Post truth politics

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." In 2004, Ralph Keyes used the term "post-truth era" in his book by that title. 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. 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.

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)". 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. 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.

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. 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.

Description

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. 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. 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. Tory MP and Leave campaigner Sarah Wollaston, who left the group in protest during its campaign, criticised its "post-truth politics".

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. In this context, campaigners can push a utopian "positive campaign" to which rebuttals can be dismissed as smears and scaremongering and opposition as partisan.

In its most extreme mode, post-truth politics can make use of conspiracism. In this form of post-truth politics, false rumors (such as the "birther" or "Muslim" conspiracy theories about President Obama) become major news topics.

Drivers

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.

Major news outlets

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 News which allow states to influence Western audiences. 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. Trust in the mainstream media in the US has reached historical lows. It has been suggested that under these conditions fact-checking by news outlets struggles to gain traction among the wider public, and politicians resort to increasingly drastic messaging.

Many news outlets desire to appear, or have a policy of, impartiality. Many writers have noted that in some cases, this leads to false balance, the practice of giving equal emphasis to unsupported or discredited claims without challenging their factual basis. 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, 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.

Social media and the internet

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, allowing a parallel media ecosystem of websites, publishers and news channels to develop which can repeat post-truth claims without rebuttal. In this environment, post-truth campaigns can ignore fact checks or dismiss them as being motivated by bias. 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. 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."

The new digital culture also allows anybody with a computer and access to the internet post their opinions online and mark them as fact. Everybody's voice becomes legitimized as fact through echo-chambers and other users validating one another. Content is often judged based on how many views it gets, creating an atmosphere based on click bait that appeals to emotion instead of researched fact. Content that gets more views is continually filtered around different internet circles, regardless of its legitimacy. Some also argue that the overwhelming abundance of fact available to everybody 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. The internet also allows people to choose where they get their information, allowing them to reinforce their own opinions.

Modern political culture

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." Data is becoming increasingly accessible as new technologies are introduced to the everyday lives of citizens. An obsession for data and statistics also filters into the political scene, and political debates and speeches become filled with snippets of information that may be misconstrued, false, or not contain the whole picture. Sensationalized television news emphasizes grand statements and further publicizes politicians. This shaping from the media influences how the public views political issues and candidates.

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". 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. 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". 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. 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". Mantzarlis also noted that interest in fact-checking had never been higher, suggesting that at least part of the electorate rejects "post-truth" politics.

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."

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.

Germany

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 from 2015 on. Since the 1990 years was in the sociology more and more post-democracy used.

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. 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.

Post-truth politics has been retroactively identified in the lead-up to the Iraq War, 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.

The phrase became widely used during the 2016 UK EU membership referendum to describe the Leave campaign. 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. 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." 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, especially after she denied having disparaged rival Theresa May's childlessness in an interview with The Times in spite of transcript evidence.

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".

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. 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.*

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. Similarly, Rob Boston writing for The Humanist saw a rise in conspiracy theories across American public life, including Birtherism, 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.

In 2016, the "post-truth" label was especially widely used to describe the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, including by Professor Daniel W. Drezner in The Washington Post, Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, Chris Cillizza in The Independent, Jeet Heer in The New Republic, and James Kirchick in the Los Angeles Times, and by several professors of government and history at Harvard. President Barack Obama stated that the new media ecosystem "means everything is true and nothing is true".

Poland

A rising tide of anti-intellectualism and populism has come to the forefront of Polish politics. A massive consolidation of power has taken place within their Parliament as a result of a massive and sweeping change to the way their administration runs. With the recent election of the conservative Law and Justice Party, Poland is entering into a new populist-run era. The recent election of the Law and Justice Party has, according to opponents, "transformed Poland into a surreal and insular place". These recent political reforms have gone against the grain of typical intellectual institutions. Culminating to the surface in Poland's political sphere is anger and distrust towards mainstream media outlets and the organic intellectual community. In a recent fight, the Polish courts have led to an exponential increase in the rise of conspiracy theories and other post-truth mechanisms aimed at furthering the level of misinformation within the country. Many sources link the rise of post-truth politics in Poland to the slow rise of the Law and Justice Party in the radical wings of the Polish political sphere. However, the party began to make waves in 2010, when the unfortunate death of former Polish president Lech Kaczynski became a national conspiracy theory. At the forefront of this theory is the de facto head of the Law and Justice Party and brother of Lech Kacyznski; Jaroslaw Kaczynski. The party has created a conspiracy theory claiming that the Kremlin and former Russian prime minister and current president Vladimir Putin were responsible for the fatal plane crash of Lech Kaczynski, the brother of Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

Recent laws put in place by conservative Polish legislators have proposed an idea known as "periodic" meetings. The Guardian reports this new policy as, "rallies organised repeatedly in the same place and on the same date, giving such gatherings priority over other meetings. Under the new law, unrelated meetings must take place at least 100 metres (yards) away from any meeting designated “periodic". Recent outcry from oppositional parties and the European Union have called upon the Law and Justice Party to reconsider this legislation, claiming that the new law, "restricted fundamental rights and freedoms". The reasoning for the recent legislation according to the Law and Justice Party said the law would, "boost the security of participants at all gatherings by preventing clashes".

Another potential move towards post-truth politics and media coverage in Poland comes in the form of recent legislation proposed by the Law and Justice Party in late December 2015. The party is preparing a bill to pass through parliament that aims, "to allow its government to directly appoint executives to public broadcasters and end what it sees as biased media coverage against its policies"

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. During the course of the most recent 2016 election in the United Sates we have seen numerous climate deniers such as new environmental protection agency head Scott Pruitt replacing Barack Obama's appointee Gina McCarthy. 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.