David Amrock

1

That there has lately been something of a national conversation about the truth is unfortunate. The phrase “national conversation,” a favorite trope in the news media, paints a wholesome picture of a public discourse that is both democratized and productive, but such a picture is in stark contrast to the actual role of the media in American life. Far from being occasions of serious reflection, national conversations lead chiefly to the promotion of antagonisms, of preordained conclusions, and as evidenced by the phrase “national conversation,” of tiresome clichés.

Hence the already tedious refrain that “we are now living in a post-truth (or post-fact) era.” This era can be taken to include a few phenomena, none of them exactly new by most people’s admission. Polling shows increasing political polarization, one aspect of which is that Americans tell pollsters that most Republican and Democratic voters disagree “on basic facts.”¹ Polling also shows mounting distrust in the media,² much to the chagrin of media professionals. For their part the news media, in the face of ludicrous, near-constant falsehoods from the president, have proven ineffective at correcting the record, with earnest debates emerging inside the profession about whether news outlets can even announce a lie as a lie.³

All this is to say nothing of “fake news.” A phrase that gained popularity with a journalistic investigation of fictitious news articles planted on social media in the run-up to the 2016 election is now the sneering catchphrase of any politician faced with unflattering reporting. After the last couple of years, one hopes never to have to hear the phrase “fake news” again, but it’s part of a relevant backdrop to the post-truth era. That backdrop is a series of campaigns on the part of media businesses to try to do the reader’s work of separating fact from fiction, and legitimate sources of information from illegitimate ones.

This point is important. The notion of a “post-truth era” presumes some historical facts about the truth: that institutions previously guided the public to the truth, that political actors previously did not mislead the public in a significant way, that journalism funded by advertising was an effective means for informing the public, who rightly played a passive, “trusting” role in getting informed. Paradoxically, it has also been assumed that the public as passive consumers of information still played an active, skeptical role in separating truth from falsehood: a necessary presumption for rationalizing the kind of “neutral” or “balanced” reporting that gives the deceitful a place to air their views. Such a presumption would be dubious—even if the public is skeptical in some ways, there have always been serious inadequacies in the way the media are consumed in American society. What we call a post-truth era is more like the usual state of affairs, made more explicit in the day of Trump. We as Americans and as people are not post-truth, but decidedly pre-truth.

2

Allowing and encouraging people to pursue the truth is a crucial feature of a just society, yet I don’t guess anyone thinks ours is such a society. On the contrary, there is a well-known mandate in American life to misrepresent oneself. The buying and selling which dominate our economy (and our morality) require the practice of marketing, which requires the promotion of a certain way of looking at topics and the suppression of others. It’s pretty clear that advertisers are not going to launch into an earnest, probing public discussion of the benefits and harms of their products. Political careerism, and arguably governance itself, follows the same incentives.

Criticisms of the media should ideally start with an acknowledgement of these kinds of institutional limitations. This was the basic work of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, published in 1988, they presented their oft-misunderstood “propaganda model” of the media (primarily the national news media).⁴ In the Herman–Chomsky view, the existence of the mass media as corporate enterprise means that the mass media are tethered to corporate interests, which fundamentally steers the focus of their content away from the interests of the public and toward the interests of a wealthy elite.

Journalists may object that their relative autonomy, not to mention low pay, assures that journalism is not an elite enterprise, but as Herman and Chomsky state in their 2002 introduction, the shaping of media coverage “is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.” The Herman–Chomsky view is that the propaganda function of the media is highly implicit. As a result, they serve what might otherwise be expected to be an explicit or highly deliberate function of keeping the public in line with the dominant interests in the country.⁵

It might be tempting to look for the active suppression of unfavorable information in the news media, but as the propaganda model partly illustrates, it’s arguably more important to look at the media’s narrowing of topics for public discussion. It’s also quite relevant that the media are limited not just by the influence of advertisers, but by limits to manpower, budget, and availability of sources, so that, even without the rest of the propaganda model, we can see that the consuming public cannot merely expect important information to surface in the news.

These points are made more compelling by Neil Postman’s critique of the media, forged around the same time as Herman and Chomsky’s. In his famous Amusing Ourselves to Death,⁶ Postman speaks of “a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment,” and of the “disinformation” of the news media, by which he means “misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented, or superficial information ... that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.” It’s worth emphasizing these descriptors: the danger, in Postman’s view, is not always false information, or even the downplay of important stories, but rather a media output that merely appears to inform, and in doing so sets a distorted social standard for what informing oneself looks like.

Thus the Herman–Chomsky and the Postman view paint a picture of the news media as, although not unhelpful, fundamentally inadequate for serving what would otherwise be viewed as their primary function: getting the most important, relevant information to the public for the conduct of public affairs.

And yet for all the talk of distrust toward the media—where some measure of skepticism would seem warranted by these critiques—both media and audience continue to accept the flawed social standard for information. The ability of the media to promote even obvious falsehoods, and the public’s willingness to countenance them, is remarkable. Thus President Trump’s claim of “millions” of fraudulent voters in 2016 was headline news. The claim, which would require at minimum something like 1 in 70 votes to be fraudulent, and for the president to have instantaneous and compelling information of that fact while it otherwise went unreported, was described as being merely “without evidence,” a qualifier which mainly served to imply that evidence might exist, that the claim was plausible, when the most relevant detail was that the claim was wildly implausible. The New York Times joined the “no evidence” chorus when Trump initially made the statement in November, then finally described it as a lie—one of the only instances of their deploying the word—when he repeated it in January. In its occasional willingness to deploy the word “lie,” Poynter notes that “the Times differs from its mainstream competitors.”⁷ Debatable as these outlets’ hesitance around the word “lie” may be, the importance is less whether they say a public figure who’s known to make outlandish, ridiculous statements is lying than whether the nature of the claim is addressed. A media environment dependent on the format of the headline will have a hard time adequately inviting the reader into the substance of what Trump’s claim implies.

But if a failure to address implausiblity seems like a failure only of the Trump era, we could look at then-President Obama’s claim of “evolving” on gay marriage. This particular case was at least noted for its incongruity in the press (Obama had evidently stated his support for gay marriage in a questionnaire in 1996, and former aide David Axelrod has said Obama privately characterized his 2008 stance against gay marriage as “bullshitting”),⁸ but it nevertheless has given rise to a popular trope in which politicians launder past behavior or present views in a storybook-like narrative of self-improvement. “Evolving” has become a fresh entry in the already vast anti-intellectual lexicon of American politics.

Even more dumbfounding than this was the story in the 2016 election of polling respondents viewing Trump and Clinton as comparably untrustworthy.⁹ It was as if Americans suddenly developed an everyday standard of skepticism toward politicians, in time to apply it to Clinton—but not in time to apply it to Trump, whose truly remarkable record of lawsuits and falsehoods dwarfed the bland untrustworthiness of a career politician like his opponent. This last example in particular paints a vivid picture of the problem of clichés in American thinking. Rather than taking the information given them and evaluating it, as journalists might expect, Americans were buying a very different product: the notion that there was “no difference” between Trump and Clinton. No matter that the notion was baldly false: it felt like an insight.

False skepticism, paired with the overlooking of obviously false statements, amounts to a form of conduct that is common in politics and mass consumption more broadly. As when the public vaunts the shallowest corporate philanthropy, and perhaps more importantly dismisses critique of such philanthropy as cynicism, all while knowing corporations are unavoidably motivated by profit, American consumer culture enforces a social expectation of credulity. The false insight is emblematic of this: it represents a culture that often purports to know but does not seek to inquire.

3

Noam Chomsky has famously critiqued the dishonesty of the American establishment for decades, in particular the subservience of the media to the American war machine. And for me, encountering Chomsky’s leftist critique of American society was like making contact with a saner, truer way of viewing the world. But by definition, everybody thinks they are right and those who don’t agree are misguided. The American media landscape is full of putative truth-tellers selling prepackaged insights, often at a lucrative price. Fox News and Donald Trump proclaim a truth suppressed by liberal political correctness; conspiracy theorists proclaim a truth suppressed by a shadowy government. How does one know their truths are the right ones, and that their view of the world isn’t waiting to be discarded?

Indeed, the story of fake news in the election inspired a newfound concern for disinformation on the internet, leading to some new growth areas for professional arbiters of truth. Facebook implemented “fact-checking” privileges for certain news outlets, controversially including the conservative Weekly Standard alongside nominally nonpartisan outlets.¹⁰ YouTube began adding notes under videos from news outlets as to whether the outlets were government-affiliated. (Notably, TeleSUR has been flagged as “funded in whole or in part by the Latin American government,” while privately owned outlets are not flagged as privately owned.) Amidst these developments, charts have circulated on social media that purport to show the relative “bias” or reliability of specific outlets. The implication being that in order to navigate the news, one mainly needs to be acquainted with perceived biases, and adjust one’s trust level accordingly.

This reflects another false insight: the tendency to cast right and left ideologies as comparable “extremes” deviating from a reliable, trustworthy center, itself a prepackaged form of truth. The centrist or “liberal” position on truth and facts is that we ought to return to a moment when people trusted elites. A look at the purportedly liberal media thus proves interesting. The agenda best served by these outlets is, as the propaganda model predicts, that of the wealthy. Outlets such as the Times (to which I subscribe), NPR, and Vox are not quite luxury brands or status symbols—indeed, it’s noteworthy that they do not profess to a wealthy perspective at all. But they are trained on the worldview of an educated upper middle class, and they demonstrate a market for cheap insight, intended for people who have been educated and socialized to appreciate irrelevant but shareable trinkets of knowledge. This is the market that gives us the books of Malcolm Gladwell and Nate Silver, and podcasts like NPR’s Serial. Murder cases and neuroscience are seen primarily as a source of niftiness to be talked about on the terms given, which is to say simplistic, consumable terms. An essay by David A. Banks in The New Inquiry put it succinctly: “NPR’s podcasts depoliticize important issues by recasting them as interesting factoids to be shared over cocktails—stimulating but inherently incomplete.”¹¹ In short, these media dull any natural curiosity about the workings of the world on the part of the educated class, ensuring that even politics is distorted out of the relevance of real life and into entertainment. This is the worldview that treats “politics” as a section header in a newspaper, as the unfolding daily soap opera of political performers. It is the worldview that treats the content of the news as stuff to be known, stuff to be in the know about—crucially, not stuff to be acted on. The centrist posture sees disagreements between liberal and conservative politicians as indeed mere disagreements and leaves unexamined wide or unanimous Democratic support for right-wing measures such as an increase in military spending, or Barack Obama’s warmaking and deportations, or Bill Clinton’s bolstering of the prison system and weakening of welfare.

In these outlets’ easy treatment of the American establishment, we can see a subtler version of what is made more explicit in Fox News, and the far-right posture which today passes for “conservatism.” In the same way that a major function of the American news media overall is to render the harms of American government palatable and polite, the function of conservative media is to render even further harms palatable and polite. As Chomsky speculated that the appearance of liberal bias in the media serves to limit how far to the left public opinion can go,¹² we can speculate that the conservative media serve to reorient the appearance of harm in society: even the relatively liberal segments of the public may be less likely to focus on subtler or less visible issues like the excesses of modern capitalism, the erosion of labor organizing, the several current foreign bombing campaigns, if the conservative media set the bar for right-wing villainy at issues like flagrant, apoplectic xenophobia.

In the same way that the centrist posture is to project a common sense of belief in science and the realism of political moderation, the conservative posture is to project a common sense of the inevitability of armed borders, or harsh punishment for crime, or what is sometimes called the “scientific fact” behind anti-trans sentiment. In both cases it’s fair to speculate that the “common sense” offered is ad hoc. Obviously conservatism does not advocate harsh punishment for all crimes; obviously US liberals apply the label of moderation opportunistically.

Thus it may be better to see conservative media as an extension of centrist or neoliberal media rather than as in opposition to it. Taken as a whole, the mass media take a posture in support of the eminence of elites. This is a posture in plain opposition to democracy, and in its tendency to leave important and morally contentious topics unexamined, it is in opposition to truth as well. Media personalities may “disagree on the facts,” but they reliably concur on the frame.

It is striking to witness how enthusiasm for the military on the part of the neutral media recently played out, as Giraldo Rivera of Fox News sentimentally cheered the dropping of a bomb in Afghanistan days after Brian Williams of MSNBC sentimentally cheered the launching of missiles at Syria.¹³

4

If we find ourselves in the position of having to defend truth and facts, it won’t do to assume that truth and facts are self-justifying. In her recent memoir about the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton laments authoritarian efforts “to sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves.”¹⁴ Setting aside that the ghostwritten political memoir is another token of willful credulity in America, the sentiment expressed here exemplifies what is wrong with the American posture toward truth. It exemplifies the notion that some things are simply to be believed, and some people simply to be trusted. And still the paragraph in which this remark is found begins, without irony, “Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism.”

Despite the apprehension displayed by politicians and the media, “mistrust” is not a very meaningful concept. An actual, productive skepticism consists in a particular posture, one not adopted by followers of Trump, not adopted by many viewers of Fox News or MSNBC, and probably not adopted by too many Chomskyites or even myself. The posture of skepticism is not in putting trust in the right people, nor is it in doubting the right people. Skepticism, quite differently, is a posture of dissatisfaction with the truth as it is handed to you. Skepticism requires being able and willing to judge the most likely or most plausible truth, and to go on looking for new information anyway. It is, in short, a posture of curiosity.

The mistrust or distrust which politicians and media professionals today lament represents a way for some on the right to inflate their own sense of intellectual independence, and a way for those in the establishment center to hold themselves out as honest and trustworthy by contrast. Those in the establishment cannot help but flatter the right-wing notion of distrust with denunciations, because they can’t afford to encourage actual curiosity.

This plays out particularly clearly in the conflict over climate change and the rise of “climate skepticism.” This brand of skepticism relies on speculations that climate change by turns isn’t anthropogenic, isn’t happening, or isn’t consequential. In other words, climate skepticism consists in active “disbelief” of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change.

Climate skepticism is expounded by the right; the center weakly denounces it as “climate denial.” That this posture is one of denial is a fair point and worth saying, but it doesn’t end the matter. For one it doesn’t convince anybody. It’s true that most of us aren’t well acquainted with climate science, in the sense that we aren’t climate scientists. We have, therefore, some choices to make. We have to decide whether climatology overall is likely to be of consequence. We have to decide whether to try to acquaint ourselves with its methods and its implications. And we have to decide whether to act on it. These might be interrelated decisions, but they can be undertaken independently and often are.

Those who purport to stand for the truth are raising a philosophic issue—awkwardly so, as philosophy is a subject absent from our media and from our schools. By now it’s a truism that the encouragement of STEM in school and the denigration of the humanities is a hallmark of the assumption that Americans should be workers before they are thinkers. The relationship between that assumption and mainstream ideas about the things one ought to believe or disbelieve hardly needs to be drawn here.

There is also little room in this essay to wade into deep philosophical debate about truth and knowledge. We might simply take a page from the pragmatist philosophers’ ideas. Richard Rorty’s reference to John Dewey, who “wanted to get rid of what he called ‘the notion, which has ruled over philosophy ever since the time of the Greeks, that the office of knowledge is to uncover the antecedently real, rather than, as is the case with our practical judgments, to gain the kind of understanding which is necessary to deal with problems as they arise”¹⁵ is impressive, because it lights the way to a workable conception of human thought that does not presume anything about reality—which we might not ever adequately regard or describe—but which is chiefly concerned with consequences as we do regard or describe them. To my thinking, what is important is that truth is not something merely to be revered, but something to be pursued, tested, and used.

Those who claim to “believe in science,” if they are not poised to act on averting climate change or preventing mass death from it—and this is surely most of us—are not really in a superior position to those who claim to “disbelieve.” Those who are poised to work against climate change but have no interest in the science may be in a vaguely preferable position, but a lack of acquaintance with the science might lead them to take or support ineffective measures. (In particular, in a society where morality follows profit mandates, and policy choices are shaped primarily by politicians and lobbyists, it’s easy to see where proposals for combating climate change may not actually be adequate or worthwhile.) Those who pay no attention to climate change, aren’t acquainted with the science, and have no plans to do anything are in an especially woeful position, intellectually and morally—and worst of all are in the best position to be manipulated by politicians, conservative and otherwise. It is no help to claim to be skeptical.

Granted, basic philosophical questions about the nature of knowledge and truth can work to do the opposite of what they purport to do. If we fixate on a narrow philosophic concept of knowledge, philosophy can obscure more than it illuminates. Similarly, the impulse to think for oneself can lead us to reach for easy, satisfying conclusions rather than to always be working to improve our understanding. Even then, resigning oneself to the perceived insight that it’s too egoistic to be sure of oneself, that the mature insight is to give plenty of room to other people’s views, can lead us astray if we aren’t assertive enough to discard blatant nonsense.

It is not meaningful to claim that the truth is relative. Nor is it meaningful to equate the inadequacies of the news media with lies. The fact of honest journalism is what makes news organizations so indispensable in understanding the world, and what makes their precarious economic position today so dangerous. But truths as expressed in the media are not all one ever needs to know. The false skepticism, the misleading insights, and the willful credulity in American society are all significant dangers themselves. National conversations as we know them are the site of almost bafflingly easy conclusions, encouraging and rewarding shallow opinions to the point that an opinion itself is a badge of honor.

It would thus be wrong of me not to acknowledge that an essay like this is itself an invitation into an easy, consumable insight. I do not mean simply to trumpet Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, to moralize with Neil Postman, or to flatter myself over my own false sense of intellectual independence. I hope this essay is more like a warning against all this—a reminder that to vaunt American freedom, or intellectualism, or the truth, is mainly to beg for a heap of work. “The truth” and the many people offering it are not a safehouse from reproach or from folly.