This is not a new story
I just finished watching the local Sunday news interview show. The local news anchor had a representative of Trump and a representative of the opposition to talk about the administration. The representative of Trump made the statement that former NSA Director Clapper and current FBI Director Comey had both stated that there is no connection to criminal action by the Trump Administration and Russia. Her line was: “there is no there, there”.
The statement was allowed to go uncontested by both the moderator and the opposition representative. The statement is patently false, and a great example of what has happened to our view of “facts” in the past two years. Both Comey and Clapper did state that there was no connection – to statements made that the Trump campaign and transition team had been tapped by the Obama administration. Those statements did not address connections of the Trump campaign and transition team to Russia. “There is no there, there,” better applies to the statement made about the “ Obama tapping fake-news controversy” on Donald Trump’s twitter account.
It’s been going on for several years. The media has agonized over how to cover these statements. If they correct every falsehood, if they call them LIES, then they are declaimed as being biased and unfair. So the “little” untruths are passed over, the half-truths (Clapper and Comey did say something that sounded a little like this) are left uncontested, and the public is left confused.
George Orwell predicated this alteration of truth in “1984.” When we read the novel back in the 1960’s, we related to Winston Smith, the main character who saw through the lies. We were arrogant in our view that it couldn’t really happen, and in the year 1984 marveled at how Orwell got it all wrong. We now live in a true Orwellian world, just a little later than he thought, where the truth is altered to match the political ideology of the teller.
This is the unspoken crisis that our political world faces. As we realize the depth of dis-information the Russians and others were able to place into our political thought, it’s difficult to see what “the fix” is? How do we get back to a point where we can at least agree on the truths? And it’s not just the Russians, certainly there is enough money in our political system, particularly in this post “Citizens United” decision world (NYT – How much has Citizens United changed our political world), that others will follow the Russian game plan to alter the body politic.
We, all of us, the politicians, the media, the private citizens: we all have a duty to define the facts and debunk the lies. Our public lives are currently infected with lies: whether we call them half-truths, opinion, alt-facts, or Russian mis-directions. The cure, the inoculation against manipulation, is to call the truth true, and non-truths lies. It has to happen every time, so that we can find a baseline of healthy truth again. This is the test of whether our nation will survive foreign and domestic terrorism on the truth. How we respond to this test, will determine the fate of our Republic.
