Word of the Year 2016 was chosen as post-truth by the Oxford Dictionaries, which can be defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.[1] Although the word has been around some time, it gained popularity during the presidential election in United States. It is often used with the noun politics as in post-truth politics which refers to manipulating facts in order to achieve political power.
“If you repeat a lie often enough it becomes politics” is famously written in a Banksy graffiti, which demonstrates the intertwined nature of lies and politics. Throughout history politicians have always lied in order to achieve or maintain in power so this is certainly not a new phenomenon. What is new about this era is consistently lying and presenting the truth as a lie under “fake news” despite great accessibility to the truth. Ironically, we are transitioning to the post-truth era from the age of information.
In the past, governments were the gatekeepers to information hence it was much easier to hide the truth. Today, internet enabled alternative news sources to emerge and information to be shared through social media which, in theory, made the truth much more accessible to the public. Since fact-checking became much easier, you would think that politicians would think twice in fact five times before lying. Nevertheless, Trump administration manages to shock us every day by presenting “alternative facts” and constantly claiming that facts, presented by certain news organizations, are fake news. Almost on a daily basis he attacks certain news organizations which are trying to hold him accountable for his lies.
Although fact-checking is certainly not a new thing in journalism, it gained popularity during the 2016 election race just like the word post-truth. Despite all the efforts of fact-checking, Donald Trump still won the election. While there are many studies proving that fact-checking changes readers' minds, there are also many studies showing that humans are prone to the confirmation bias (looking for information that supports our views) and motivated reasoning (explaining away information that doesn't). Especially with such polarizing political figures whom people have strong opinions and attitudes, these psychological traits kick in. This is a phenomenon most of the people are familiar with.
Of course, one can also argue that fact checking corrected voters’ views, but they were determined to vote for Trump for many other reasons so him being an untruthful person simply did not matter. I think this is a much more interesting argument than them being prone to the confirmation bias. Even though they knew he was lying about the facts, they wanted to believe that he would be truthful in his promises. Whether he lied about the unemployment statistics didn’t matter because he promised providing jobs to ones who were unemployed for a long time.
Those who voted for him are still supporting him because from the first week he started to execute exactly what he promised in his campaign at least for now. He took action to ban Muslims, to build the wall on the Mexican border, to withdraw support from environmentalist actions, to defund planned parenthood… Since it has only been a little more than a month of his inauguration, whether he will keep all of his promises like providing countless jobs or destroying ISIS is still a question mark.
People tolerated and overlooked Trump’s lies about facts because they wanted to focus on his promises which would benefit them in the future. This pragmatic approach is very natural and understandable. If it turns out that he doesn’t keep his campaign promises especially those targeted to low-class, unemployed Americans, after a couple of years passes and his voters still adamantly support him then we should be really worried about being in a post-truth era. Because then, the truth will really lose its importance.
Nowadays, journalists in Turkey are depressed more than ever not only because they live under constant threat and oppression but also because the stories they write has absolutely no effect neither on the government nor on the people who support the government. Stories that would be sensational, cause government officials to resign and everyone in the country to be outraged in normal circumstances are forgotten in a week. Journalist become estranged to their jobs because nothing they write has a solid impact on politics. Every fact put forward by the journalists becomes meaningless within this frame of “everyone is our enemy, everyone wants to weaken our state” put forward by the government.
Trump doesn’t care if he is lying about facts because he still has strong support from his voters. He will only be more cautious about lying if he starts to lose significant amount of support from the voters. And he will lose support when his voters are not satisfied with his actions regarding his promises especially the ones about employment and fixing the economy. If that doesn’t happen because people are too enchanted by his charisma or racist/sexist rhetoric that they don’t care about his promises anymore, then this country might share the same destiny with Turkey. However; this possibility is highly unlikely in my opinion.
Truth will only re-gain its value when people are not satisfied with the results.
