‘FAKE NEWS’ AND ‘ALTERNATIVE FACTS’; DANGER TO DEMOCRACY
As United States President Donald Trump today completes his first year in office -- which many analysts describe as a reign of dangerous chaos and unpredictability -- a senior Senator of his own Republican Party last Wednesday made a historic speech which many compared to the famous, “I have a dream” oration of Martin Luther King Junior.
Senator Jeff Flake took to the Senate floor, with his speech being telecast live all over the world -- to rebuke President Trump for his repeated attacks on the media, regarded as the one of the four institutions which maintain democracy through checks and balances.
He said, “Mr. President, near the beginning of the document that made us free, our Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident ...” So, from our very beginnings, our freedom has been predicated on truth. The founders were visionary in this regard, understanding well that good faith and shared facts between the governed and the government would be the very basis of this ongoing idea of America. As the distinguished former member of this body, Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, famously said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” During the past year, I am alarmed to say that Senator Moynihan’s proposition has been tested more severely than at any time in our history.
The Senator said he was making his speech to talk about the truth, and its relationship to democracy. For without truth, and a principled fidelity to truth and to shared facts, American democracy would not last. He lamented that 2017 was a year which saw the truth -- objective, empirical evidence-based truth -- more battered and abused than any other in the history of the US, at the hands of the most powerful figure in the government.
It was a year which saw the White House enshrine “alternative facts” into the American lexicon, as justification for what used to be known simply as good old-fashioned falsehoods. It was the year in which an unrelenting daily assault on the constitutionally-protected free media was launched by that same White House, an assault that was unprecedented and unwarranted. Senator Flake whose speech is still being analysed by international political specialists said, “The enemy of the people,” was what the US President called the free media in 2017. It was a testament to the condition of US democracy that its own president used words infamously spoken by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to describe his enemies.
He noted that so fraught with malice was the phrase, “enemy of the people,” that even former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Mr. Stalin to annihilate such individuals who disagreed with the dictator.
“This alone should be a source of great shame for us in Congress, especially for those of us in the president’s party. For they are shameful, repulsive statements. The president has it precisely backward -- despotism is the enemy of the people. The free media are the despot’s enemy, which makes the free media the guardian of democracy,” he said adding that when a figure in power reflexively called any news that did not suit him as “fake news,” it was that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the media. The Washington Post, famous for bringing down President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal of the 1970s said this week Mr. Trump had used the words “fake news” more than 400 times last year.
Sri Lanka has much to learn from Mr. Trump’s attack on the free media and the fake news scenario. To a large extent the US media has maintained high ethics, checking and double checking reports and giving both sides of a story in a fair, balanced and accurate manner. While our government has restored media freedom to a large extent and needs to maintain it, our media also need to be ethical and balanced, lest “fake news” hits Sri Lanka also.