One of the chief problems, Sykes said, was that it had become impossible to prove to listeners that Trump was telling falsehoods because over the past several decades, the conservative news media had "basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers."
"There's nobody," he lamented. "Let's say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it's a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, 'By the way, you know it's false.' And they'll say, 'Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.' Or they'll say, 'I saw it on a Facebook page.' And I'll say, 'The New York Times did a fact check.' And they'll say, 'Oh, that's The New York Times. That's bulls---.' There's nobody — you can't go to anybody and say, 'Look, here are the facts.'"
"And I have to say that's one of the disorienting realities of this political year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there's no way to break through it," Sykes continued. "And I swim upstream because if I don't say these things from some of these websites, then suddenly I have sold out. Then they'll ask what's wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true."By the "gatekeepers," Sykes essentially means those who do some "fact checking" on the stories that they run. One assumes that there is some basic agreement on just what constitutes a "fact," or better a set of facts, and it has some basic alignment with Truth. In the commonsensical world most of us inhabit on a day-to-day basis, a statement of fact can be labeled either True or False -- e.g. the world is flat. At one time of course, people believed the statement was True, but because we have developed more sophisticated means of observing our world, we recognize the statement as False and have for some time. In the famous example of media distortion (I have heard it attributed to several different sources) if a particular politician X comes out and says "the Earth is flat," there are several different approaches one can take to that statement.
- The first is to "fact check" it, and the resulting media headline would be "Politician X made the false claim yesterday that 'the world is flat.'" The headline itself is "factual," if indeed the statement is false and politician X made the statement. Does this represent a "bias" against X? Well, yes, if one assumes that politicians, like the rest of us, have some duty to the Truth, then it would be biased against X for making false statements.
- The second is to report the "stances," without regard to the truth or falsity of the claims in the statements. If politician Y replies to politician X, saying "X is making the bogus claim that the earth is flat!" the resulting headline would be "The Political Parties disagree on the shape of the Earth." Here again, the headline itself is "factual," if indeed the two parties disagreed on the shape of the earth. Does this represent a bias against X or Y? If the subsequent story reports only the who-what-where of the two conflicting statements, the media could claim that they are simply providing "balanced" reporting between the two political camps. If the story that falls beneath the headline, however, fails to mention that the claim made by politician X is, in fact, false, one could say there is a bias against the whole Truth -- that is to say, if one assumes that the media, like the rest of us, have a duty a duty that extends beyond partial truths to the whole truth, then the media would be revealing a bias that works for X against Y. Why do I say that? By NOT reporting the falsity of politician X's claim, the media leaves the impression that the conflicting statements have a more or less equal claim on the Truth and are merely matters of opinion. If one assumes that politicians, like the rest of us, have some duty to the Truth, then it would favor X by obscuring the falsity of his claims.
- The third is to report the so-called "horse race." If politicians X and Y make competing claims about the shape of the Earth, one False and one True, and the press reports on the public reaction to those claims, the resulting headline might be something like this: "64% of the American public agree with Politician X that the Earth is Flat." Here again, the headline itself is "factual," if indeed "polling results" or some other sampling of American public opinion resulted in 64%. Here again, if the subsequent story reports only the who-what-where of the two conflicting statements and the "polling results" around those statements, then it would favor X, not only by obscuring the falsity of his claims, but also by lending "credence" to those claims with significant agreement. The same bias would prevail even if the polling results were flipped and the headline read: "46% of Americans agree with Politician X that the Earth is Flat."
"If you are a conservative talk show host, which I am, if you don't accept that it's likely Hillary Clinton has taken part in multiple murders, or that Barack Obama is a Muslim extremist sympathizer who was probably born outside this country — if you don't accept those two things, it's almost as if you're a sellout. You're a RINO. You're somehow part of the liberal elite. It's nuts. It's making my own show very difficult to do. It's almost where to the point where we are not able to function."
He continued: "It's almost like it's a disease, and it's taken over people. I don't remember this being the case four years ago. But something has happened. Something snapped. But now all of a sudden, if a story comes out, and it's not on Breitbart or endorsed by Drudge, it can't be true. Especially if it's about Donald Trump. Which is flat-out ludicrous."
The so-called "controversy" surrounding the birth place of President Obama should not really be a controversy. Despite the ludicrous need, Obama has supplied a considerable amount of "credible" and "verifiable" evidence to confirm his place of birth within the US. I should be honest here. I have not personally observed Obama's birth certificate. It's unlikely that I will ever personally see Obama's birth certificate, but I have an unwavering belief in the truth of the assertion that he was born in the US. Why? Because respected members of the fourth estate have told me so. Here, of course, one must interject the element of "trust." Although one can suspect the Washington Post of a centrist liberal bias and the Wall Street Journal of a centrist conservative bias in their editorial views, if either were to run a story headlined -- "Donald Trump made the false claim yesterday that President Obama was born outside the US" -- I would "trust" that they had done the necessary "fact-checking" and that indeed there was "credible" and "verifiable" evidence to confirm Obama's birth in Hawaii. Because 99.99% of Americans will likely never personally see Obama's birth certificate, it is important that we "trust" certain members of the fourth estate to do the fact checking, but as Sykes points out, the conservative media has done a good deal to undermine that level of trust. "At a certain point you wake up and you realize you have destroyed the credibility of any credible outlet out there," Sykes said. "And I am feeling, to a certain extent, that we are reaping the whirlwind at that. And I have to look in the mirror and ask myself, 'To what extent did I contribute?'"
I could speculate about the reasons for undermining of "trust," but I believe it often comes down to this: the facts, as we normally think of facts in our commonsensical day-to-day lives, don't support conservative theories about the world quite as well as they would like. Leaving aside the "birther" theories buzzing around Obama, or the more extreme house of cards murder theories stalking about Clinton, a better case in point would be the repeated insistence that either or both are coming to take away one's guns. I won't dignify the first two, nor will I amass all the evidence here, but I suspect that, if one were to do a pro and con sort of chart for each of theories surrounding gun legislation (or the lack thereof), the existing evidence would strongly support what has been called "reasonable gun legislation." I say this with a sense of irony, in full recognition that I may just be revealing my "bias." Here again, one assumes that there is some basic agreement on just what constitutes a "fact," and there is a "neutral position" where one can judge the facts and form an opinion. A good deal of modern philosophy (really most modern philosophy) has called the "neutral position" into question, and much of the contemporary social science too has chimed in. For example, The Conversation has recently published a summarizing article Ian Anson that "Partisan disagreement about the economy is just one example of a broader phenomenon in contemporary party politics, known as 'partisan motivated reasoning.'” He goes on to write that "essentially, Republicans and Democrats think differently about prevailing conditions because they are motivated to see the world in ways that help them feel good about the performance of the partisan 'home team.'” Or to put it more crassly, we come at the world with predispositions, and we skew or suppress the evidence that doesn't confirm that bias -- or perhaps even more crassly, we twist the "inconvenient truths" to fit our bias, and if we can't contort it to fit, we ignore the evidence entirely. Consequently, as Anson points out, "ideological media sources, in turn, gain popularity among loyal partisans when they provide audiences with a version of reality that jibes with this “partisan preferred world state” – the way the world should work given partisan assumptions." Consequently, we tend to see those media sources that align with our "predispositions" as unbiased and truthful, and extend our trust to them. For those with conservative "predispositions," that means Fox News, the Drudge Report, or Breitbart News, and they can say, without irony, that "Oh, that's the NY Times, that's bull****." They can assert, without irony, that if its not on Breitbart and endorsed by the Drudge Report, it can't be True.
If this larger meta-truth is true, the recognition that we are ALL biased, that there is no "neutral position" where we might simply judge unvarnished facts and come to a reasoned theory, however, is hugely self-defeating. One can hear the shoulder shrug of defeat in Anson's last sentence, where he writes "rigid in party loyalty, yet limber in mind, Republicans and Democrats can deftly vault past disconfirming information to land in vastly different economic realities. In 2016 and beyond, then, we shouldn’t be surprised if economic accountability lies just out of reach." We exist, so to speak, in parallel but incompatible universes, composed of matter and anti-matter, and there really can be no reconciliation without an explosion that eliminates one or the other. The mainstream media reports on the "differing stances" or in election years on the "horse race" between those "stances," purportedly as a way of avoiding partisan bias, finding neutral ground in the larger meta-truth of ubiquitous bias by simply reporting on how the bias shakes out. Meanwhile, the ideological media continues to reinforce the partisan differences between the stances, insuring the fans loyal to one "home team" don't jump ship to the other "home team."
Having said this, however, though I think Anson's metaphor is apt, and much of political discourse can be reduced to "trash talk," we are not simply rooting for "home teams" in the normal sense of the word. We are not talking about the relative distribution of Cub fans vs White Sox fans in the Chicago metro area, or who is most likely to win the world series, in part because the winner of the contest will need to govern, and how the country is governed could have dramatic effects on the lives of people. Selecting one partisan stance over another will have consequence beyond the horse race in ways that a world series win will not. One can believe or not believe in man made global warming, but the indisputable fact of global warming itself will have consequences, some understood, some not, but most clearly undesirable. As I have suggested, however, by merely reporting the stances, the media gives aid and credence to those stances that ignore or distort the facts. If acted upon, stances demonstrating willful ignorance or cynical distortion of "inconvenient facts" about global warming (or gun control, or the economy, or education, or health care, or ...) will nevertheless have "unbiased" consequence for both sides of the ideological divide.
Wait -- "indisputable fact?" Yet here again, I am assuming that there are "observable" and "independently verifiable" facts that either support (or do not support) one's preferred ideological stances on various issues. There are various impediments to a belief in the truth of "observable" and "independently verifiable" facts, not least are ideological stances derived from religion. It is one thing to believe that "jesus love me, this I know, because the bible tells me so," quite another to believe that creation actually occurred in seven days, despite the OVERWHELMING observable and independently verifiable evidence that it did not. The latter has clear consequence for other belief systems, notably "evolution." If acted upon, stances demonstrating willful ignorance or cynical distortion of "inconvenient facts" about evolution will have consequence for science education, but also for our understanding of the etiology of disease and the continuing development of bacteriological and viral diseases in particular. Beyond that, there are various impediments to a belief in the truth of "observable" and "independently verifiable" facts, to include those "secular" ideologies that are nevertheless held "as if" they were religion. Although there's a bit of the "I'm rubber you're glue" form of argumentation in the recent article on RedState about "climate deniers," to be fair, there's a grain of truth in the argument that "he climate change message has helped develop and unofficial pagan religion around the issue." RedState suggests that "standing opposite of this environmental religion is the conservative conservationism that casts a skeptic eye on a lot of the propagandism touted by the left." To be fair too, not all on the left subscribe to a dance around the may pole earth day paganism or buy into all the propaganda. "Conservative conservationism" is exactly what I, as someone on the left, would endorse, and I too would "encourage debate and scientific research that furthers our understanding of Earth and her climate." If that were the prevailing view of the republican party, however, one would expect something of a bi-partisan committee to review the available science and make recommendations to congress for action. As someone on the left, I would relish such a committee and would support their recommendations with enthusiasm, but instead, we have the republican nominee tweeting a conspiracy theory suggesting that "the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." His next closest competitor during the primary season, Ted Cruz, made a point similar to RedState's that “it is always disturbing to hear science use the language of theology. Deniers. Heretics. That’s not what science is supposed to be about. Science should follow the facts,” but then actually went a step further than Trump to deny the "factuality" of the available "facts," suggesting that the US government itself was engaged in a conspiracy. Time, for example, reported him saying, "government researchers are reverse engineering data sets to falsify changes in the climate. 'They’re cooking the books. They’re actually adjusting the numbers,' Cruz said. 'Enron used to do their books the same way.'” This is probably fodder for a follow on post, but let me just suggest, if initially there was an orthodox "catholic" conservative ideology, that ideology has devolved in the same way as the historical catholicism, the first major schism being the "protestant" tea party, which itself has devolved into various "denominations," the most virulent of which are the apocalyptic dominionism of Ted Cruz and the equally apocalyptic alt-right vision of Breitbart News and "Trumpism."
As I have argued in previous posts, while both parties lie and suppress facts not amenable to their rhetorical positions, the conservative party currently suffers from this malaise of outright fact denial to the point that "inconvenient facts" are simply no longer possible, and Zeigler is correct, it's like a disease and it's taken over people. If the major news outlets cannot be trusted to purvey "fact-checked" articles, if the US government cannot be trusted to publish "facts," if an article from a major news outlet like the Washington Post titled "Trump repeatedly claims more Hispanics are in poverty under Obama. He’s repeatedly wrong" is mere partisan propaganda, then who can you trust? If the answer is "no one," then truly there is no way out of the "partisan motivated reasoning" or what has also been called "confirmation bias" -- where I can accept only that data confirming my biases -- and a media ready and willing to rub those biases into raw passion. There is really only one way out of such "factionalism," and it is not the development of a "new consensus" through partisan debate of the sort imagined by defenders of democracy. The only way out of the continuing feckless bickering is a triumph of one faction over the other, a triumph sufficiently complete to insure that the sort of "government conspiracy" imagined by Cruz actually comes into being, where they have sufficient power not only to "cook the books," but the ability to suppress any media (to include social media) that might call the chefs into question with "inconvenient facts." It is a democracy, where power changes hands, not by vote reflecting a "new consensus," but by violent coup. Insofar as there are those who imagine the coup has already taken place, who believe the current government is illegitimate, who believe any government but their government will have been secured "fraudulently," and for whom it is an imperative, often from God himself, to "take back the government," it's not difficult to see where it all leads. We are a ways from that, one hopes, but the question we should be asking, is "just how far away are we?"
If this larger meta-truth is true, the recognition that we are ALL biased, that there is no "neutral position" where we might simply judge unvarnished facts and come to a reasoned theory, however, is hugely self-defeating. One can hear the shoulder shrug of defeat in Anson's last sentence, where he writes "rigid in party loyalty, yet limber in mind, Republicans and Democrats can deftly vault past disconfirming information to land in vastly different economic realities. In 2016 and beyond, then, we shouldn’t be surprised if economic accountability lies just out of reach." We exist, so to speak, in parallel but incompatible universes, composed of matter and anti-matter, and there really can be no reconciliation without an explosion that eliminates one or the other. The mainstream media reports on the "differing stances" or in election years on the "horse race" between those "stances," purportedly as a way of avoiding partisan bias, finding neutral ground in the larger meta-truth of ubiquitous bias by simply reporting on how the bias shakes out. Meanwhile, the ideological media continues to reinforce the partisan differences between the stances, insuring the fans loyal to one "home team" don't jump ship to the other "home team."
Having said this, however, though I think Anson's metaphor is apt, and much of political discourse can be reduced to "trash talk," we are not simply rooting for "home teams" in the normal sense of the word. We are not talking about the relative distribution of Cub fans vs White Sox fans in the Chicago metro area, or who is most likely to win the world series, in part because the winner of the contest will need to govern, and how the country is governed could have dramatic effects on the lives of people. Selecting one partisan stance over another will have consequence beyond the horse race in ways that a world series win will not. One can believe or not believe in man made global warming, but the indisputable fact of global warming itself will have consequences, some understood, some not, but most clearly undesirable. As I have suggested, however, by merely reporting the stances, the media gives aid and credence to those stances that ignore or distort the facts. If acted upon, stances demonstrating willful ignorance or cynical distortion of "inconvenient facts" about global warming (or gun control, or the economy, or education, or health care, or ...) will nevertheless have "unbiased" consequence for both sides of the ideological divide.
Wait -- "indisputable fact?" Yet here again, I am assuming that there are "observable" and "independently verifiable" facts that either support (or do not support) one's preferred ideological stances on various issues. There are various impediments to a belief in the truth of "observable" and "independently verifiable" facts, not least are ideological stances derived from religion. It is one thing to believe that "jesus love me, this I know, because the bible tells me so," quite another to believe that creation actually occurred in seven days, despite the OVERWHELMING observable and independently verifiable evidence that it did not. The latter has clear consequence for other belief systems, notably "evolution." If acted upon, stances demonstrating willful ignorance or cynical distortion of "inconvenient facts" about evolution will have consequence for science education, but also for our understanding of the etiology of disease and the continuing development of bacteriological and viral diseases in particular. Beyond that, there are various impediments to a belief in the truth of "observable" and "independently verifiable" facts, to include those "secular" ideologies that are nevertheless held "as if" they were religion. Although there's a bit of the "I'm rubber you're glue" form of argumentation in the recent article on RedState about "climate deniers," to be fair, there's a grain of truth in the argument that "he climate change message has helped develop and unofficial pagan religion around the issue." RedState suggests that "standing opposite of this environmental religion is the conservative conservationism that casts a skeptic eye on a lot of the propagandism touted by the left." To be fair too, not all on the left subscribe to a dance around the may pole earth day paganism or buy into all the propaganda. "Conservative conservationism" is exactly what I, as someone on the left, would endorse, and I too would "encourage debate and scientific research that furthers our understanding of Earth and her climate." If that were the prevailing view of the republican party, however, one would expect something of a bi-partisan committee to review the available science and make recommendations to congress for action. As someone on the left, I would relish such a committee and would support their recommendations with enthusiasm, but instead, we have the republican nominee tweeting a conspiracy theory suggesting that "the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." His next closest competitor during the primary season, Ted Cruz, made a point similar to RedState's that “it is always disturbing to hear science use the language of theology. Deniers. Heretics. That’s not what science is supposed to be about. Science should follow the facts,” but then actually went a step further than Trump to deny the "factuality" of the available "facts," suggesting that the US government itself was engaged in a conspiracy. Time, for example, reported him saying, "government researchers are reverse engineering data sets to falsify changes in the climate. 'They’re cooking the books. They’re actually adjusting the numbers,' Cruz said. 'Enron used to do their books the same way.'” This is probably fodder for a follow on post, but let me just suggest, if initially there was an orthodox "catholic" conservative ideology, that ideology has devolved in the same way as the historical catholicism, the first major schism being the "protestant" tea party, which itself has devolved into various "denominations," the most virulent of which are the apocalyptic dominionism of Ted Cruz and the equally apocalyptic alt-right vision of Breitbart News and "Trumpism."
As I have argued in previous posts, while both parties lie and suppress facts not amenable to their rhetorical positions, the conservative party currently suffers from this malaise of outright fact denial to the point that "inconvenient facts" are simply no longer possible, and Zeigler is correct, it's like a disease and it's taken over people. If the major news outlets cannot be trusted to purvey "fact-checked" articles, if the US government cannot be trusted to publish "facts," if an article from a major news outlet like the Washington Post titled "Trump repeatedly claims more Hispanics are in poverty under Obama. He’s repeatedly wrong" is mere partisan propaganda, then who can you trust? If the answer is "no one," then truly there is no way out of the "partisan motivated reasoning" or what has also been called "confirmation bias" -- where I can accept only that data confirming my biases -- and a media ready and willing to rub those biases into raw passion. There is really only one way out of such "factionalism," and it is not the development of a "new consensus" through partisan debate of the sort imagined by defenders of democracy. The only way out of the continuing feckless bickering is a triumph of one faction over the other, a triumph sufficiently complete to insure that the sort of "government conspiracy" imagined by Cruz actually comes into being, where they have sufficient power not only to "cook the books," but the ability to suppress any media (to include social media) that might call the chefs into question with "inconvenient facts." It is a democracy, where power changes hands, not by vote reflecting a "new consensus," but by violent coup. Insofar as there are those who imagine the coup has already taken place, who believe the current government is illegitimate, who believe any government but their government will have been secured "fraudulently," and for whom it is an imperative, often from God himself, to "take back the government," it's not difficult to see where it all leads. We are a ways from that, one hopes, but the question we should be asking, is "just how far away are we?"
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