Friday 12 May 2017 17.00 AEST
Last modified on Friday 12 May 2017 17.46 AEST
A word on definition: “post truth” is emphatically not the same as lies, spin and falsehood. What is new is not mendacity but the public’s response to it – the growing primacy of emotional resonance over fact and evidence, the replacement of verification with social media algorithms that tell us what we want to hear. Truth is losing its value as society’s reserve currency, and legitimate scepticism is yielding place to pernicious relativism.
Here, as a primer, are 10 classic examples of post truth, past and present.
1. ‘Alternative facts’
On the morning after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, Sean Spicer, the new White House press secretary, called a special press conference and insisted belligerently that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe”. The crowd in photographs of Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration looked larger, he claimed, because of new white floor coverings laid on the National Mall that had the effect of “highlighting areas where people were not standing, while in years past, the grass eliminated this As angry as Spicer and his boss might be, their position was hilariously unsustainable. It fell to Kellyanne Conway, senior aide to the president, to find some way of squaring the epistemological circle, of reconciling bogus claim with photographic evidence. On NBC’s Meet the Press the next day, Conway told Chuck Todd that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation: “Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You’re saying it’s a falsehood [...] Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that.”
2. ‘£350m for the NHS’
The promise that the weekly cost of EU membership – allegedly, £350m – would be ploughed into the NHS was front and centre in the Vote Leave campaign. For a start, the figure did not take account of the rebate received by Britain: its net contribution per week to the EU was closer to £250m. Having pointed out the error, the UK Statistics Authority declared itself “disappointed to note that there continue to be suggestions that the UK contributes £350m to the EU each week, and that this full amount could be spent elsewhere”.
Four days after the referendum, Chris Grayling, the then leader of the House of Commons, downgraded the promise to “an aspiration”. Iain Duncan Smith, another prominent Brexiter, also distanced himself from the hitherto unambiguous claim: “I never said that during the course of the election [sic].” Dominic Cummings, the campaign’s director, has admitted: “Would we have won without £350m/NHS? All our research and the close result strongly suggests no.” But the speed with which the pledge was dumped indicates that it was never likely to be honoured. To borrow a distinction often made by Trump’s supporters, it was evidently a mistake to take the Leave campaign literally rather than seriously.
3. ‘Pizzagate’
Hillary Clinton … subject of ‘ludicrous’ claims. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP
Conspiracy theories thrive in the new age of post truth – often with dangerous consequences. In December, a phony report alleging that Hillary Clinton was at the heart of a paedophile conspiracy persuaded 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch from Salisbury, North Carolina, to “self-investigate” the ludicrous claims by firing shots from an assault rifle in a Washington DC pizza parlour. The restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, had been falsely associated with the story, itself comprehensively debunked before Welch’s attack. Death threats were received by the owner and staff, unwitting victims of the so-called Pizzagate allegations. It is worth noting that Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s national security adviser, had tweeted that the stories connecting Clinton with “Sex crimes w/Children” were a “MUST READ”. As tempting as it is to dismiss fake news as the staple diet of the fringe, it has enthusiastic consumers at the very apex of power.
4. ‘Holohoax’ horrors
The most vile manifestation of post truth has been the reinvigoration of Holocaust denial, especially online. Google searches on the subject are rewarded by headlines such as “Holocaust Against Jews is a Total Lie – Proof”; “Is the Holocaust a Hoax?”; “Was there really a Holocaust?”; “THE HOLOCAUST AND THE FOUR MILLION VARIANT”; “How the ‘Holocaust’ was faked”; and “Jewish Scholar Refutes The Holocaust”. There could scarcely be a more brutal reminder that algorithms, in their current form, are indifferent to veracity.
5. ‘Reality is not external’
John Hurt as Winston Smith in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Photograph: RONALD GRANT
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is the Ur-text for all those confronted by post truth, and it is heartening that the dystopian classic rose to the top of Amazon’s charts days after Conway urged Americans to embrace “alternative facts”. In his interrogation of Winston Smith, the Inner Party oligarch, O’Brien, warns that “reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else ….Whatever the Party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”
Winston still objects that the party has no mastery over gravity, climate, disease or death: “O’Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. ‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull … There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation – anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to … You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.”
6. ‘The University of Google’
Increasingly, scientific evidence is proving no match for emotionalism and the charisma of celebrity. In 2007, the model and television personality Jenny McCarthy, whose son Evan is autistic, appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show to take a stand on vaccination. Against the full might of the scientific establishment, she pitted her “mommy instinct”. Challenged to produce her own evidence, she said: “My science is named Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.” In the course of the controversy, doctors had often complained that the web had digitally turbo-charged false science. McCarthy turned this allegation on its head. “The University of Google is where I got my degree from,” she declared.
The guru of the anti-vaccination movement Andrew Wakefield – though discredited and stripped of his medical licence – has grasped that, in the strange alchemy of our times, academic infamy can be the basis for a celebrity of sorts: a means of relaunching his campaign and career. In April 2016, his movie, Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe – withdrawn from the Tribeca film festival – was shown in Manhattan for the first time amid much hoopla and controversy.
Drenched in often clumsy appeals to emotion, the film hinges on the story of the so-called “CDC whistleblower” – Dr William Thompson, a scientist at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Thompson, as the film relates, fed Brian Hooker, a biochemical engineer and father of an autistic son, with reams of data that Hooker – who had no training in epidemiology – subjected to his own personal analysis. He claimed that the CDC had known all along that there was a link between MMR and autism, especially among African American men, but had concealed this information. In fact, Hooker had committed elementary statistical errors, and his report was retracted by the journal that had published it. But Vaxxed simply repeats the allegations, presenting Hooker as the David who took on the Goliath of the health industry, and Wakefield as the oracular prophet vindicated.
7. ‘It’s a pageant’
Wag the Dog … ‘The power of politically manipulated technology to obliterate reality.’ Photograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.com
The power of politically manipulated technology to obliterate reality was perfectly predicted in Wag the Dog, Barry Levinson’s movie satire of 1997, which describes the “pageant” of a fictional war invented to distract attention from a presidential sex scandal. The political fixer, Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) approaches a Hollywood mogul, Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman), to “produce” the military “pageant” of an imaginary conflict with Albania:
Conrad: You watched the Gulf war – what do you see day after day? The one smart bomb falling down the chimney. The truth? I was in the building when we shot that shot – we shot in a studio, Falls Church, Virginia. One-tenth scale model of a building.
Stanley: Is that true?
Conrad: How the fuck do we know? You take my point?
Later in the story, Conrad is dismayed when the CIA conspires with the president’s electoral opponent to declare the nonexistent war at an end. But the producer is not so easily dissuaded:
Conrad: It’s over. I saw it on television.
Stanley: The war’s not over. No, the war isn’t over.
Conrad: I saw it on TV.
Stanley: No, this is what you hired me for. No, the war isn’t over until I say it’s over. This is my picture. This is not the CIA’s picture.
What the two men are arguing about is not reality, but a competition between two fictions. They are talking about post truth.
8. ‘I have a very good memory’
At a 2015 campaign rally in Birmingham, Alabama, Trump declared: “I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City … where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” This was a complete falsehood. But Trump simply refused to acknowledge his mendacity. “I have a very good memory, I’ll tell you,” he said when challenged on NBC. “I saw it somewhere on television many years ago. And I never forgot it.”
9. Tucker’s Law
The Thick of It, starring Peter Capaldi, centre, as Malcolm Tucker … the essence of post truth. Photograph: BBC/Mike Hogan/BBC
In the very first episode of The Thick of It in 2005, Armando Iannucci and Jesse Armstrong captured the essence of post truth. Malcolm Tucker is explaining to the besieged minister, Hugh Abbot, how to turn the tanker of a potentially damaging story:
Hugh: What, erm ... What are we going do now?
Malcolm: You’re going to completely reverse your position.
Hugh: Look, no, hang on a second. Hang on, Malcolm. It’s not actually that, erm – that’s going to be quite hard, really.
Malcolm: Yes, well, the announcement that you didn’t make today – you did.
Hugh: No, no, I didn’t. And there were television cameras there while I was not doing it.
Malcolm: Fuck them.
Hugh: I’m not quite sure how … what level of reality I’m supposed to be operating on.
Malcolm: Look, this is what they run with. I tell them that you said it, they believe that you said it. They don’t really believe you said it – they know that you never said it.
Hugh: Right.
Malcolm: But it’s in their interests to say you said it – because if they don’t, they’re not going to get what you say tomorrow or the next day when I decide to tell them what it is you’re saying.
What Malcolm describes to Hugh is the pernicious contract that lies at the heart of post truth.
10. ‘Birthers’ and the backfire effect
The furore over Barack Obama’s place of birth was first whipped up by supporters of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, and very publicly exploited by Trump as a pilot exercise for his eventual candidacy. Obama’s initial response to the claim that a person born outside the US was not qualified to run for the presidency was to post an image of his short-form birth certificate. In July 2009, the director of Hawaii’s department of health confirmed that the president’s full birth records were indeed on file. Finally, in April 2011, Obama published his long-form birth certificate on the White House website.
Case closed? Not a bit of it. Before the publication of this definitive evidence, 45% of US citizens admitted to doubts about Obama’s birthplace. After the full certificate was posted, this figure fell – but only to 33%. Then, in a startling rejection of the facts, the number began to climb again, reaching 41% in January 2012. According to Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, presenting someone who believes in a conspiracy theory with evidence that it is unfounded can often reinforce his or her belief: the so-called “backfire effect”. Like an infection resisting anti-biotics, post truth can fend off even incontestable facts.
Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back by Matthew d’Ancona is published by Ebury (£6.99).
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