It is no coincidence that the same year that Donald Trump was elected president at the polls (2016) the Oxford Dictionary chose word of the year post-truth, defined as “a circumstantial context in which objective facts influence the formation of public opinion less than references to emotions and personal beliefs.” Nigel Farage also contributed to this with his pro-Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom that same year. His strategy was a collection of lies and false data, which he recognized as such when he achieved his goal of removing the country from the EU.
At the end of Trump’s term, The Washington Post counted the lies (or post-truths) that he spread during four years in the White House: 30,000. Which gives an average of twenty falsehoods a day, which, without a doubt, requires a high dose of ingenuity, imagination and irresponsibility. As records are there to be broken, we will have to see if it is surpassed in the second term, knowing that the Republican never disappoints in his fabulations.
George Orwell, British author of dystopian novels who fought in the Republican ranks during the Spanish Civil War, was one of the first to warn that the concept of objective truth was disappearing, to the point that he wrote that “lies were going to become the story.” Teodoro León Gross, in The death of journalismremember that this subordination of facts to political or partisan interests is what led Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s press chief, to justify the president for using “alternative facts.” Paraphrasing Groucho Marx, he could have said: “These are your facts, if you don’t like them, you have others.”
Journalism must prevent the truth from being of interest to public opinion.
The truth is beginning to be of little interest to political leaders, but even less to public opinion, which prefers to be informed by unscrupulous influencers or amoral impostors. The only hope is that Trump activates the best of the journalist’s craft, that is, quality press and investigative journalism. The New York Times knew how to make the orange man’s previous mandate profitable. This is the challenge of the profession. And what readers trust who don’t want to be fooled.
Read also
