Fake News means news the Leader does not want to hear. Truth is whatever is convenient for the Leader. For example, the Leader and Rick Scott claim there is massive voter fraud in Florida because Scott's lead has declined as more votes are counted. There is no evidence for this claim of the sort that sane people usually depend on. The evidence for the claim is that the Leader and Rick Scott want it to be true.
As Krugman points out, however, this is not actually anything brand new. The Republican party for two decades has been insisting that global climate change is a hoax perpetrated by a grand conspiracy of tens of thousands of scientists. Their evidence for that is that climate change were real, it would require actions by government that they do not want to take.
This means that trying to reason with them is impossible, because they are not using reason at all. As Amanda Marcotte says:
The first thing liberals and journalists should do is find ways to speak the truth without inviting conservatives to troll them with "debate" about it — debate that will inevitably just be the pitting of lies against truths, leaving those who still believe in reason frustrated and giving conservatives endless opportunities to gloat about their triggering talents.She has some other good advice. But the problem is that journalists are still stuck with conventions and assumptions that don't work any more. Their commitment to "balance" betrays them when there are not in fact two sides to the argument. One party is lying. They just can't say that.
There are a variety of tools that accomplish this, but the primary one is to avoid speaking to liars and instead speak about them. For instance, cable news would do well to stop inviting Kellyanne Conway or other administration liars to appear on camera and tell more lies. That time would be better used straightforwardly debunking their numerous falsehoods and deliberate misstatements.
Brevity is key here. Whenever you're explaining, you're losing. For instance, it was a waste of time going frame by frame through that Jim Acosta video to prove he did nothing wrong, since everyone who claimed to believe he had done something terrible was lying in order to troll the left. Journalists would have done better to present the fact that Acosta did nothing wrong as self-evident truth, which it was, and move on to addressing the real story, which is how Trump uses lies to advance his agenda.
3 comments:
I'm shocked that any reasonable person would quote Amanda Marcotte.
I let this through because it's an expression of opinion that I suppose some people may agree with. Marcotte made a serious mistake about the Duke Lacrosse team, but so did many other people at the time. (I smelled something fishy about it and steered clear, I'm happy to say.) However, that mistake doesn't invalidate what she has written since.
I was listening to NPR today (National Pentagon Radio), that smug, garbage-repeating bastion with no critical thinking, and the interviewer asked a California fire official of some sort what his response was to Shitler's accusation that California mismanages its forests. He deflected the question, choosing instead to focus on the effects of the weather, and she just cut him off for time reasons.
The trolls at NPR do this all the time. "President Shitler said this, president Shitler said that ...". What the fire official could have responded to be true to reality would have been, "Well, since Shitler said that, it must be false. Everything he says is false, a lie, invidious, designed to incite emotions and make mischief and mayhem. Any criticism by him is an endorsement of integrity on the part of the person he's criticizing."
We have a lunatic in the White House. That much is fact. Specifically, a narcissistically-disturbed egomaniac who has never taken responsibility for anything in his entire life, a rich Caucasian boy who had a fortune handed to him by his virulently racist father, squandered it, and became a lackey and obsequious stooge of the Russian, Putin. A complete failure as a human being who'd have no business running a convenience store, much less a nation. Ich hob im in drerd.
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