In less contentious times, arguments over the word “lie” generally involve its grammatical partner “lay.”
But the election of Donald Trump, criticized during his campaign and in the early days of his presidency for statements often at odds with verifiable fact, has recast the discussion.
Political prevarication comes with the territory. And the media traditionally have been reluctant to label individuals with the L-word, defaulting to terms like “falsehood” or “baseless claim.” But from and even the to unfounded complaints of , Trump has by sheer frequency and repetition dared those chronicling his public discourse to use a word they’d rather not.
“I’m very, very careful with the word lie, because it does imply intent, and sometimes when people share a falsehood they’re not necessarily intending to lie,” says Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin. “What concerns me most right now is whether we’ve come to a point where people don’t necessarily believe there is a truth anymore.”
The conversation detours through a range of disciplines: Rhetorical devices adapted and artfully employed. Proliferation of social media and online information sources that have at once engaged and segmented their users. Even fundamental neuroscience.
All have converged in the ongoing argument, raised to new levels in the early days of the Trump administration, about the nature of provable fact in relation to political gamesmanship, partisan skirmishing and high-stakes diplomacy. About lying.
It flared recently with the New York Times’ carefully considered shift from employing the descriptor “falsely” to describe Trump’s claim about fraudulent voters to labeling the statement a “lie.” Repetition in the absence of evidence provided confirmation of intent, reasoned the Times, which while quoting the editor acknowledging the word’s strong negative connotation and that it should not be used lightly.
In a more general sense, the voter fraud claim arguably moved Trump’s dodgy relationship with the truth from the realm of the inconsequential (his crowd numbers) to more substantive ground (reliability of elections). And as world leaders have engaged with the president, even the veracity of his seemingly impetuous Tweets has raised concern beyond mere parsing of the language .
Trump called it “truthful hyperbole” in his best-selling book “The Art of the Deal.” And in his early flirtations with presidential politics, his untruthful assertions were variously described as characteristic bluster, salesmanship and entertainment.
Jennifer Mercieca, an associate professor of communication at Texas A&M who studies political rhetoric, began researching a book seven years ago on what she anticipated would be a new brand of demagogue based on social media. But her work stalled as there seemed to be no single example of an emerging archetype.
“Then along came Donald Trump,” she says.
Within months of launching his campaign, he embodied many of the qualities she envisioned: He embraced the ambiguity of social media, used it to circumvent the press, spoke to people in a way that was at once polarizing and entertaining.
One particular tool he wielded was paralipsis — emphasizing something by insisting that he’s not. In painting Trump as a master, she points to : “I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct. Instead I will only call her a lightweight reporter!”
“He uses certain techniques that are part of the entertainment culture of social media,” Mercieca says. “Itap funny, itap what a stand-up comedian does. It rewards the audience, builds a connection between the audience and him at the expense of the ‘other.’ You feel you understand the authentic Trump, but itap all a game.”
As a rhetorical device, . But whatap new, Mercieca notes, is a media environment, with is proliferation of voices, that has bred polarization. In times when there were fewer news channels, the national conversation proceeded from a more shared knowledge base.
“Thatap not possible today,” she says, adding that over recent generations social bridges have eroded as well as trust in institutions. “Social media allows that to flourish even more. It isn’t the kind of face-to-face interaction thatap required for people to build trust with one another.”
Thatap part of why fact-checking has assumed a more important role than ever, Culver says. And not just among journalists, but citizens as well.
“We’ve seen a fall-off on both the left and right in assuming that responsibility,” she says. “We’re more capable than ever in history of surrounding ourselves with information that only supports our worldview. We’re falling into echo chambers and not deliberating. And thatap dangerous.”
In the recent political season, Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, started wondering why people don’t seem to mind what he considered an unprecedented level of lying in politics.
“The thing I found was that people want their politicians to lie,” he says. “Itap not that they want them to lie for the sake of lying, but lying is always a question about the order of priorities.”
In his research, Ariely portrayed to people a variety of cases of dishonesty and asked them to express their moral judgment on the politicians involved. He found that everyone wanted politicians of opposing viewpoints to be honest, but were willing to cut those who aligned with their own values some slack.
“Particularly with things that had to do with policy that they held deep beliefs about,” he adds. “Under those cases, they were willing for people to make these trade-offs.”
George Lakoff, a retired professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley, points to basic neuroscience to explain why blatant lies, so reviled by one’s political opponents, often are so easily accepted by one’s supporters.
The neurocircuitry in our brain allows us to understand imprinted notions of right and wrong that reflect family-based morality — what Lakoff calls either the — that in turn defines one’s worldview: the former being conservative, the latter progressive or liberal.
And politics, he adds, echoes morality.
“Why would his supporters not care whether he lies? The answer is, if they have that worldview, that worldview must be true for their identity to be preserved, and it must be a higher truth,” Lakoff explains. “Any other falsehoods he utters don’t matter, because they’re all in the service of a higher truth.”
Just days ago, Trump addressed a gathering of county sheriffs and repeated a falsehood he advanced during the campaign about the country’s murder rate being at its highest in 47 years. Actually, it stands at less than half of its historic high. The president previously has said — correctly — that the murder rate in 2015 showed its largest increase in 45 years, an 11 percent one-year jump, but the rate remains far below its earlier peak.
At Wisconsin’s Center for Journalism Ethics, Culver spends a lot of time talking to students about the meaning of truth — and a lot of them fall back on accuracy. She prefers a slightly different equation: accuracy plus context equals truth.
“When Donald Trump says there were a million and a half people at his inauguration, the context is he has no way of knowing that, and the context is the photographic evidence that shows otherwise,” she says. “I do think we are to the point where we can say falsely saying the inauguration crowds were bigger than they were is a lie — because he’s continuing to say it, we can assume intent there.”
Mercieca, who also teaches a course in fact-checking at Texas A&M, contends that ultimately, itap not about media gatekeepers limiting access to information — even false information — or journalists single-handedly policing political speech.
Her answer: citizen critics.
“Itap the responsibility of the receiver, the person on the other end of propaganda, to use critical thinking to diminish its power,” she says. “We have to figure a way to trust each other.”
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