutions for dealing with post-truth politics, in what Invernizzi-Accetti calls "remedies for the growing split between populism and technocracy in contemporary democratic regimes".
"[154] Alfred Moore responds to Rosenfeld's proposal noting that "solutions will not come from the better organization and communication of knowledge, whether popular or expert, nor from institutions and practices of competition and interaction between them, but from the generation of substantive relations of common interest and mutual commitment".
