Postfactual politics
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion,” said US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan a generation ago, “but not his own facts.” What would Moynihan say if he were alive to witness an election in which so many facts have disappeared into the unfathomable data stream of social media? An election in which a nominee can half-seriously invite Russia to hack his rival, routinely share misinformation (with the disclaimer “I hear that…”), or grudgingly allow his campaign to own up to plagiarism in a major speech – without being affected in public opinion polls.
Neetzan Zimmerman delivered a memorable epigram on this vanishing world of agreed facts. Zimmerman is a former Gawker editor whose virtuosity at creating viral content – 30 to 35 daily posts, even on weekends – remains a legend. Two years ago he told an interviewer: “Nowadays it’s not important if a story’s real. The only thing that really matters is whether people click on it … If a person is not sharing a news story, it is, at its core, not news.”
By this measure, Trump has become the most newsworthy candidate in recent memory – a fact that is not lost on his campaign. Rarely does he miss a chance to take advantage of his seeming omnipresence. Should anyone quibble over something he has said, he simply reminds the faithful of the need to “Make America Great Again.” If you doubt the slogan, haven’t you already shown that you have lost faith in the country?
For the last 20 years, the US media have constructed the infotainment universe that has enabled the rise of Donald Trump. In the 1990s, as digital media swept aside traditional newsrooms, little thought was spared for the consequences of closing down local newspapers, or dispensing with beat reporters. Profit-driven outlets never figured out how to ‘monetize’ the old content, so they chose to let it go. A visually dazzling, infinitely customisable and up-to-thesecond journalism took its place, but since the new content resided on screens and cellphones, it felt more like television and was usually treated that way. Complex journalism migrated elsewhere while the big media learned how to chronicle the cultural ephemera that captured the most clicks.
Globally, one of the most harmful consequences of this shifting media paradigm was our increasing isolation from opinions we don’t share, or like. In the wake of the Brexit referendum, for instance, the British Internet activist Tom Steinberg noted that his Facebook feed contained no support for the Leave vote, even though half of the country was clearly in favour of it. Steinberg wrote that the chronic “echo chamber” created by major social media and