This Is Not Propaganda: The supposed death of objectivity
Previous part: Part III — The decline and fall of Laughtivism.
Ever since the advent of universal education and mass literacy, facts held the powerful to account. If an ideology, a regime had internal contradictions, inconsistencies, hypocrisies, then these could be exposed and dwelt upon, handing a propaganda boost to their opponents. Regimes such as the USSR had to introduce total secrecy to cover up such contradictions, had to hide the bare facts showing that their system was not doing as well as they claimed. They also expended a lot of resources on elaborately crafted conspiracy theories to attack their opponents, to try and look better by comparison.
Since the fall of the USSR, a horrifying discovery was made: there was something else that worked just as well. Instead, you could churn out conspiratorial lies by the dozen, one after another, the more ludicrous the better. They are all, supposedly, examples of ‘what is possible’. Self-contradictory doublethink did not, it turned out, put people off: on the contrary they lapped up all the different conspiracy theories as long as they reinforced their world view. As Pomerantsev puts it: “Faced with wildly conflicting versions of reality, people selected the one that suited them.” As for facts, if people came across a fact that didn’t fit their view of reality, they have a tendency to ignore it or think up a conspiracy to explain it away.
When people are called out, they respond by pointing fingers. The Fox News correspondent Sean Hannity stated openly after being called out in an interview by Ted Koppel of CBS — “I don’t pretend that I’m fair and balanced and objective. You do”. He added that “the CBS only tells one side of the story”. This is a standard line of Fox News, ardent defenders of Trump, Putin and others like them: yes we are biased, yes we are one-sided however so is everyone else. Now, impartiality, objectivity in journalism is a problematic concept in that it likely never existed. But that is not what Hannity really means. He really means that it is fine for him to lie and mislead, to peddle conspiracy theories because no one is 100% objective. He really means that just because the media have always lied some of the time, it is fine for him to lie brazenly and always.
As Pomerantsev describes, politics is becoming a pure performance. ‘With the possibility of balance, objectivity, impartiality undermined, all that remains is to be more ‘genuine’ than the other side, more emotional, more subjective, more heroic.’ You win by putting on a better show, whose themes are individually tailored to subgroups of your target audience through extensive analysis of data. This is a game in which money talks — whilst facts and objective truths often cannot be bought and are a great equaliser, money will help you turn political discourse into a circus and remove this important mechanism for the people to challenge the powerful.
As far as pure facts are concerned, the situation seems salvageable — and not just because reality, as we are seeing with the COVID-19 epidemic, does not do post-truth. Fact-checking organisations — using the same peer-review system that exists for academic papers to weed out impostors — are taking the lead on accuracy. If a sufficiently broad, international, consensus ‘certifies’ a fact-checking organisation as ‘reliable’, then they will have the ability to publicly judge the facts from the alt-facts, just like a scientist is trusted based on their academic record (or was, until recently). Conversely, a similar broad consensus would call out media outlets that routinely give out factually wrong or misleading information.
However, it is very possible to stay true to the facts and still lie through your teeth. Suppose I pointed to an irrefutable case of wrongdoing by officials in some Russian province: a bad faith interlocutor would simply respond ‘this also happens in the West’ implying that, yes, things are not perfect but the leadership are ‘doing their best’. I cannot prove a negative, I am relying on the objectively true statement that there is less wrongdoing by officials in the West. A different bad faith interlocutor would say “well, ok, but in the West you allow ‘promotion of homosexuality’ ” — changing the subject and trying to segue into comparing apples and oranges. As a third alternative, with the sheer number of silly conspiracy theories on offer, any fact can be explained away with one that is elaborate enough. As a fourth, you could acknowledge the truth of the fact but insist that ‘now is not the the time’, ‘people are doing what they can’ or accuse people of ‘political point-scoring’.
This is where it gets more problematic. Given sufficient time and effort, most of the facts that tend to be lied about are verifiable, but their interpretation often is not, it is based on opinions and axioms, core beliefs held by people. We will — eventually — have accurate COVID-19 death statistics, broken down by category, but the questions of whether the government is culpable and whether they could have done more depend on analysing the situation. Facts can help us reconstruct what happened, but they cannot help us understand the hypothetical alternatives, the paths not taken. Would someone else have made a better fist of running Russia than Putin? Should Johnson have imposed a lockdown earlier? We need trusted, objective experts to tell us — and if we do not trust any of them to be honest, we are stuck. Similarly, facts may not suggest their own interpretation. No amount of facts could tell you what brand of ‘Brexit’ is ‘real Brexit’, and when people, even judges and lawyers, tried to make an argument about this they were attacked.
The fears for the fate of ‘objectivity’ are not new — for instance, in 1942, George Orwell wrote that the coverage of the Spanish Civil war gave him ‘the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world’. The difference between Spain and a modern conflict, such as the civil war in Syria is that we now have factual video evidence of a lot of what goes on. And yet, Pomerantsev describes the work of the White Helmets journalist Khaled Khatib on covering the war in Aleppo, his terabytes of video evidence of hospitals, houses, schools being bombed, people wounded and killed — all of it without any outrage from the international community. Indeed, it was the White Helmets themselves that were attacked as terrorists. (Not only that, but Khatib himself was barred by the Trump administration from entering the US.) People are now capable of ignoring or overlooking clear factual evidence that does not fit into their view of the world, preferring to believe the conspiracy theories about the White Helmets over the factual information. As Pomerantsev says, the videos of atrocities are still sitting around waiting ‘for the facts to be given meaning’.
A fatal loss of respect.
It seems that there is no longer a counter-weight to the propagandists of the ‘fairy-tale’ narratives, no authority that can be used as a reference point to counter the mis-information, no voice trusted to be impartial and ‘above politics’.
Pomerantsev attributes this to widespread disillusionment in progress, the loss of belief that life would keep improving that followed that 2008 financial crisis with the consequence that people are ‘rebelling against the notion of fact itself’. I am not convinced that this is the main reason.
The main reason is the loss of respect — for the big institutions of society, for expert knowledge, for learning. The culture of individualism, of measurement of status purely through wealth has diminished the authority of the very people who deal in objectivity and in fact — judges, academics, senior civil servants and all the other, much-derided, ‘experts’. The same happened to other ‘traditional’ figures of authority — clergymen, television and radio presenters, politicians. They are not heeded as before, what they say does not seem to carry as much weight, they no longer define the common ground, are not seen to be setting norms, parameters, putting forward objective facts that most of us can agree on.
Previously, (non-climate) scientists have mostly avoided the same fate as far as the UK is concerned, but now, during the COVID-19 epidemic, we see science being politicised also. The narrative of the people in power pretends that scientists decide whether to impose lockdown or not — but scientists are not decision makers, they are advisors guided by the science.
The media carefully foster this narrative. My ‘favourite’ program Question Time (described earlier), now include a celebrity with no particular expert qualifications but a lot of opinions on the panel alongside the usual fare of MPs, academics and other worthies. One of these was a Harrow-educated actor by the name of Laurence Fox, who, on prime-time television declared that ‘to call me a white privileged male is to be racist’. The content is not significant: what is significant is that his interlocutor was Rachel Boyle, a lecturer in the field of race and ethnicity, and yet Fox’s opinion was deemed to be of equal importance. The message is clear: an actor’s opinion is at least equal in value to that of an expert. People are encouraged to abandon facts and follow their emotions.