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SundayReview
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Opinion

Why Nobody Cares the
President Is Lying

By CHARLES J. SYKESFEB.
4, 2017

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Bráulio Amado

MILWAUKEE
— If President Trump’s first tumultuous weeks have done nothing else, at least
they have again made us a nation of readers.

As
Americans grapple with the unreality of the new administration, George Orwell’s
“1984” has enjoyed a resurgence of interest, becoming a surprise best seller and
an invaluable guide to our post-factual world.

On
his first full day in office Mr. Trump insisted that his inaugural crowd was the
largest ever, a baseless boast that will likely set a pattern for his
relationship both to the media and to the truth.

At an event
marking Black History Month last week, the president took a detour from a
discussion of Frederick Douglass — he described the abolitionist as “an example
of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more” —
to talk about the press. “A lot of the media is actually the opposition party —
they’re so biased,” he said. “So much of the media is the opposition party and
knowingly saying incorrect things.”
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Mr. Trump understands that
attacking the media is the reddest of meat for his base, which has been
conditioned to reject reporting from news sites outside of the conservative
media ecosystem.

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For years, as a conservative radio
talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream
media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far
higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize
those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false
information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience.
Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that
could be easily misled.

The news media’s spectacular failure to get the election
right has made it only easier for many conservatives to ignore anything that
happens outside the right’s bubble and for the Trump White House to fabricate
facts with little fear of alienating its base.

Unfortunately, that also means that the more the
fact-based media tries to debunk the president’s falsehoods, the further it will
entrench the battle lines.

During his first week in office, Mr. Trump reiterated the
unfounded charge
that millions of people had voted illegally. When challenged on the evident
falsehood, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, seemed to argue that
Mr. Trump’s belief that something was true qualified as evidence. The press
secretary also declined to answer a straightforward question about the
unemployment rate, suggesting that the number will henceforth be whatever the
Trump administration wants it to be.

He can do this because members of the Trump administration
feel confident that the alternative-reality media will provide air cover, even
if they are caught fabricating facts or twisting words (like claiming that the
“ban” on Muslim immigrants wasn’t really a “ban”). Indeed, they believe they
have shifted the paradigm of media coverage, replacing the traditional media
with their own.

In a stunning demonstration of the power and resiliency of
our new post-factual political culture, Mr. Trump and his allies in the right
media have already turned the term “fake news” against its critics, essentially
draining it of any meaning. During the campaign, actual “fake news” — deliberate
hoaxes — polluted political discourse and clogged social media timelines.

Some outlets opened the door, by helping spread conspiracy
theories and indulging the paranoia of the fever swamps. For years, the widely
read Drudge Report has linked to the bizarre conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who
believes that both the attacks of Sept. 11 and the Sandy Hook shootings were
government-inspired “false flag” operations.

For conservatives, this should have made it clear that
something was badly amiss in their media ecosystem. But now any news deemed to
be biased, annoying or negative can be labeled “fake news.” Erroneous reports
that the bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the
Oval Office or misleading reports that sanctions against Russia had been lifted
will be seized on by Mr. Trump’s White House to reinforce his indictment.

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Even as he continues to attack the “dishonest media,” Mr.
Trump and his allies are empowering this alt-reality media, providing White
House access to Breitbart and other post-factual outlets that are already
morphing into fierce defenders of the administration.

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The relationship appears to be
symbiotic, as Mr. Trump often seems to pick up on talking points from Fox News
and has tweeted out links from websites notorious for their casual relationship
to the truth, including sites like Gateway Pundit, a hoax-peddling site that
announced, shortly after the inauguration, that it would have a White House
correspondent.

By now, it ought to be evident that enemies are important
to this administration, whether they are foreigners, refugees, international
bankers or the press.

But discrediting independent sources of information also
has two major advantages for Mr. Trump: It helps insulate him from criticism and
it allows him to create his own narratives, metrics and “alternative facts.”

All administrations lie, but what we are seeing here is an
attack on credibility itself.

The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov
drew upon long familiarity with that process when he
tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an
agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

Mr. Kasparov grasps that the real threat is not merely
that a large number of Americans have become accustomed to rejecting factual
information, or even that they have become habituated to believing hoaxes. The
real danger is that, inundated with “alternative facts,” many voters will simply
shrug, asking, “What is truth?” — and not wait for an answer.

In that world, the leader becomes the only reliable source
of truth; a familiar phenomenon in an authoritarian state, but a radical
departure from the norms of a democratic society. The battle over truth is now
central to our politics.

This may explain one of the more revealing moments from
after the election, when one of Mr. Trump’s campaign surrogates, Scottie Nell
Hughes, was asked to defend the clearly false statement by Mr. Trump that
millions of votes had been cast illegally. She answered by explaining that
everybody now had their own way of interpreting whether a fact was true or
not.

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“There’s no such thing,
unfortunately, anymore as facts,” she declared. Among “a large part of the
population” what Mr. Trump said was the truth.

“When he says that millions of people illegally voted,”
she said, his supporters believe him — and “people believe they have facts to
back that up.”

Or as George Orwell said: “The very concept of objective
truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” But Ms. Hughes’s
comment was perhaps unintentionally insightful. Mr. Trump and company seem to be
betting that much of the electorate will not care if the president tells
demonstrable lies, and will pick and choose whatever “alternative facts” confirm
their views.

The next few years will be a test of that thesis.

In the meantime, we must recognize the magnitude of the
challenge. If we want to restore respect for facts and break through the
intellectual ghettos on both the right and left, the mainstream media will have
to be aggressive without being hysterical and adversarial without being unduly
oppositional.

Perhaps just as important, it will be incumbent on
conservative media outlets to push back as well. Conservatism should be a
reality-based philosophy, and the movement will be better off if it recognizes
that facts really do matter. There may be short-term advantages to running
headlines about millions of illegal immigrants voting or secret United Nations
plots to steal your guns, but the longer the right enables such fabrications,
the weaker it will be in the long run. As uncomfortable as it may be, it will
fall to the conservative media to police its worst actors.

The conservative media ecosystem — like the rest of us —
has to recognize how critical, but also how fragile, credibility is in the
Orwellian age of Donald Trump.

Charles J. Sykes (@SykesCharlie), a former talk-show
host in Wisconsin, is the author of the forthcoming “How the Right Lost Its
Mind.”

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Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on
February 5, 2017, on Page SR1 of the New York
edition with the headline: The Right That Cried Wolf. Today's Paper|Subscribe

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