Toolkit to recognise and handle deception

AUTHOR: Evan Davis PUBLISHER: Hachette RRP: $35 REVIEWER: Mary Ann Elliott

IT appears that there is a political culture now in which debate is influenced by emotion rather than based on facts; personal assertions are repeated while facts are ignored.

In 2016 The Oxford Dictionary defined a new word, “post-truth”, as “relating circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion”.

As a BBC radio and TV presenter, Evan Davis knows better than most how people can be “economical with the truth”.

He interviews politicians and CEOs on a daily basis and has to decipher and expose what they really mean.

Davis asserts that low-level dishonesty is rife everywhere, in the form of selective use of facts, or exaggeration; from Trump and the Brexit debate to companies that tell us “your call is important to us”, to ever-present, misleading advertising.

With “spin-doctors” now so effective, has bulls..t virtually become the communications strategy of our times? Misrepresentation of facts is nothing new, but the panoply of deception has assumed new heights.

Evan Davis steps inside the pervasive ruses employed in all walks of life, and assesses how it has come to this.

Instead of logic and reason, a disenchanted and vulnerable public (perhaps swayed by recent political upheavals and world events), swallows manipulated emotion and fakery, a stock-in-trade of men in power.

Davis provides readers with a tool-kit to recognise and handle the kinds of

The internet and social media has transformed communication but has also resulted in the potential for misinformation and deception on a global scale.

almost daily deceptions we encounter.

For example the Iraq war ultimately became a stupendous exercise in false information and denial.

Political campaigning became propaganda; distortion of the facts has sadly become the new norm in this post-truth era.

The internet and social media has transformed communication but has also resulted in the potential for misinformation and deception on a global scale.

Let’s hope wisdom, open-mindedness and reason will prevail in a troubled world.