A most terrifying election year
This is an exciting year for journalists, at least according to one puff-piece interview I read this week. Mention was made of how pumped we should be that it’s election year both here and in the US. Woohoo.
I don’t want to seem like a wuss, but I’ve covered elections all the way back to 1987 in Australia when Bob Hawke was bigger than Jesus – and frankly, I’m terrified in a way I’ve never, ever been before.
No matter how hard your favourite parliamentary gallery hack strives for fair, balanced and comprehensive coverage, it is getting harder and harder for the average voter to tell what’s fact and what’s not. This is not a criticism of political reporting, or any reporting. It’s just the way it is now.
Writing in Vox, Sean Illing described our new reality as ‘‘flooding the zone with shit’’.
This, he says, is the state where ‘‘we live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information’’. Illing points out that if you follow politics at all, you’re likely to be bloody exhausted.
‘‘Some of (the) information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth.’’
This abject confusion among the populace is measurable: a Center For Public Affairs Research poll released in November showed 47 per cent of Americans believe it’s hard to know whether the information they are getting is true. The original ‘‘flooding the zone’’ quote came from the Grand Poobah of misinformation himself, former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
This leaves us all in dire straits, as evidenced by Jacinda Ardern’s plea at the opening of Labour’s caucus retreat on Thursday. Since when has the leader of an open democracy had to plead for a truthful election campaign, long before the official campaign has even begun? Since Russia carried Trump over the line like a bride in white in 2016, that’s when.
Elections in Australia and the UK followed suit with various flavours of misleading attacks, fibs and obfuscations. If you want a brief but comprehensive run-down on how it all came about, pop over to YouTube and watch Carole Cadwalldr break down the lie soup that was the Brexit vote. You won’t regret it, but it should scare you.
I sometimes forget it’s only three years since Kellyanne Conway came up with the phrase ‘‘alternative facts’’ in a TV interview about an official White House response. (Incidentally, we now know Trump has made demonstrably false or misleading statements 16,241 times in the past three years – that’s about 15 a day. You’re welcome.)
At the time, Conway’s phrase felt laughable and typical of, but surely peculiar to, the Trump White House.
Cut to this week when National’s campaign manager Paula Bennett denied her party’s online ‘‘memes’’ are misleading (despite two rulings from the Advertising Standards Authority that say different) by using the phrase, ‘‘an interpretation about how figures are used’’. One woman’s falsehoods being another woman’s ‘‘interpretation’’, I guess.
You could be forgiven for writing off anything that comes tagged with the words ‘‘election’’. Thank goodness we can all still rely on non-political institutions like museums, libraries and archives as the last bastions of truth.
Except we can’t, and we have the shmagoggles of a mess created this week by the US National Archives as proof.
You may have missed this story – it would appear at first glance to have little to do with us, snuggled as we are down here in the last free and fair democracy still operating.
We should care, though. It matters to all of us that the decision-makers at this institution, which calls itself America’s ‘‘record keeper’’, opted to censor actual history this week.
Promoting a new exhibit called Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote, the Archive used a large photo of thousands of sign-waving women at the 2017 Women’s March on Washington.
Archives staff – presumably working on orders from management – had deliberately blurred selected words on some of the signs.
One, which said ‘‘God Hates Trump’’, had the word Trump blurred out. The president’s name was similarly removed from a sign reading ‘‘Trump & GOP – hands off women.’’ The words ‘‘pussy’’ and ‘‘vagina’’ were removed from other signs in the photo.
Sprung by the Washington Post, the Archive’s first response was to defend its decision to avoid offending visitors and because it wanted to stay out of the ‘‘current political controversy,’’ by which it means the Trump impeachment process.
After a public outcry, the Archives changed its mind and admitted it had been wrong – but even that apology had echoes of Bannon’s ‘‘flood the zone’’ philosophy.
‘‘This photo is not an archival record held by the National Archives but one we licensed to use as a promotional graphic’’ it blathered, as if that somehow made the photo – fake? Less verifiable? As if the women holding the signs were… actors?
‘‘Nonetheless, we were wrong to alter the image.’’ No kidding.
Co-president of the Women’s March Board of Directors, Rinku Sen, called the doctoring of the photo a ‘‘symbol of the degradation of democracy’’.
It is that, plus another example of how democracy will die – not with a bang but with a whimper, to borrow from TS Eliot.
It is also an attack on history. What short memories we have, if we can so easily deny or forget why so many women around the world took to the streets that day. If you do need reminding, one of the big reasons was because the new president of the United States had boasted in a 2005 recording about using his celebrity status to sexually ‘‘move on’’ women without their permission, even groping their private parts.
We marched because we were furious, and because we had seen enough to know that the freedoms and rights that had been grudgingly given to women after a long, long fight, were in danger of being taken away. We were right.
One reader responded to the Washington Post article this week by comparing National Archives staff to Winston Smith – the character in George Orwell’s 1984, whose job was to alter historical archives so they would not offend those in power.
‘‘Orwell’s character said it all,’’ the reader wrote. ‘‘Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past ... it follows that the past is whatever the party chooses to make it.’’
If even the people who we trust to guard our history betray us, then we are indeed in deep, deep trouble.
Since when has the leader of an open democracy had to plead for a truthful election campaign, long before the official campaign has even begun?