Redefining the Moment: Trump, Truth, and War with the Media

Trump has lowered standards of intellectual virtue by distorting facts and truth, thus, making social conversation valueless.     

Sebahate J. Shala

Just a few weeks before Donald Trump swore-in as the President of the United States (U.S.), the Washington Post anticipated an “unprecedented conflict” between the administration and the press, which in the worst scenario may lead to a “culture of war,” even ending the American democracy. The conflict, however, turned out into a “running war” once President Trump took the office on January 20th, 2017, instigating huge reactions from the press. The latter denied the existence of a war, saying that the president is in a “running war” with facts and the truth.

Trump is deemed as one of the most untrustworthy and dishonest presidents—even comparing to Nixon—and a leading exponent of post-truth politics. His presidential campaign was characterized by lies, falsehood statements and conspiracy theories—from birtherism to Kennedy assassination to the Iraqi war. Unfortunately, he has operated under the same standards in the White House, too, unleashing a series of false or unsubstantiated claims such as the one on the “VOTER FRAUD” and the increase of murder rate in the U.S.

Friedman, the New York Times’ columnist, has no theory to explain what he calls “Trump’s industrial size and contradictory lies”—except intent lying for his personal advancement. Trump’s constant distortion of truth, according to CNN’sCooper, indicates that he either gets information wrong or he deliberately does not tell the truth. In either situation, Cooper continues, the White House—which is supposed to have all information on a particular matter—has demonstrated that has “such a little respect for facts and the truth.” (AC360, January 7, 2017)

Being faced with an administration that does not value facts over the falsehoods, the news top-journalists found themselves confused on how to cover politics in the post-truth America, respectively, what word to use when the president makes a false or unsubstantiated statement? The Times’ columnist, Krugman, has the answer: “Journalists simply do their job, which is to report the facts, report the truth even when it is reporting the truth that a presidential candidate is a liar.” The Politico’s reporter, Thrush, on the other side, urges reporters to weaponize facts in the way that Trump and others have weaponized falsehood.

Trump and Media: Facts vs. Fictions War 

March 8, 1933: About a hundred reporters embarked into the oval office to be informed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the new rules of communication between the president and the press. He greeted and offered an individual handshake, and announced a twice a week press-conferences— described as a “merely enlarged editions of very delightful family conferences.”“FDR was a revolutionary change in mass communication—particularly comparing to Hoover’s notoriously uncommunicative presidency. He was determined to redefine the relationship between the president and the press,” Alter wrote in his book, “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.”Roosevelt provided unprecedented access to the media, he invented “on and off-record” statements and treated journalists as his allies—which helped him execute his program, especially the “New Deal.”

January 21, 2017: In a visit to the CIA, President Donald Trump declared a “running war with the media,” calling reporters the “most dishonest people on the Earth” for inventing a feud between the intelligence community and him, and deliberately underestimating the size of his inauguration crowd. Following President’s statement, the White House chief strategist, Bannon, asked media to “shut up and listen for a while” due to the humiliation they faced on the election outcome. He went further calling media “the opposition party.”

 The Guardian called Bannon’s attack a “threat” while the CNN’s Amanpour compared it to those of totalitarian regimes, which believe that media should be a propaganda unit of President. “This is not in the tradition of the American press, so of course we are not going to shut up and why should we? We are not the opposition party, we are the press.” Trump’s continuing attacks against the press corps have received a huge backlash from the news organizations. Some analysts suggest that the President is in the “state of war” with the press. Polgreen, a chief-editor at the Huffington Post, rejects such claims, saying that the President is in a war with facts and the truth. “We must do our job to separate facts from the fiction,” Polgreen said at the CNN’s Reliable Sources. According to the Times’ Blow, Trump, in fact, is in a “running war” with the truth as he seeks the absolute control over the flow of information by dictating his own version of facts rather than living with the reality of accepted facts.

President Trump, who otherwise borrowed the catch-phrase of the “Forgotten Man” from Roosevelt’s 1932 radio speech, risks to destroy much of the 32nd president’s foundation and legacy, and what has distinguished the U.S. democracy from non-democratic regimes. Rosen, a leading media thinker, sees big trouble ahead. As he told the Post, under Trump era, not only will the media be under the siege but also it is possible the end of American democracy. In the worst scenario, Trump, as Rosen believes, might attempt to convert the press coverage on his falsehoods into a “culture war”— by calling on the shutdown of honest reporting or prosecuting journalists based on the crime of reporting the news.

Now more than ever, the U.S. media have mobilized to confronting with Trump administration and committing to their mission—telling the truth and holding the powerful people accountable. The Guardian urges the media to “unite, share and collaborate” in fighting against Trump’s lies and protecting journalism and U.S. democracy. Its three-point plan calls on solidarity among journalists in taking answers in questions the White House refuses to answer; cooperation regarding completion of information; and collaboration to investigate Trump and his subordinates international business ties and conflict of interest. Reuters did not subscribe to this proposal, saying that it will cover Trump presidency in the “Reuters way”–-by reporting on what it matters for people, be ever-more resourceful in taking information, less worry about official access, and get out into the country and talk to the people.

Truth in the Trump Era: It Doesn’t Matter

Right after the election, the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” was chosen as the “Word of the Year 2016” in response to the word’s spike in frequency after the Brexit, and in particular, following the U.S. election. Used first by Steve Tesich, a Serbian-American playwright in 1992, with the reference to the Iran–Contra scandal and Persian Gulf War, “post-truth,” as Oxford explains, denotes or relates to a condition where “objective facts do not seem to matter in shaping public opinion rather than emotion and personal belief.”

The word associates with post-truth politics. President Trump is viewed as the leading exponent of post-truth politics. In the post-truth politics, the truth, as the Economist explains, is not falsified or contested but is of secondary importance. However, Trump’s political lying, according to the magazine, marks a departure from the once-post-truth purpose: rather than convincing elites by creating a false view of the world, Trump aims reinforcing prejudices where feelings, not facts are central to this campaigning. As a matter of fact, Trump’s lying has shredded–-what the Times' columnist, Brooks, calls “the standards of intellectual virtue”—respect for facts and truth to make the conversation possible. In Kant’s words, the truth must be the guiding principle in social intercourse; without truth, social intercourse and conversation become valueless.

Unfortunately, Trump and his inner circle have challenged our understanding of facts, showing little or no regard for them. As one of his surrogates told the Times, “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts.” Trump was a front-runner liar during the campaign trail. PolitiFact examined 258 Trump’s and 255 Clinton’s statements and find that two candidates lived in completely different moral universes regarding the truth-telling: Trump had 89 False ratings vs. Clinton 27 and 48 Pants on Fire vs. Clinton just six. By tracking Trump’s lie, half-truth and outright exaggeration, the Politico found that during primary season, Trump said a lie approximately once every five minutes for entire week, while during the fall, including three presidential debates, he progressed by superseding for tens times Clinton, saying a lie just about once every three minutes.

In a total, only 2.0 percent of Trump’s claims, according to the Atlantic, were true versus 75.0 percent false (by adding numbers from mostly false to flagrantly so) against Clinton with 29.0 percent. This, according to McAdams, suggests that Trump stands in extreme with regard to lies even compared to Nixon’s dishonesty and deceit. “Trump’s personality is flummoxing and low in agreeableness–-a characteristic of people who are viewed as untrustworthy, suggesting a presidency that could be highly combustible. One possible yield is an energetic, activist president who has a less than cordial relationship with the truth. A person who never thinks twice about the collateral damage he will leave behind,” McAdams wrote in “The Mind of Donald Trump.”

Trump has so far operated under the same rules as President, disregarding pundits’ suggestions to undergo a “radical change in his personality and politics”—from a compulsive liar to a compulsive truth-teller. On day one, he falsely accused journalists of inventing a rift between the CIA and him and deliberately underestimating the size of his inauguration. According to the White House press secretary, Spicer, Trump’s inauguration crowd was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration”—reaching up to 1.5 million people. The metrics of the National Park Service and Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, however, contradicted such claims. In this “messy truth,” Trump’s senior adviser Conway went on the NBC Meet the Press, explaining that Spicer provided “alternative facts” on the size of inauguration audience, prompting huge internet reaction on the catch-phrase that people compared to the 1984 Orwellian novel.

On day four, Trump repeated another unsubstantiated statement he made during the election, claiming that 3-5 million casts illegally by undocumented immigrants cost him the popular vote. He called for a major investigation on the “widespread voter fraud,” thus conflating various reports, among others, the 2008 and 2012 Pew Center and the 2008 and 2010 Old Dominion University professors’ ones. None of them, including a 2007 New York Times report, supported Trump’s claims. Becker, who worked with the Pew, said on CNN: “Any claim that suggests that fraud exists, well it does exist more than zero.” If Trump’s claims are true, as the Times reported, “this would suggest the wholesale corruption of American democracy.”

Later, Trump falsely claimed that the murder rate is at its highest point in 47 years in America and media is not reporting about it. According to the recent FBI Uniform Crime Reporting, the U.S. murder rate was 5.0 homicides per 100,000 in 2015—which are not peak numbers.

Traditional vs. Social Media War: The “Tsunami” Fake News 

In an acceptance speech award, Amanpour warned her colleagues on “the existential threat that journalism faces in the Trump era.” Along with democracy, she continued, journalism is at a “mortal peril” due to a combination of President’s savvy end run with the media, the massive proliferation of “fake news” and Russia interference into the U.S. democratic system.

Following Trump’s election, media experts explored all possible avenues that led to the rise of “Trump phenomenon,” pointing to the mainstream media for “getting it wrong”–by focusing more on Clinton’s emails rather than Trump’s scandals. Nevertheless, Glasser rejects this criticism. “The media scandal of 2016 is not so about what reporters failed to tell the American public: it is about what they did report on, and the fact that it did not seem to matter.” Unfortunately, Glasser continues, stories that would have killed any other politician, did not stop Trump from thriving. “Even fact-checking did not work. The more news outlets did it, the less the facts resonated. This election showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news.”

Amanpour directed her critiques toward social media and advertisers’ sites for spreading, as she said, the “tsunami fake news.” “Social media tends to reduce complex social challenges to mobilizing slogans that reverberate in echo chambers of the like-minded rather than engage in persuasion, dialogue, and the reach for consensus.” The same line of argument holds the NYT, too. According to the newspaper, social media and Cable TV have fractured the shared public–-once generated and reaffirmed by the church, government, news media, and universities on the widely accepted facts. The NYT cited a North Carolina man who said that, while he regularly clicked on stories claiming that Clinton was indicted or Mexico wall, he missed the days when Walter Cronkite delivered news to the nation. “Cable TV fractured that shared experience and then social media made it easier for Americans to curl-up in cozy, angry or self-righteous cocoons,” the NYT concluded.

Regretfully, the Trump rise has gone parallel with the proliferation of “fake news.” Rather than connecting people as the primary mission, Facebook, as the Guardian suggests, is actually doing more to divide than unite the world. The newspaper published a quote shared on Facebook, ostensibly said by Trump in an interview with People magazine in 1998, saying: “If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They are the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.” The truth, the newspaper concluded, is that Trump never said it.

Reviewing more than 1,000 posts of six large hyperpartisan Facebook pages, BuzzFeed found that three large right-wing politics pages published false or misleading information 38.0 percent of the time during the period analyzed, and three large left-wing pages did so in nearly 20.0 percent of posts. According to the NYT Magazine, through its distinctive sort of operation, Facebook allows the hyperpartisan political media, such as the Occupy Democrats, Angry Patriot, Right Alerts, and the likes, to feed millions of followers. “It is like a meme of war, and politics is being won and lost on social media,” said Rivero, who run the Occupy Democrats. In retrospect, as the magazine warns, the Facebook takeover of online media looks rather like a “slow-motion coup.” For example, a national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure Obama was born in the U.S. while various polls found that between a quarter and a half-Republicans believed he is a Muslim.

Facebook is the largest social network in the world, accounting for 1.86 billion monthly active users and reaching up to 67.0 percent of American adults. A study of the Pew Center and Knight Foundation suggests that 62.0 percent of American adults got news on social media in 2016 against 49.0 percent in 2012. Two-thirds of Facebook users, respectively 64.0 percent get news on the site, which amounts to 44.0 percent of the general population, followed by 59.0 percent of Twitter users who gets news on the site.

Social networks’ movements and viral phenomena are supposed to create— what Nahon and Hemsley call a “self-organized interest network.” The“self-organized interest network” operates outside the control of traditional power structures, allowing more diverse activism and awareness, opening the possibility for public deliberation and enabling public opinion formation. For public opinion to be created, the public, according to Page, must be well-informed through traditional media, communicative experts and social-media platforms. “Through all of these channels, then ordinary people can create their opinions by spotting the truth and rejecting nonsense.”

The process of changing peoples’ mind, as Shirky explains, goes through two-steps: opinions are first transmitted by the media and then purveyed to friends, family, and colleagues. And, it is only in the second step that the political opinions are formed, and internet in general, and social media, in particular, can make a difference. “Access to information is far less important politically than access to the conversation.” This is how the public sphere is created and it is not just an interaction of media or the socio-spatial sites but as Castells suggests, it is the interaction between citizens, civil society and the state. “Failure to communicate between two or more key components leads the whole system of decision-making to a stalemate.”

The 2009 “Arab Spring” was mainly attributed to the “social media effect.” The turmoil was initially reported by social media, which then coordinated and channeled the citizens' revolt. However, Zuckerman disagrees, suggesting that revolutions were primarily merit of labor unions, lawyers and other professional networks. Likewise, protests movements in India (2009) and South Korea (2008) used social media not as a replacement for the real world action but as a way to coordinate it. Those who praised the “social media effect” in the Arab world said that social media platform, unfortunately, failed to mobilize masses in the U.S. against Trump’s demagogy. With the massive proliferation of fake news, Cable TV and the steep decline of newspapers’ advertising, the news-media landscape, as the Washington Post’s columnist Sullivan argues, “is unlike anything we have seen before.”