Abstract
Four days before the general election of 1924, the Daily Mail came out with a sensational scoop. It had got hold of a letter purporting to “prove” that the Bolshevik regime was effectively in control of the first Labour government in Britain. “Civil War Plot by Socialists’ Masters”, read the splash headline above a report of the leak of a letter apparently written by Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Soviet-led Comintern, detailing a list of alleged instructions from the Kremlin to Ramsay MacDonald's minority government in London. “Moscow Orders Our Reds”, said the story.
If the Mail had carried out even cursory checks it might have discovered that its great revelation was based on a forgery. But the story was too good to check and it fitted in too neatly with the paper's politics. In the campaign, Labour looked well placed to remain the largest party in Parliament. But the Tories won by a landslide, Labour would not return to power for years and the Zinoviev letter became notorious as a political/journalistic scandal. It was the ultimate example of fake news, dramatically changing the political landscape.
Tout ça change, but nothing has stayed the same, according to the authors of three new books on the buzzword that has accompanied the populist revolutions of the last couple of years: post-truth. More books on the theme are on the way, though I am sceptical that they will be more successful at dealing with the principal problem in the very idea of post-truth. It presupposes there was once an era of truth and that something profound and deeply disturbing has happened in our politics, the media old and new, in the human condition itself.
Two of these books, by distinguished journalists, are fascinating and thought provoking, and offer fresh new insights – up to a point. Evan Davis, the Newsnight presenter and former BBC economics editor, spots examples of the bullshit, lies and cant in our public discourse with wit and forensic skill. Interestingly, he broadens his arguments out from politics and the media to show how mendacity has became the default position in a range of businesses and financial institutions.
Matthew d'Ancona, a fine liberal Tory columnist, writes elegantly about his despair that “at the heart of …(our age) the global trend is a crash in the value of truth, comparable to the collapse of a currency”. He is appalled that in 2017 the idea of truth as a fundamental value has to be justified. The point of his book, he tells us, is to “explore the declining value of truth as society's reserve currency”. James Ball, a long-time contributor to Buzzfeed, is interesting in his argument that social media and the economics of the internet are designed to spread fake news.
All three are right in diagnosing the ills of our time. But like Oxford Dictionaries, which made post-truth its word of the year in 2016, their definition is not always helpful. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, post-truth describes a time and place in which objective facts are “less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief “. There have been many such periods, in many places.
Yes the EU referendum campaign plumbed the depths of dishonesty and ghastliness, and Donald Trump is a demagogue who can barely post a tweet without lying. Both those electoral campaigns gave democracy a bad name. But did they represent a category difference from the past, or were they a matter of degree?
All journalists should worry about the confusion in all media between fact and comment. We should be concerned about the “echo chamber” of the internet, where so many people see only material they agree with. It atomises society in a perplexing way. It is right to worry about relative equivalence which gives equal weight to the opinions on, say, climate change, of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and a conspiracy nut in a wooden shed in west Virginia. But these are not entirely new or revolutionary concerns. Commentators and some geeks have been talking about them for a while. They did not appear with Brexit and Trump.
Davis examines the point by some psychologists that in parts of our lives we want to be lied to. Post-truth may have a significance here. We want to be told there are simple solutions to complex problems – for example, withdrawing from the EU or building a wall in Arizona. We don't believe experts who say it's complicated. We are in a mood to blame someone. In this era of populism, many may follow a con artist or billionaire snake oil salesman even when we suspect they are lying. In a democracy of some sophistication, should we blame the liar or those who are lied to when things go belly up?
