IN November 2016 Oxford Dictionary declared that the international word for the year was “post-truth”—an adjective relating to or denoting “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”.
The dictionary explained that the word’s usage across various media increased in 2016 by roughly 2000 percent compared to 2015, saying the spike came in the context of the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the US presidential elections.
Donald J. Trump’s election and Brexit are among the most significant political upheavals of 2016, not just because pundits and pollsters failed hugely to predict them. They also demonstrate the very real dangers of the emerging post-truth world.
During the Brexit campaign, Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, and Boris Johnson, former mayor of London, repeated vigorously that if the UK left the European Union (EU), up to £350 million a week could be allocated for the National Health Service—England’s publicly funded, single-payer health-care system. The amount would supposedly come from what the UK sends to Brussels every week, as part of its membership to the EU.
Various quarters proved that claim to be false. For instance, the Guardian calculated that the actual figure is £100 million, and does not consider how much the EU spends on the UK. No amount, in fact, is actually “sent” to the EU headquarters from Britain. However, many still voted “Leave,” in part, because they believed that UK money earmarked for the EU could be better spent on UK matters, like England’s health-care system.
Even before he ran for the presidency, Trump openly questioned the US citizenship of President Barack Obama and pushed the assertion that the Commander in Chief is a Muslim. As early as 2011, he led the so-called birther movement, pressuring Obama to release his birth certificate and prove his faith and commitment to the US.
The claim was, of course, false, as Obama was clearly born in Hawaii and had earlier professed his Christian faith. But even in the face of definitive evidence, many of his political opponents—including Trump—rallied support against him by creating skepticism, if not outright belief, in the fiction.
President-elect Trump eventually conceded the truth during the campaign. But by then, he had already clinched the Republican Party’s nomination and was well on his way to become Obama’s successor to the White House.
So effective was the fiction-peddling that, even though the birth certificate had already been released, one NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll in late-June and early-July 2016 found that up to 72 percent of registered Republican voters still doubted Obama’s citizenship. In fact, up to 40 percent of Republicans reported to have high political knowledge disagreed that he was born in the US. These developments reflect what one author, Ralph Keyes, once wrote in 2004: “In the post-truth era, we don’t just have truth and lies, but a third category of ambiguous statements that are not exactly the truth, but fall short of a lie.”
Social media and faster telecommunications play a significant role in such an unreal world. Huge amounts of information are available at people’s fingertips. News items can spring up from anywhere, greatly disrupting the position of established media institutions as information gatekeepers.
Such greater access to information has not necessarily made it easier, however, for people to arrive upon more rational and well-informed opinions. In fact, people now appear to make weighty, sometimes life-changing, decisions (as with the polls) more on perception than reality. They gravitate toward echo chambers online—spaces where other people mirror their sentiments and beliefs, with sometimes bigoted, very dangerous consequences.
Facts matter less today, as false information and demagoguery become dominant. Unscrupulous individuals can say outrageous things that “feel” true, but aren’t necessarily true, to score political wins. Politicians are now free to stoke popular support on mere conjecture, if not outright fiction—with impunity.
Keyes, in his book The Post-Truth Era, described this as a sign of the “routinization of dishonesty,” where people get away with lying, even if they get caught doing so. Susan B. Glaser, founding editor in chief of Politico, wrote in a Brookings Institution article that a lot more transparency may have been achieved in today’s journalism, but not necessarily with the accountability that was supposed to come with it.
Without such accountability, how then shall our democracies thrive?
E-mail: angara.ed@gmail.com, Facebook and Twitter: @edangara