News

Facts come to the rescue in the age of gaslighting : NPR


The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes has long symbolized the endless search for truth. In our day, that search is more complicated than ever.

ilbusca / Getty Images


hide captions

switch captions

ilbusca / Getty Images


The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes has long symbolized the endless search for truth. In our day, that search is more complicated than ever.

ilbusca / Getty Images

Sad world events and reactive conversation in the media can make you feel cynical these days. Or you may prefer what takes comfort in a more stoic attitude.

Either way, the names of those philosophical reactions date back to the time of ancient Greek philosophers, including a man named Diogenes. He died in 323 BC, and his name is still associated with the Cynics and Stoics. However, his name has survived to our times mainly because legend says that he walked the Earth in search of an honest man.

You may have seen him on this hunt, drawn by classical sculptors or more likely caricatured by contemporary cartoonists. He usually has a long beard and a lamp he holds high when looking into the murky darkness. Whatever form he takes, he has long symbolized the endless search for truth.

In our day, that search is more complicated than ever. Even the idea of ​​truth is disputed; we say the word out loud and add quotes, a sarcastic tone or a smirk. The term has been explicitly denied by the likes of, for example, the so-called “Truthers” of two decades ago, who assert that no plane crashed into any building on that day. September 11, 2001.

Perhaps that is why journalists and other observers often shy away from the word truth and prefer to talk about truth. There are many versions of the truth, many misuses, and much disagreement over its meaning. The idea of ​​truth is something we feel better prepared to defend on objective grounds.

Even so, we must deal with those who speak of “alternative truth” as if the truth is also replaceable. Who could forget a day after former President Trump was sworn in, when a spokesperson used that phrase to describe his completely false rebuttal of the size of his inauguration crowd.

Movie posters from Gasoline lights.

LMPC via Getty Images


hide captions

switch captions

LMPC via Getty Images


Movie posters from Gasoline lights.

LMPC via Getty Images

A good example of “alternative truth” might be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech last week, declaring four regions of Ukraine as part of Russia by definition. To justify this land grab by invoking a fake referendum conducted with guns, Putin added another serious episode to his misrepresentation of Ukraine.

However, Americans need not feel complacent about this. Putin’s credibility strain may not be greater than Trump’s claims at the end of 2020, when he claimed he had won an election “by so much” that he in fact lost 7 million votes. . It was the most severe case in the US to date of a behavior that now has a common name: ignition.

This word comes from the Hollywood movie 1944 Gaslight. Ingrid Bergman won an Academy Award playing a young opera singer who doubts her sanity because of a plot to deceive and confuse her. Its one-word title has entered the language as a codeword for telling complex lies or treating fictional situations as real. It is now common to see it in the headlines or hear it on cable news. It is certainly more familiar to most Americans than the Diogenes lamp.

Perhaps it is because the cunning deception the gas lamp alludes to has become a pandemic, like the “pandemic” of misinformation that the World Health Organization said accompanied COVID in 2016. 2020.

Opposing “The Big Lie”

There’s a kind of boldness in Major Garrett and David Becker at the top of their book Big truth: Hold on to democracy in an age of big lies. Just published last week, Big truth is a strong argument against Trump’s false claims regarding the outcome of the 2020 election.

The book reviews events that are still intriguing in the weeks following the November 2020 election. They include the preparation of an executive order for December 16, 2020, by which Trump will order the U.S. military. Ky “seized the ballot boxes and declared a national emergency – all to preserve his presidency.”

Only the integrity and bravery of key individuals at various points in government – especially in state government and the courts – has frustrated these efforts by Trump and some of his supporters. his greatest zeal was to delay and ultimately overturn the outcome of that election.

Garrett is CBS News’ chief Washington correspondent and a former senior White House correspondent for Fox News. He has been in Washington for nearly four decades. David Becker is an elections professional with many years of experience as an election law trial attorney at the Department of Justice. He is also the founder and executive director of the Center for Nonpartisan Electoral Research and Innovation.

At one point in their story, they quote from their interview with Wyoming Republican Representative Liz Cheney, vice chair of the committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021. . “I think of it as if we, all of us, on January 6thorderwe’re all looking into the abyss,” Cheney said. And responsible civil servants and responsible elected officials have a duty to pull the country back from there. “

But it must be said that Cheney’s side disagreed with her. She lost her elementary grades this summer by almost 40 points. Other Republicans who opposed Trump on electoral votes were toppled state after state, replaced by those who refused to vote.

Garrett and Becker wrote: “We have come to the point of uncertainty about how we vote and count ballots. “This is absurd because it’s destructive, especially given how far we’ve come and our elections are safer today than ever before.”

The idea that the 2020 election has been “stolen” or somehow illegitimate has taken root within the Republican Party and to some extent beyond it.

Garrett and Becker blame “vandals” they claim to be selling the idea – and profiting from this sale financially through fundraising. The way to break their grip on so many Americans is to use the truth, and be adamant that truth still exists and can prevail.

In our time, it can be argued that the burden so long borne by truth has shifted from reality. If truth is considered subjective – the domain of the individual – then we still see rational people with widely different backgrounds seeing the truth about what they are. They are the building blocks of provable reality. They are undeniably beyond the debate over competing cable news channels.

By these lights, if we had a Diogenes in our day, he could very well be called a fact-checker.

Check the truth like a lamp

Last week, the Poynter Institute hosted a conference on truth and politics in Washington, DC, in honor of 15order Politifact’s founding anniversary. Fact-checking gained immediate attention when it won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 2008 presidential election, along with other activities, such as FactCheck.org (a project of the Annenberg Center for Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania), Politifact has endeavored to hold participants on all sides of the partisan divide to a practically constant standard.

The Poynter Institute was the brainchild of Nelson and Henrietta Poynter, who also used some of the proceeds from their lucrative newspapers in Indiana and Florida to start a newsletter in 1945 to check their votes. members of Parliament. At that time, Congress record did not regularly provide that information to the House.

Their newsletter evolved into Congress quarterly, finally a weekly magazine with various online iterations. It remains that way to this day, with the title often abbreviated as CQ (also incidentally a proofreader’s trademark meaning that the written material has been checked and verified for factual accuracy).

The meaning of the underlying facts in “CQ” is similar to what lawyers mean when they talk about “the facts of the case” or the facts that have been prescribed by both parties. These are the basic points that all parties to the dispute are willing to accept, leaving all other issues to be determined by the jury.

What we hear in the contemporary media all too often, of course, is not an attempt to find an agreeable truth but a constant rivalry between stories, a wrestling match. pairing one instance of an event with another. Each side considers its story to be true. Each side views the other as a complex work of fiction, the product of perverse spinsters of vain falsehoods.

Competition with social networks

Politifact was born at a time when social networks emerged as a pervasive and increasingly dominant element in media culture. Major newspapers and national broadcasters once set the agenda and acted as arbiter in the political debates of the day. But social media offers an alternative route – a public square in which all voices can be heard and can pretend to have equal authority. This new force of media reached a critical stage when it helped bring Trump to power in 2016.

Through all this, truth can still “raise a standard that the wise and honest can fix,” to borrow a phrase from George Washington.

No matter how much we may wish for them, the truth is the truth. They stubbornly refuse to do otherwise, or to follow our wishes and preferences.

There are two famous quotes that are often quoted by political figures and journalists to defend the truth. One was that of John Adams, the future president, who had the challenging task of protecting British soldiers who opened fire on a noisy crowd in 1770 – an incident known as the “Boston Massacre. “

Adams understands why jurors tend to convict red-shirts, but thinks the truth is more complicated. And that means they have to rethink.

“Truths,” Adams told the jury, “are stubborn things. And whatever may be our desires, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, we cannot change the state of facts and evidence.”

Four-term senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, had less to say: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own reality.”

As long as we can discern that, we can yearn to turn off the gas light and look at Diogenes’ lamp.

news7f

News7F: Update the world's latest breaking news online of the day, breaking news, politics, society today, international mainstream news .Updated news 24/7: Entertainment, Sports...at the World everyday world. Hot news, images, video clips that are updated quickly and reliably

Related Articles

Back to top button