Truth Decay

According to Glenn Kessler, in the four years of his presidency, Donald Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims.  A friend of mine suggested that fact-checkers would be unemployed with Trump’s leaving the White House.  On the second day of the Biden-Harris Administration, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared at a press conference and was asked if he felt liberated. He said, said that the new administration was committed to being ‘completely transparent, open and honest,’ a sharp break from the Trump White House, where Fauci said he often felt there would be repercussions for speaking honestly about the pandemic.

‘It was very clear that there were things said, be it regarding things like hydroxychloroquine and other things like that, that really was uncomfortable because they were not based in scientific fact,’ Fauci told reporters, speaking about the Trump administration.  ‘The idea that you can get up [now] and talk about what you know, what the evidence is, what the science is,’ Fauci continued, ‘it is somewhat of a liberating feeling.’

There is little doubt that our current struggle to restore a common understanding of what is true and what is not stems directly from ex-President Trump’s active promotion of lies. However, the decline in broad respect for the truth has been going on for decades.  Of course, the biggest lie, the lie that is still believed by millions of people, is that Trump won the 2020 Presidential election. That lie has been rejected by courts, by local officials, and by Trump’s own Justice Department, but even on January 6, 2021, when insurrectionists sought to overturn the “stolen” election, many Congresspersons and Senators continued to promulgate this big lie.

This declining ability for society to recognize and uphold truth has been called “Truth Decay” by The RAND Corporation which defines it as the diminishing role of facts and data in American public life. More precisely, they say, “we are concerned with the growing imbalance in political and civil discourse between, on the one hand, trust and reliance on facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data and, on the other, opinions and personal attitudes—a balance that seems to be increasingly shifting in favor of the latter.

There are four trends that characterize Truth Decay:

• increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data
• a blurring of the line between opinion and fact
• the increasing relative volume and resulting influence of opinion and personal experience over fact, and
• declining trust in formerly respected sources of facts.

If we examine Trump’s big lie that he won the 2020 Presidential election, we see all four components of Truth Decay active here.  The objective facts are these:

• The election results were certified by state governments, both Republican and Democratic.  Joe Biden won 51.4% of the vote nationally (81.2 million), while Donald trump won 46.9% (74.2 million).  Biden won 306 electoral votes while Trump won 232.
• All of the major news outlets, including Fox News, called the election for Joe Biden by Saturday, November 7, 2020.
• Every legal attempt to challenge the results was defeated by a variety of courts.
• The US Department of Justice found no evidence of fraud widespread enough that the results could be challenged.
• Votes were counted by thousands of volunteer citizens who were dedicated to an honest count.
• Many states saw Joe Biden the Democrat, winning the presidential vote while at the same time Republicans won down-ballot races.

Nevertheless, these facts are being disputed. Because of the President’s “bully pulpit” he was able to convince a very large number of people that their opinions hold greater validity than facts that have been certified by official processes.  According to a CNBC poll published on November 27, 73% of Trump voters believe that he had won.  As a result, the sources of facts and data, largely the press and state governments have lost even more credibility with a large number of people.

It is important to realize what has happened here. The nation’s media has diminished credibility; election workers have diminished credibility; Republican governors and Secretaries of State have diminished credibility. In order to believe this “big lie,” you must believe that a national conspiracy of enormous extent and deviousness has overwhelmed all our electoral systems; that this conspiracy left a few clues, but not enough clues for courts to overturn the results (I suppose this also means that the courts have lost credibility). To believe that Trump won, you would have to believe the bizarre “kraken” conspiracy theory promulgated by Sidney Powell “that Dominion [Voting Systems] had rigged voting machines to favor President-elect Joe Biden as part of a plot involving deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.” Dominion is suing Powell, so the “truth” may eventually come to light.

Most of these trends are not unprecedented in American history. But today’s level of disagreement over objective facts is a new phenomenon. So how did we get here?  There are four areas that I want to discuss here:

• Decline in trust for institutions, particularly but not only the press.
• The increased place of opinion over reporting in news media.
• The increase in lying for fun or profit.
• The rise of social media and other changes to the information environment.

The rest of this article discusses the first three points, while the question of “social media” and the truth will be discussed in my next post.

As the Rand Corporation noted,” Truth Decay does not just erode Americans’ ability to have meaningful political debates about important topics; it also contributes to political polarization and paralysis, undermines civic engagement, perpetuates the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation, and leads to widespread uncertainty and anxiety throughout the U.S. electorate.” Thus, Truth Decay is part of a vicious cycle where the erosion of truth leads to more political polarization which in itself leads to more Truth Decay. The irony here is that we live in an information age. We can ask our phone or our tablet who scored the most touchdowns in the NFL this year, and we get the answer immediately.  We can also ask who won the 2020 presidential election and get “Joe Biden” as the answer.

A non-political example of the growing divide between public opinion and truth as understood by experts is the issue of food which contains Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).  A study by Cary Funk and Lee Raine found that 11% of scientists considered GMOs unsafe for human consumption, while 57% of the general public consider them unsafe. There is no partisan difference in attitudes toward GMOs in food. These are just people who have agreed with propaganda rather than science. While people trust science in general, they are quick to challenge science in specific areas such as vaccines.

Decline in Trust.  The bacteria of truth decay have been active for quite a while. For example, the chart below shows that Americans have become increasingly distrustful of both news outlets and Congress.  According to Gallup 22% of the population had “a great deal” or “a lot of trust” in Congress in 1997; by 2016 that number fell to 9%, before rebounding to 12% in 2017. In the case of newspapers, the decline was from 39% to 24% over the same period. (see first chart below).  But this has been going on for a long time (see second chart below).

The rapid decline from the 1960s through the 1970s can be largely attributed to the Vietnam War.  We now know (and believed with less certainty) that the Government lied to us for years, saying that we were winning in Vietnam; the sudden Tet Offensive made the lies obvious. Interestingly, at that time certain people in the news business, especially Walter Cronkite, had enormous credibility and were more readily believed than the government. It is also interesting that while trust in the government as a whole has declined, trust in the military has risen after it declined during the Vietnam era.

Donald Trump’s attacks on the press as the “enemy of the people” seem to have had an important effect on Republican’s view of the media (see chart below from the Pew Center).  By substantial margins more Republicans than Democrats say that the media are not highly professional, hurt democracy, and are too critical of America.

The increased importance of opinion over reporting.  All three of the major cable news networks (CNN, Fox and MSNBC) have a high degree of opinion as opposed to hard news.  At least, traditional newspapers try to separate the two, confining, in theory, opinion to op-ed pages. Of course, most websites have a large degree of opinion, and the situation is getting worse.

According to the Daily Beast, Fox News “fired [Chris Stirewalt] the political editor who was tasked with defending the network’s election night decisions that especially angered President Donald Trump and his allies” as well as at least 16 digital editorial staffers, including senior editors. People familiar with the situation said the layoffs—a ‘blood bath,’ as multiple Fox News insiders described it—were perpetrated by Porter Berry, the Sean Hannity crony now in charge of remaking Fox’s digital properties in the image of its right-wing opinion programming.”  Equally important, unlike newspapers cable news networks and online news sources have no bright line separating fact from opinion.

The Rand study cited above claims that the increase in opinion over facts arises in part from the changing economics of the traditional news media. “For example, the shift to a 24-hour news cycle and an increase in the number and diversity of news organizations appear to have significantly increased the relative volume of opinions to facts and created incentives for the dissemination of sensationalized and sometimes misleading information. As competition increases and subscribership decreases, shrinking profit margins have also played a role, forcing newspapers and network and cable television stations to focus less on expensive investigative journalism and more on commentary, which is cheaper and appeals to viewers.

The increase in lying for fun or profit. The big lie that Trump won the 2020 election is being promulgated by many of Trump’s supporters, particularly in Congress. Whatever they believe is the case, they find it politically profitable to support the “big lie,” for fear that Trump supporters will primary them in future elections. This is especially important in the House of Representatives, where the separation of Republicans and Democrats in terms of where they live is enhanced by gerrymandering, so that for most candidates, the primary election is more competitive than the general, and contains more risks. I won’t go into here how the social media have developed algorithms that leads to presenting more divisive content to readers.

I want to conclude with two examples from Great Britain. The first is the story of the Brexit campaign and how politicians knowingly lied in order to achieve their goals. According to The Guardian, “At the end of a campaign that dominated the news for months, it was suddenly obvious that the winning side had no plan for how or when the UK would leave the EU – while the deceptive claims that carried the leave campaign to victory suddenly crumbled. At 6.31am on Friday 24 June [2016], just over an hour after the result of the EU referendum had become clear, Ukip [United Kingdom Independence Party] leader Nigel Farage conceded that a post-Brexit UK would not in fact have £350m a week spare to spend on the NHS – a key claim of Brexiteers that was even emblazoned on the Vote Leave campaign bus. A few hours later, the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan stated that immigration was not likely to be reduced – another key claim. Obviously, truth was less important than winning.

A second story concerns Prime Minister Cameron.  Without going into detail, the story, extracted from a new biography of Cameron, sparked an immediate furor. It was gross, it was a great opportunity to humiliate an elitist prime minister, and many felt it rang true for a former member of the notorious Bullingdon Club. And so a powerful man was sexually shamed, in a way that had nothing to do with his divisive politics, and in a way he could never really respond to. But who cares? He could take it.

Then, after a full day of online merriment, something shocking happened. Isabel Oakeshott, the Daily Mail journalist who had co-written the biography of Cameron which reported the “incident,” went on TV and admitted that she did not know whether her huge, scandalous scoop was even true. Pressed to provide evidence for the sensational claim, Oakeshott admitted she had none.  ‘We couldn’t get to the bottom of that source’s allegations,” she said on Channel 4 News. So, we merely reported the account that the source gave us … We don’t say whether we believe it to be true.’ In other words, there was no evidence that a scandalous story reported in dozens of newspapers and repeated in millions of tweets and Facebook updates, which many people presumably still believe to be true today.’”

The story is both funny and salacious, and completely unproven. Despite the lack of proof, a journalist and biographer decided to publish an outrageous story about Great Britain’s top government official without a scintilla of proof, presumably to generate eyeballs and clicks. Is it any wonder that truth is decaying?