The year of propaganda

How did the passing year do in terms of truth and manipulation in the United States? And what can be expected from now on?

By MICHAEL WILNER
Donald Trump (photo credit: REUTERS)
Donald Trump
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Less than a week after Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss to Donald Trump on November 8, campaign staff began passing around a book to help them process what in the world had just happened: Eric Hoffer’s True Believer.
“Though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious,” Hoffer wrote in his 1951 work, for which he was ultimately awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image.”
Clintonites comforted themselves with the idea that Trump’s movement was, indeed, historic – that his rise was beyond their control, and beyond that of 17 Republican adversaries the New York real-estate tycoon had vanquished in the GOP primaries.
To them, Trump had created a Hoffer- style mass movement – filled with people who lived, without exaggeration, in a cultural world and an information space that the Clinton campaign was never going to be able to penetrate.
ONE CRITICAL tool in stoking a mass movement, according to Hoffer, is the ability to manipulate public information.
It is not necessary that the instigator acquire absolute control over the dissemination of news, however; for Hoffer argues that propaganda is really about offering a clean and compelling, if simple and dishonest, message to those looking for reaffirmation of their preexisting political beliefs.
“Propaganda does not deceive people,” Hoffer writes. “It merely helps them to deceive themselves.”
The American Left fears the president- elect for many reasons, but one existential fear ties together their concerns: the belief that Trump is a demagogue, a cynical figure willing to feed into the ignorance and prejudices of common men in his quest for political power.
They are convinced that Trump is uniquely, if not singularly, responsible for the spread of disinformation – a force that has brought out of the woodwork conspiracy theorists and know-nothings with the conscious intent of eroding civic discourse.
In this belief, Clinton’s supporters were gripped by fear upon her loss. They remain so to this day. And yet nonpartisan Americans share at least some of their concerns.
Journalists, academics and historians are increasingly worried over the rise of fake news infecting the nation’s political bloodstream. And they are increasingly vocal in their criticism of Trump as he prepares to take the oath of office – a commitment to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.
THE OXFORD English Dictionary chose “post-truth” as its new word of 2016, while Merriam-Webster considers “fascism” its word of the year, due to a spike in searches it has received for the term.
Some of the world’s leading historians, including filmmaker Ken Burns and Simon Schama, worry over parallels they see in Trump’s attacks on the press.
The press itself is scared, fearful that Trump’s targeting of the media signals disregard for liberal democratic principles basic to the American experiment – freedom of expression chief among them.
“I think that journalists are worried,” Dean Baquet, editor of The New York Times, said in an interview with NPR last week. “I think that President-elect Trump has personalized his distaste for independent journalists and made it clear that he likes journalists who say nice things about him.”
Baquet fought to use the word “lie” in a front-page headline on Trump’s strategy to push birtherism over the last eight years. Now the Times head vows to continue using the term throughout his presidency. “He insists that things are true that are sort of demonstrably wrong,” Baquet said.
“I think that when we believe something is baseless, which is a real word, it’s not an opinion. It is a word in the dictionary, and it means without any foundation in truth,” Baquet continued.
“I think if that word can be used very clearly and in this case accurately, I think that’s journalism. And I think in fact to do the opposite would not be journalism.”
Marty Baron, editor of The Washington Post, expressed similar concerns. “Many journalists wonder with considerable weariness what it is going to be like for us during the next four – perhaps eight – years,” he said late last month. “Will we be incessantly harassed and vilified? Will the new administration seize on opportunities to try intimidating us? Will we face obstruction at every turn?” And Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent, said that Trump’s attacks on the press remind her of a pattern of behavior she has seen from authoritarian leaders the world over, including Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Ali Khamenei.
“We have to accept that we’ve had our lunch handed to us by the very same social media that we’ve so slavishly been devoted to,” Amanpour said as she accepted an award from the Committee to Protect Journalists last month. “The winning candidate did a savvy end run around us and used it to go straight to the people. Combined with the most incredible development ever – the tsunami of fake news sites – a.k.a. lies– that somehow people could not, would not, recognize, fact-check or disregard.
“Journalism itself has become weaponized,” she added. “We have to stop it.”
SEVERAL CONSERVATIVE media figures are pushing back against this narrative.
One person’s fake news is another person’s real news, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson said. But claiming that Pope Francis endorsed Trump, that the White House conducted a false flag operation by hacking the Democratic National Committee or that Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim forces journalists who base their work in sourcing and verification into a combative posture.
They are given no choice but to actively fight against the dissemination of falsehoods, instead of merely sharing their findings from reporting.
Entire websites such as the Conservative Daily Post, Bangor Daily News and Right Wing News fabricate stories wholesale out of thin air, such as the claim that Democrats offered amnesty to undocumented immigrants who voted illegally for Clinton, or that Clinton would be dead within days from an unspecified illness. Perhaps the most famous fake news story of the election cycle was “Pizzagate,” which claimed that Clinton ran a child sex ring in the basement of a Washington pizza shop.
Facebook, a major aggregator of news for millions of Americans, has acknowledged the problem, and said it is working on a fact-checking scheme that would give fake news articles less prominence in members’ news feeds.
But Democrats believe that mainstream news organizations deserve some of the blame themselves.
IN HIS final press conference of the year, US President Barack Obama faced an onslaught of questions over his handling of Russia’s hacking of the DNC and of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The news out of those leaks should have been Russia’s attempt to disrupt the election, he argued. But that is not what made US headlines.
“I’m finding it a little curious that everybody is suddenly acting surprised that this looked like it was disadvantaging Hillary Clinton, because you guys wrote about it every day. Every single leak, about every little juicy tidbit of political gossip – including John Podesta’s risotto recipe. This was an obsession that dominated the news coverage,” Obama said.
“I do think it’s worth us reflecting how it is that a presidential election of such importance, of such moment, with so many big issues at stake and such a contrast between the candidates, came to be dominated by a bunch of these leaks,” he added. “What is it about our political system that made us vulnerable to these kinds of potential manipulations?”