CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--Millions of people claim to believe what Donald Trump and his supporters say. Perhaps they do. Would at least some of them believe otherwise if there were a way to tell them the real truth?
Lots of institutions such as the Washington Post and the New York Times have tried, but their success seems limited. What's it about people who profess to believe in outright lies?
We've heard that they live in a bubble -- they watch Fox News and listen to talk radio, and within that bubble they hear what they are supposed to hear -- that it's all a witch hunt, that the Democrats and their supporters are making things up, that the commercial news media are all part of the plot.
Perhaps a lot of them are just pretending that they don't know they are being lied to. Perhaps they are merely showing tribal loyalty as it were. Perhaps some others actually do believe what they are being told.
What's important for us to remember is that we can't convince everyone, but we might be able to convince some of the people who are, by now, on the fence. A move of 5 percent in swing districts would be significant.
To a certain extent it's already happening. Recent elections show that this is the case. We can attribute a lot of anti-Republican votes to antipathy against Trump himself. But the problem isn't just Trump. It's the politically poisonous atmosphere that is created on a day to day basis by the big lie team. If we don't do something to reduce its effects, it will continue for decades to come.
Is there a way to begin to counteract the propaganda machine? The writers and editors of Mother Jonesmagazine and its associated blogs think so.
Kevin Drum's online Mother Jones column leads with the announcement, "We're Fundraising to Start a Team Dedicated to Killing Disinformation."
A most useful goal indeed. It turns out that Drum is referring to an internal Mother Jones project. As described in an earlier column by Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery, the idea is to fact check the innumerable lies that are invented and disseminated by Trump supporters such as Sean Hannity, Fox News, and talk radio. Fact check first, then get the truth out. I would point out that a considerable part of political lying is in the form of failure to "tell the whole truth." Half-truths are used effectively by the right wing.
It's a meritorious project and I hope they will get their funding. At the same time, we have to realize that fact checking alone isn't a complete cure. Some studies suggest that arguing the truth to people who have been propagandized with lies actually causes them to believe the lies more strongly. The piece by Bauerlein and Jeffery suggests otherwise -- at least for some part of the population, truth telling leads to understanding.
But how do you get the truth to people who haven't been hearing it lately? I suspect that there is a limit to what magazines and blogs can do. But if the information developed by a fact checking team could be put to effective use, then political gains will be the result.
We need an effective war room that will respond within the hour
When Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992, his headquarters were known for responding to attacks within a few hours. It was an effective tactic for that election at that time. Can anything comparable be effective in hundreds of congressional campaigns and a couple dozen senatorial campaigns?
We're not going to know until we try. Maybe what we need is several dozen war rooms, perhaps two or three in every state where there are contestable swing districts. How would such a war room function in response to an attack in a specific congressional campaign? That's the obvious question. Obviously, it's possible to contact local newspapers with rebuttals. The harder question is how to deal with local talk radio outlets and with Fox News.
Getting right wing outlets to cover the political center
A couple of decades of trying to deal with right wing talk radio have largely failed. In the 1990s, people tried to call into the Rush Limbaugh show to give the opposing view. Once in a great while, someone succeeded, but after a while, the screeners on these shows figured out how to select for the true believers.
The one method that has shown some success is the threat of consumer action. It worked against Rush Limbaugh when he crossed the line in the way he maligned a female law student. More recently, it worked to some extent against Laura Ingraham when she attacked one of the survivors of the Parkland massacre. Multinational corporations can be intimidated when thousands of angry consumers contact them. In the past, the right wing and puritanical conservatives were effective in keeping sex and left wing politics out of broadcasting. It's only more recently that the center-left has made use of consumer protest as a political tactic.
We know that the tactic is effective because right wing outlets protest piteously when it is used. They bleat about the First Amendment -- in spite of the fact that they are private concerns which are not being attacked by the government.
In brief, threats of consumer action have had some effect on the behavior of radio and television stations. What's necessary is that local consumers in the small and midsized markets learn to speak out.
We don't have to demand that the right wingers be removed. They are, after all, the money machines for these stations. But we can demand a chance at rebuttal. Even ten minutes response time (and put it at the end of the program) is a chance to offer some truth to all the fiction.
If we don't start fighting back in effective ways, the problem will continue as it has for the past couple of decades. What about the next several elections when smoother, less abrasive versions of Trump are running? What about the dozens of congressmen who are well to the right of Trump?
Political magazines should finish the job and be straightforwardly political
I have one nit to pick with the Bauerlein and Jeffery piece. They tell us, "And last but not least: Vote! We are not in the business of telling you how—that’s not our job as journalists. But we do know that sound information and a vigorous democracy go hand in hand."
This is the point where I disagree with Bauerlein and Jeffery, and probably with every other official spokesperson for Journalism. I've said it before, but I might as well say it again: The difference between "journalism" -- as it is explained by those who practice it -- and real science is that scientists provide not only the findings but the interpretations. You don't just refer to studies finding helical elements in DNA, you put forth a model of DNA as a double stranded alpha-helix. In the same way, if Mother Jones or any other news source finds that one candidate is spewing right wing lies, it is appropriate to point out another candidate as preferable.
I wish that leaders such as Bauerlein and Jeffery would take the honorable pursuit of journalism that one step farther and include the obligate political conclusion along with the demonstrable facts. Investigative journalism can and should include voter recommendations.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
