A comeback in the fight for truth
Maybe this is what rock bottom in the fight for truth looks like. Perhaps America’s worst day is behind us, that day at the height of a pandemic when thousands of misguided and malevolent backers of the president overran the Capitol and attacked Congress at his urging, killing a police officer and forcing the vice president and his family into hiding for fear of their lives.
Yes, more than 140 members of Congress still stood up on that very day for the president’s bald-faced lie that he had been cheated out of re-election, and tried to overturn the votes of citizens. But there are signs that their craven ambition is backfiring on them, and that citizens are losing patience with those who excuse and defend deceit.
So perhaps the fever fueled by the malignant lies that Donald Trump has trafficked in throughout his public life has broken. Maybe as we gradually recover from the pandemic and economic disaster, we will at the same time regain a measure of sensibility and good will so that we can overcome the misinformation fatigue that has all but debilitated us. We love comeback stories, after all. Doctors told the golfer Ben Hogan that he was unlikely to walk again after a head-on car accident; he was on the course just nine months later and went on to 64 tournament wins, including nine majors. Or remember Andre Agassi, who plummeted from the world’s top tennis player in the mid-1990s to No. 141, sapped of spirit and snorting crystal meth, only to fight back over two years and regain his top form.
Of course, there’s only so much you can learn by comparing the ups and downs of an athlete’s career and the fall of a society from its place as envy of the world to object of pity. Here’s what’s true of both, though: Recovery can begin only once reality sets in.
That’s something you’ll hear from anybody who has been addicted — to alcohol or drugs or destructive behavior. If you like superstition, you can turn your baseball cap inside out and call it a rally cap, but nothing short of facing up to our frailty actually prepares us to regain strength.
Maybe optimism in the face of the calamities that have engulfed us is foolish. The estimable NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny, whose beat is the intersection of politics and the digital world, says the years of lies from Trump and his enablers have left us exhausted but unlikely to push back. “Misinformation isn’t going away, but it seems inevitable that people will stop caring,” she wrote last month.
I’m not so sure. I haven’t lost hope in the power of modeled good behavior and norm-shifting actions by key players in society.
Yes, it will be a long road back to a point where most citizens in our society can agree on a set of facts — which is what must precede any fair debate — but that will come if we can regain even a modest level of trust in each other and in our institutions.
Last week the annual Edelman Trust Barometer was released — a global survey that found not only an “epidemic of misinformation” but also “a failing trust ecosystem.” That is, we don’t trust anybody to tell us the truth — not in government, business, the media or organizations ranging from the Red Cross to the Catholic Church.
Yet we know healing can happen. In a fractured personal relationship, trust is rebuilt by one small act of integrity at a time, until a bond is restored by experience. Similarly, citizens pummeled daily by deception and delusion may gradually come to recognize truth from fiction if their information diet is made healthier by constant doses of truth-telling. We desperately need a decent person to lead us; it’s only by distortion that Joe Biden isn’t seen as that. If he delivers calm and competent leadership, he could influence American behavior for the good as powerfully as Trump has for ill.
Meanwhile, we could be helped if the digital platforms that deliver our information step up to a higher level of corporate citizenship. Algorithms determine our news diet, meaning that the more fake news we consume, the more fake news we’ll be fed. It doesn’t have to be that way. The belated but powerful response of Facebook, Twitter and other players to the Capitol insurrection — silencing thousands of accounts that incited violence, including Trump’s — suggests a path forward. Digital platforms have responsibilities that they’re only beginning to recognize; if they don’t respond thoughtfully, we must take next steps to rein in their outsized power and unfair business practices.
I’m not deluded enough to think that all Americans will embrace what those of us in the so-called “reality-based media” report. We’re all inclined to what experts call motivational reasoning — giving extra validity to information that supports our opinions, and discounting what contradicts our biases.
But a society that holds those who distort reality to account at least gives truth-telling a fair shot. That’s why we should draw hope from the corporations, organizations and universities that are stepping away from lawmakers — including Rep. Elise Stefanik, from our area — who backed the effort to overturn the election results.
Take heart. We may have seen the worst of times in the fight of truth over falsehood.
Constant doses of truth could change attitudes.