Why Trump Can Lie and No One Seems to Care

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/16/why-trump-can-lie-and-no-one-seems-care

If you are wondering how this is relevant to the 2016 campaign, in time Winchell turned his roving eye from entertainment to politics, deploying exactly the same arsenal to the latter as he had to the former. Thus did gossip leap the tracks from Hollywood and Broadway to Washington. In this, Winchell’s approach was a precursor of modern election coverage. He was obsessed with letting readers in on what was going to happen — the clairvoyance of rumor — rather than with what was happening or what it actually meant. That is, he was a horse-race handicapper long before horse-race coverage became the dominant form of political journalism.

One prominent example: At the behest of the White House, Winchell spent months floating trial balloons for Franklin D. Roosevelt and his ambitions for a third term. Basically, it was presidentially endorsed gossip.

But Winchell’s influence didn’t stop at conflating entertainment with politics — and this is where the indifference to truth comes in. Winchell reported dozens of tidbits of gossip each day. Presumably, that’s why people read him or listened to him on the radio; they wanted to be ahead of the curve. But the vast majority of these tidbits were unverifiable, and nearly half of the flashes that were verifiable turned out to be false, according to a survey conducted for a six-part New Yorker profile of Winchell by St. Clair McKelway. Since there was always a passel of new scoops every day, no one seemed to notice — or care — that he was usually wrong.

One can only assume this was because readers seemed to relish the excitement of the “news” more than they desired its accuracy. Or, to put it another way, gossip was entertainment, not information. Thus the Winchell Effect.

The Winchell Effect is alive and well in today’s politics in two respects. First, candidates can get away with saying pretty much anything they want without being held accountable so long as what they say is entertaining and so long as they keep the comments coming. Trump has been the major beneficiary of this disinclination by the MSM to examine statements. The blast of his utterances always supersedes their substance. And the MSM plays along.

[PATRICK]

1. My favorite

was the press invention of Nixon's "secret plan to end the Vietnam War". This misconstrued takeaway from a misunderstood Nixon speech was such a political gift that it likely did help him win that election. Nixon couldn't believe his luck. It was "secret" so he didn't have to say anything more at all except subtly play the press gaffe for all it was worth. Of course the Dems went rabid to get the details of this fantasy and it likely only increased its power.

Further stupidity and bias gifts like that stripped Gore of credibility in 2000 with a series of memes and outright lies that only vied to be personally demeaning and insulting. Facts meant nothing.

Now the media is reflexively falling in line again to try and gift Trump with all sorts of presumed fantasies and reversals- whether he said anything like that or not or as if the Everyman voter can trust the independent champion to harbor all sorts of great ideas and goals that he never said or now baldly lies about. Of course they are also continuing to try to trash Trump, but fear is predictably taking over our intrepid crew.

And yes there is a reason why the Democrats or liberal pundits are recently gifted with being the dupes of this process over and over and over and looking like keystone cops when they invariably pick the wrong way to fight back.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. I think it has more to do with the sheer volume of lies...

Trump talks so much and throws so much garbage out there that by the time you rip into one ridiculous "plan", he's got 10 more to rip into.

Just not enough time in the day to deal with all of them. Barely time enough to report them, although reporting them is part of the problem.

I almost never watch cable news any more because it's so lightweight. and network news' half hour just doesn't have the time for analysis. The PBS News Hour and some NPR shows, like Diane Rehm's do a much better job of digging into things.

And, there's always print, like the New Yorker, and even the Times on a good day.

[Hortensis]

8. Yes, and Eridani's post mentions that syndrome as well.

The cable news services could handle any volume of lies, if they would, by cutting into Trump's free camera time to hit every significant statement briefly. There's always more than enough excess verbosity to do it. Even network news could do it in the tiny slices of time between commercials.

But after all, why would they? Which party do the businessmen at the top want running this country?

I agree entirely about TV news. We do watch PBS, and my kitchen radio's permanently tuned to NPR. Cable's for discussion shows when we feel like it. Network is basically boycotted for corruption and failure of informative purpose, watched now and then only to see what they're reporting and how they're styling it.

Print media is where the information is, and 99.99% of the disinformation of course.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

11. It's the Trump Trot corollary to the Gish Gallop.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027562497

[sendero]

3. They all lie like dogs..

... so might as we pick the one with the more entertaining lies.

Trump and Sanders represent the voting public thumbing its nose at the entire proceeding. Nothing less.

[eridani]

5. Great. More Herbert Hoover "Democrats"

We get it--the New Deal was a shitty idea and should be repealed.

[sendero]

12. Oh I am an equal opportunity..

... cynic, both parties consist mostly of self-dealing assholes. If you think they don't you are not paying attention.

The country did not wind up in the shape it is in with Eisenhowers and Carters at the helm.

[alarimer]

10. The big lie is that things will get better; they will not.

I don't know why we believe this lie, but we do. The establishment lies to us when they say it will, when all evidence is to the contrary. I think that is the only think Trump and Sanders have in common. Certainly Hillary lies a lot more than Sanders does. Well, I don't know if she is lying so much as deeply invested in the fairy tale that is the American dream, the idea that if you work hard, you will succeed. Which is demonstrably false.

[beachbum bob]

4. I believe it is more in line with conservative mindset who loves to be lied to.....but the rest of

us really don't care for it....why trippin trump is doomed in November...

[uponit7771]

6. Cause tRump is a white, male, heterosexual, Christian, billionaire and execs who pay the folks on..

... TV to talk about Trump want to be like Trump.

If said execs were mostly Muslim or Female or a PoC then Trump would be as unpopular as George Zimmerman and most likely in handcuffs instead of part of the election process.

Hate wont win

[bemildred]

7. Almost all of them lie all the time and nobody cares.

Damn few that won't say anything.

[gratuitous]

13. Depends on what is meant by "nobody" or "no one"

I know that I certainly care about the sheer volume of lying pumped out by candidate Trump, and I'm appalled that it doesn't get more play in the popular media.

But as for "all of them lie," I would submit that some lies are qualitatively worse than others. The candidate who swears up and down that he'll shake up Washington if you elect him to Congress has to know that he doesn't have a chance in hell of doing any such thing. The people who vote for him probably know that, too. When a candidate says he's going to stop all illegal immigration or build a wall along the southern border and force Mexico to pay for it, he's lying his ass off. A lot (but significantly not all) of the people who vote for such a demagogue may know he's lying, but they'd like his lie to be true and vote accordingly.

But what about the lies that shoot right past the gate undetected? Lies like how a politically neophyte candidate is going to work with a hostile Congress to enact a program detrimental to most citizens, but selling it as something desirable? The lies pile up so thick it's practically impossible to separate them all out.

[bemildred]

14. That's kind of my point:

"The lies pile up so thick it's practically impossible to separate them all out."

And while that remains the case, it seems unlikely that any of these other problems that we have will get ironed out.

[pampango]

9. Trump "waffles, flip-flops and obfuscates, sometimes changing positions from one press appearance to

another."

Donald Trump is a serial liar. Okay, to be a bit less Trumpian about it, he has trouble with the truth. If you look at Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning site that examines candidates’ pronouncements for accuracy, 76 percent of Trump’s statements are rated either “mostly false,” “false,” or “pants on fire,” which is to say off-the-charts false. By comparison, Hillary Clinton’s total is 29 percent.

In an ordinary political season, perhaps Trump would be under fire for his habitual untruths, like the one that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved with Lee Harvey Oswald. This time around, though, neither the media nor the public — least of all his supporters — seem to care. Which leads to the inescapable conclusion that these days, as far as our political discourse goes, truth, logic, reason and consistency don’t seem to count for very much.

Another explanation is that long before Trump, social scientists observed that truth matters less to people than reinforcement, and that most of us have the ability to reformulate misstatements into truth so long as they conform to our own biases. We believe what we believe, and we are not changing even in the face of opposing facts (without this capacity for self-deception there would be no Fox News).

The media have been bored with policy for a long time ... . And when they do discuss policy ... they are likely to prefer the windy, absurd generalities of a Trump to the wonky policies of a Clinton. It makes better copy, and it has the added benefit that it doesn’t require any fact-checking.

Obama's defense of facts and science and his disdain for leaders and commentators who embrace "a culture of willful ignorance", which he expressed the other day at Rutgers, certainly stands in stark contrast to the Trump and many others.