As the U.S Presidential election campaign
intensifies, the national polls there show Hillary Clinton’s lead dissolving,
and the race turning into a virtual dead heat. I am not surprised. The groundwork has been laid for Donald Trump
by several decades of conservative media and what I call its relativism about
truth. When Sean Hannity or Bill
O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh claim to be fair or objective or to be providing a
“no-spin” zone, they can’t really mean
that, of course. What they do mean, I think, is that they think they have as
much right to claim the mantle of truth as such stalwarts of the ‘liberal’
media as the CBS anchors like Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather, or the Editors of
the New York Times. All of which is hogwash, of course: whatever liberal bias
those journalists may have had was balanced and constrained by the highest
standards of professional journalism, which in the past was concentrated in
four large broadcast networks and in a robust and competitive newspaper industry. Unfortunately, those days
are long gone.
As a result, it has become easier for conservatives
in America to paint ‘crooked’ Hillary Clinton as the equal and opposite of
Donald Trump--an extreme left-winger and a corrupt one at that. Never mind that Bernie Sanders effectively
exposed her as an overly cautious and triangulating centrist politician, who
never stuck her neck out on Iraq (like Barack Obama) or on Wall Street (like
Sanders or Elizabeth Warren).
Somehow, we have gone from a world where politicians and
media sometimes lie to one where they
don’t care whether they tell the truth or not. Some blame technology for this
development: the internet and social media can facilitate fact-checking, but
that ability is outweighed by the tendency for ‘digital wildfires’ to spread more quickly than they can be put
out. According to writer and TV producer Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,
“All that matters is that the lie is clickable, and what determines
that is how it feeds into people’s existing prejudices. Algorithms developed by
companies such as Google and Facebook are based around your previous searches
and clicks, so with every search and every click you find your own biases
confirmed.”
Yet even critics who stress the way that social media leads
us into echo chambers of similar-minded people, recognize that it is on the
Political Right that the most danger lies. We have seen Donald Trump make up
facts on a whim, claim that he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering
the Twin Towers coming down, or that the Mexican government purposefully sends
‘bad’ immigrants to the US, when fact-checking agencies rate 78% of his
statements as untrue. He persists in being
the first nominee since 1968 to not release his tax returns, even as he attacks
‘crooked’ Hillary for not revealing all of her personal e-mails. None of this matters to the 40-50- million
angry people who are itching to get to the polls to have their anxieties
responded to --or their prejudices validated.
