As the country I thought I inhabited continues to disintegrate, I’ve become more and more convinced that what I’ve called our “information landscape” is a major contributor to our civic woes.
We have created a world that allows us to “curate” our realities, to engage in what we used to call “cherry picking.” Want to believe that science is a scam and vaccines are mechanisms for inserting Microsoft chips in our bodies? A bit of Internet “research” will locate “news” sites that confirm your suspicions. Want to believe that the deranged ignoramus in the Oval Office actually knows what he’s doing? Ditto.
The media we now refer to as legacy outlets were far from perfect. “If it bleeds, it leads” dominated decisions about what was front-page news, and even outlets with a professional devotion to the obligations of gatekeeping overlooked important events and misread others. But at their best, they acted as lie detectors–and public figures who feared that function were careful to moderate their misinformation, or at least cloak efforts at misdirection in ambiguities.
The Internet’s Wild West, where social media echoes and promotes the proliferation of Rightwing propaganda sites, is liar’s heaven. A buffoon as ridiculous as Trump, with his constant crazed, childish and misspelled posts, would never have ascended to the Presidency when actual journalists were the primary gatekeepers.
Cult leaders (Trump is the Jim Jones of MAGA) have always been able to bamboozle a slice of the population; a portion of humanity is demonstrably impervious to fact and logic. A healthier information environment would not diabuse the True Believers, who see Trump as the champion who will kill “woke-ism” and return straight White (Pseudo)Christian men to dominance. But the current fire hose of competing versions of reality is having the effect desired by autocrats everywhere–it paralyzes much larger segments of the population, who gradually despair of determining what is true, and simply check out.
Megan Garber addressed the issue in a recent essay in the Altlantic.
She noted that Trump had been reelected despite–or perhaps because of– the Big Lie, and she mused that, these days, false assertions evidently aren’t liabilities but selling points, “weapons of partisan warfare, disorienting perceived enemies (Democrats, members of the media) even as they foment broader forms of cynicism and mistrust.”
For decades, American politics have relied on the same logic that polygraph machines do: that liars will feel some level of shame when they tell their lies, and that the shame will manifest—the quickened heartbeat, the pang of guilt—in the body. But the body politic is cheating the test with alarming ease. Some Americans believe the lies. Others refuse to. Some Americans recognize the lies’ falsity but have decided that some things—their own tribe, their vision for the country—are simply more important than truth. Regardless, the lies remain, unchecked by the old machinery. The polygraph is a measure of conscience. So, in its way, is democracy.
Garber quoted Walter Lippman’s classic book, Public Opinion, in which he argued that democracy is a task of data management. American democracy “is premised on the idea that voters’ political decisions will be based on reliable information.”
The information people rely on to do the work of citizenship—voting, arguing, shaping a shared future—is data. But those data are processed by notoriously fickle hardware. The data inform our brains’ impressions of the world: the images that Lippmann called “the pictures in our heads.” The pictures are subjective. They are malleable. And, perhaps most of all, they make little distinction between things that are true and things that are merely believed to be….
In Public Opinion, Lippmann diagnosed how readily propaganda could make its way into a nation that was officially at peace. He outlined how seamlessly the false messages could mingle with, and override, true ones. He argued that Americans’ unsteady relationship with information made our democracy inherently fragile.
As Garber quite accurately notes, every lie Trump tells, no matter how consequential or petty (and Trump is nothing if not petty), erodes people’s ability to trust any and all information.
Falsehoods, issued repeatedly from the bully pulpit, threaten to become conventional wisdom, then clichés, then foregone conclusions. Attempts to challenge them, as crucial as those efforts are as matters of historical recordkeeping, take on a certain listlessness. For others to point out the truth is to do the right thing. It is also to bring paper straws to a gunfight.
As the zone is flooded with bullshit (in Steve Bannon’s memorable phrase), citizens check out. And the liars cement their power.
My Black Spouse would laugh at some of your words (as a privileged white women). She was taught as child that she needed to work twice as hard for half the opportunities. The public schools didn’t teach that.
Trump scares her- but the naïveté of white women. We white men bought lies and distortions additionally about gender. The right has worked hard for many decades. The wealthy go with Fascist leadership as they see it not seriously hurting them. I don’t see resistance to (Reverend) Claude Osteen and his alleged $54 million salary. He hoodwinks as do so many others like most of Democrat Congressionpeople pleading for our donations while they showcase their purported support of us. Trump was smart in sending missles when he did in Iran. It divided us- lying about the purported Iranian nuclear threat. The No Kings protests allowed in their impact on our resistance. We are the fools now!
theres little to say or discuss the object of this info,propaganda,etc. its a fact of life and why we are here today. who really is behind this? theres been a back room run on who gets elected via the right wing political arm. (heritage fnd,2025,leo.).citizensunited,inc. and pacs and such have been the forefront of where to target the agnotology to people who absorb ignorance over fact,,,the majority. education didnt make the grade, when it come to focus on a subject.
the point im making is further down the line.
whereas the discussion about who is financing this sham? the push for ignorance over fact is spread by free ink. but who is controlling the actual money spent on think tank minions who get paid to start the bots that influencers live on and are mostly being paid to front this shit. most sicken the mind and political well being? (zucks law)wall street goons, and the billionaires are seldom mentioned, for reason. im sure many here invested to retire, sorry if im stepping on toes. my theory is, im not about to take profits made by the working class to be my retirement genre. we should have the living wages to save over the billionaires/wall streets growth.but major shareholders/billionaires are my focus. theres no other mass amount of money that can,and did, take over a whole political party and most of the other. they all focus on their own needs over the majority. hoarded money, off shores and the hidden money are not taxed and its used for self preservation,and most likely bragging rights. the blathering idiot who was elected by the ignorant to lead is probably not the way things worked out for the upper crustys, but it worked via minds over matter. free ink social media was the brick road for this flow of crap dividing everything. the news media is a whip, headlines,no context. and a republican party that does nothing to suppress the authoritarian change and a DNC the sucks because its too far right and sucks up to the mark cubans views it should all be mine as i screw Harris out of the change needed in America. ask the question, whos financing this? its not trump, hes merely the jolly dragon of death. its the bilionaires and wall street. time to name names and push the narrative and make this public before the next,if we ever get to, vote again. but theres got to be facts, and its time the actual people involved in this change and why are mentioned. the court of 6 jesters have spoken, we now live for an authoritarian government. who,paid to make sure they keep their seats?
The wealthy oligarchy goes with Fascism because we are in the late stages of capitalism, predicted by Karl Marx. It is our national surveillance state (Palantir) that is deployed against the masses to keep them from taking on Marx’s solution – socialism. This is why the National Democratic Party is losing their shit over the victory of a Democratic Socialist in America’sbiggest and most diverse city.
The oligarchy has used legacy media to manipulate the masses since its inception. Rockefeller paid for editors to be employed at top newspapers across America that would print what he wanted. Now, the legacy media is controlled by the CIA and the State Department. This is why Blinken/Biden and the whole political establishment were upset over TikTok showing Palestinian videos of the genocide live daily. They were getting heat from AIPAC and ADL, Jewish PACS that control US foreign public policy in Washington.
We’ve discussed on this blog at length the lack of guilt among Washington politicians for lying to the American people. The conclusion is that they are sociopaths. Those who achieve that level of political success are born sociopaths – professional liars. They don’t experience guilt. Those politicians who strive for success, who aren’t sociopaths, struggle with alcohol and drug addiction, which are used to quash their internal trigger of conscience. As Sorg would say, you can’t escape or avoid a healthy conscience – it’s god-given.
If you watched Trump’s interview with Terry Moran, you can see what happens when you question a sociopath. Hell, Barbara Walters destroyed Trump in the early 90s during an interview as she presented FACTS which disputed every single lie Trump told. Today, if anybody corrects a politician for lying, they get fired.
Lastly, I’ve been conducting research on our oligarchy in comparison to social democracies in the Nordic countries, as they consistently rank in the Top 10 in global rankings for education, quality of life, happiness, and even democracy (the US ranks 28th). They have primarily two publicly funded media outlets, and voters and citizens demand that they hold their government officials accountable. Journalists work for the people, as designed in the US Constitution. If they don’t hold the government accountable, they are fired. See the difference?
That’s why our public media is attacked via defunding, especially by the worst liars of them all – Republicans.
Lincoln’s (purported) quote “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time,” seems appropriate here, as simplistic as it is. Perhaps the dwindling number of those of us not fooled by the obvious – and not-so-obvious – disinformation is the real threat here. I am completely and utterly blown away by the subservient and sycophantic actions on display by our nation’s “leaders” in their fawning over the criminal and other unacceptable actions. I watched a 60 Minutes piece where pictures of Nazi military leaders were sharing fun at picnics etc. while hundreds of thousands were being cremated nearby. We’re not their yet, not even close to that level of inhumanity, but isn’t this a similar path? Are we the proverbial oblivious frogs in the slowly coming-to-a-boil water?
jacobin.com:
trumps tax bill is bought and paid for by big buisness.. today
JS’s point is good. We know where wealth is created, and that is through work, the application of energy to materials to make them useful, marketable, and consumable on a per-item basis, ultimately converting them to waste.
We also know where it’s going: into a number labeled the GDP, where it’s processed either through corporations via the magic of retailing, or into taxes, but ultimately into the cost of living for people who, on average, live too high on the hog.
One is managed by the traditions of capitalism, characterized by a hierarchy, where at every step through those processes, a decreasing number of people reap more benefits, with the most per person at the very top of the pyramid. Those at the top already have significantly more accumulated unspent wealth per person than those at the bottom.
Then there is the channel that follows the dictates of Socialism, following a different hierarchy. Part of those traditions also includes upward, downwards, and sideways flow, providing the entire country with infrastructure that serves all of us, including capitalism and individuals, but priced not per item, but with all sharing the cost.
Our problems begin when those at the top of the capitalist hierarchy gain control or influence those at the top of the socialist pyramid.
Who bears the cost of that influence? It’s those at the bottom of every pyramid who are the workers who created all the wealth in the first place. It’s the js’s of the world managing the application of energy to the materials we all consume and eventually waste.
How can that possibly benefit most people?
This bit from today’s blog somewhat obfuscates the truth about how Trump got re-elected.
“She noted that Trump had been reelected despite–or perhaps because of– the Big Lie, and she mused that, these days, false assertions evidently aren’t liabilities but selling points, “weapons of partisan warfare, disorienting perceived enemies (Democrats, members of the media) even as they foment broader forms of cynicism and mistrust.”
Why is there no mention of the 82 million registered voters who stayed home? Crunching the numbers a little bit shows that while 155 +/- voters voted, those 82 million represent 35% of potential voters – more than 1/3. Those who voted for Trump achieved 33% of the vote, with Harris getting about 1.5% less. So, with an overall population of about 330 million, those who picked Trump to soil the White House amounted to about 24% of the population at large. Even if 52% of the 82 million non-voters voted for Harris, she wins the popular vote in the proverbial landslide.
I think it’s time to stop trying to separate fly poop from pepper about the last election and focus our efforts on saving our Constitution and nation from the vagaries of Republican legislators across the country and the fundamentally corrupt Republican-appointed “Justices” and judges.
When comparing the U.S. to Nordic countries, we need to keep in mind the relative size of those countries to the American states or even cities.
Sweden: 10,640,000
Denmark: 5,961,249
Finland: 5,617,310
Norway: 5,550,203
Iceland: 383,726
Faroe Islands: 54,440
Greenland: 56,699
Åland: 30,541
Also, keep in mind that those populations are much more homogeneous than our blue cities/states.
I depend less and less on the news, or more accurately, infotainment, coming out of U.S. outlets. Most of what I regularly view is broadcast by BBC, The Guardian, Rueters, PBS/NPR, CBC, etc.
I no longer trust any reporting coming from Indiana government agencies. Braun and the gerrymandered General Assembly control what is reported, only to their advantage and/or profit. Replacing civil servants with partisan hacks with little or no experience or knowledge, a throwback to the spoils system, at the local, state and federal level means that the dark money handlers dictate what is reported. Since most of the media is owned by that same group, what gets reported reflects what benefits them one way or another.
As to how I view the news, I always start by asking who benefits from this and how. These days the bad news get deflected to anyone who isn’t MAGA and the good news, usually anointed with divine blessings, is always justification for entitlement to rule.
As far as resistance is concerned, I always cite sources when pushing back, call out bigotry of any kind for what it is, engage with elected officials regularly, and plan to urge as many as I can reach to register and vote. I have little discretionary income to spare, especially when none of it is used in Indiana politics. The Power of One, and John Lewis’s example are my guiding principles. It is what I can do.
Long before Bannon, or Trump were ever center stage people, too many people, chose to conflate fairy tales with reality. Eugenics? Martians and flying saucers anyone? Bigfoot? Etc? Jim Jones? Q’Anon?????
Mitch McConnell’s story about why Obama could not appoint someone to SCOTUS in his last year in office? (BTW, McConnell is responsible in a large way, for the fix we are in…and then he was able to say, recently, that Trump is “unfit for office.” What a guy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
Gil’s quote of Lincoln, points out that one does not have to “…fool all the people” any of the time, just enough of them!
Vernon is right, somehow we have to energize the non-voters, show them that their input can be useful, especially in the next mid-terms. Can the Democratic Party do that? Individual candidates, maybe?
JD points at the size comparison of Nordic countries to the US.
Nearly all the global rankings account for smaller populations in Nordic countries by using ‘per capita metrics’ or by focusing on ‘rates and percentages’ rather than ‘absolute totals.’ This normalizes the data, allowing for a fair comparison of performance relative to the size of their population.
AI is a great tool because you can have conversations with it and pose questions or raise doubts, which requires the AI program to provide sources to back up what it’s saying.
In short, the Nordic countries have achieved superior results, and much of that is due to their highly educated citizenry and the demands they place on the government to be held accountable to the people. Their primary way of doing that is a powerful free press that serves the people, NOT the government or industry.
It appears that the Nordic countries are doing the exact opposite of the US, yet achieving superior results while the US continues its decades-old slide toward the bottom.
I think the decline in democracy can be attributed to the twenty-four hour news cycle. There simply aren’t twenty-four hours of news on any given day. At most we might have four hours of real stories. That leaves twenty hours to fill with opinions from a variety of “pundits”, with a wide range of expertise. Citizens must be made aware of the limits of punditry and advised to take what they hear with several grains of salt. BTW, if you doubt my initial premise, I challenge you to watch and record the number of actual stories and the time spent on each.
That’s how the silos get built. We find one or two that fit what we feel, not what we think. Thinking calls for examination and study, which too many are loathe to do. After that there’s no need to think about anything. We’re told what we think based on what we feel.
The Democratic party should look at two candidates who are dramatically different in their outlooks, but have come to the same conclusion about what works. Zorhan Mamdani and David Jolly are as different as two candidates can be. The messages that they’re running on are close to the same. Mamdani wants to make New York affordable. Jolly wants to make Florida affordable. Democrats should pull their heads out of that special place where the sun don’t shine and get on aboard this train.
Democrats,
Mamdani is real breath of fresh air! Don’t blow this opportunity!
Todd, the fact remains that those same kind of metrics can be applied to blue areas of the U.S., but the fact remains that the huge differences in the actual real number of people of the same ethnicity make it much more difficult to come to a collectively agreed upon course of action.
Trumpty dumpty is the enemy of the people.
Maniacs Are Gutting America
Yes, Lippman was right about American democracy being “premised on the idea that voters’ political decisions will be based on reliable information.” And you hit the nail on the head, Sheila, with your own words, always the way I like them, snarky, and your choice of sources on this point and the challenges to it. I’d add that there is an additional presence in the calculus that I don’t know that I recognize from the past at least not in such clear terms, and its the personal grievance, the desire to get even, to push back, to separate from, to withdraw from the nation as a community and retreat into a black hole of anger, resentment, hate…..some of which, admittedly, has valid roots but unfortunately, the group of voters in this dimension, seem disinterested in solutions, only in belonging to a cult that delivers nothing but despair, intensifying the sense of feeling wronged, excluded, left out… The MAGA crowd, lead by DT are milking that factor for all its worth and from what I see in some of the recent reports of voting behavior in the presidential election….the impact is there….
Maga has an all-out campaign to “muddy the waters” confuse the majority and continue the power grab of US government. I’ve heard that trump and company don’t care if you don’t believe their narrative, their aim is to wear citizens down to not believing anything and not resist.
It seems the press and social media are having a heyday with all the shambolic sensationalism coming from the trump regime. Every word and lie are reported and analyzed and continually repeated having a numbing effect on viewers.
I still think that many Americans working the front lines in Government have good intentions in line with the bill of rights for everyone and rule of law.
Democratic senators are working in committees to expose the current trump cabinet transgressions against established norms and laws. They are also introducing legislation continuously (that gets press) to counter the Project 2025 overreach.
A bright piece of news on the home front, my daughter an (immigration attorney) went to trial last week and got her client released from detention and allowed to continue their naturalization process. Facts still matter and we have judges who discern the overreach of trump’s strategy and oppose it. These everyday victories aren’t headlining news that would diminish Magas all powerful image, but its grassroots reality that has growing power of it’s own.
Jamie Raskin said that “Democracy depends on the truth” and progress is based on facts. We’re going to continue in our small way to find the facts and keep progressing, come Hell or High Water!