Post-truth politics
Post-truth politics, also described as post-factual politics or post-reality politics, amidst varying academic and dictionary definitions of the term, refer to a recent historical period where political culture is marked by public anxiety about what claims can be publicly accepted facts.
It suggests that the public distinction between truth and falsity—as well as honesty and lying—have become a focal concern of public life, and are viewed by popular commentators and academic researchers alike as having a consequential role in how politics operates in the early 21st century. It is regarded as especially being influenced by the arrival of new communication and media technologies. Popularized as a term in news media and a dictionary definition, post-truth has developed from a short-hand label for the abundance and influence of misleading or false political claims into a concept empirically studied and theorized by academic research. Oxford Dictionaries declared that its international word of the year in 2016 was "post-truth", citing a 20-fold increase in usage compared to 2015, and noted that it was commonly associated with the noun "post-truth politics".
Since post-truth politics are primarily known through public statements in specific media contexts, it is especially studied as a media and communication studies phenomenon with particular forms of truth-telling, including intentional rumors, lies, conspiracy theories, and fake news. In the context of media and politics, it often involves the manipulation of information or the spread of misinformation to shape public perceptions and advance political agendas. Deceptive communication, "disinformation, rumor bombs, and fake news have mass communication era antecedents in both war and security and commercial communication. All can be said to be forms of strategic communication and not mere accidental or innocent misstatements of facts."
However, distrust in major social institutions, political parties, government, news media, and social media, along with the fact that anyone today can create and circulate content that has generic characteristics of news creates the conditions for post-truth politics. Distrust is also politically polarized, where those identifying with one political party dislike and distrust those of another. Distrust becomes the bearer of post-truth politics, since citizens cannot verify claims firsthand about world events and usually lack expert knowledge about subjects being reported factually; they are faced with the choice of trusting news providers and other public truth-tellers. For this reason, some scholars have argued that post-truth does not at all refer to a sense that facts are irrelevant but to a public anxiety about the status of publicly accepted facts on which democracy can function.
, political commentators and academic researchers have identified post-truth politics as ascendant in many nations, notably Australia, Brazil, India, Ghana, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among others.
History of terminology
The term post-truth politics appears to have developed from other adjectival uses of "post-truth", such as "post-truth political environment", "post-truth world", "post-truth era", "post-truth society", and very close cousins, such as "post-fact society" and "post-truth presidency". According to Oxford Dictionaries, the Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich may have been the first to use the term post-truth in a 1992 essay in The Nation. Tesich writes that following the shameful truth of Watergate, more assuaging coverage of the Iran–Contra scandal and Persian Gulf War demonstrates that "we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world." However, as Harsin notes, the term was in academic circulation in the 1990s. The media studies scholar John Hartley used the term "post-truth" as the title of a chapter, "Journalism in a Post-truth Society", in his 1992 book The Politics of Pictures.In 2004 Ralph Keyes used the term "post-truth era" in his book by that title. In it he argued that deception is becoming more prevalent in the current media-driven world. According to Keyes, lies stopped being treated as something inexcusable and started being viewed as something acceptable in certain situations, which supposedly led to the beginning of the post-truth era. The same year American journalist Eric Alterman spoke of a "post-truth political environment" and coined the term "the post-truth presidency" in his analysis of the misleading statements made by the Bush administration after 9/11 in 2001. More specifically, the American academic Moustafa Bayoumi argued that it was the 2003 "Iraq War that ushered in the post-truth era and that the United States is to blame". Bayoumi believes that there existed differences compared to the times, for example, of the Spanish–American War and of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Starting from 2002–2003, through the formation of the Office of Special Plans and supported by the neocons' noble lie ideology, the greatest difference from previous time periods of all existed and "the apparatus of lying became institutionalized". In his 2004 book Post-democracy, Colin Crouch used the term post-democracy to mean a model of politics where "elections certainly exist and can change governments", but "public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams". Crouch directly attributes the "advertising industry model" of political communication to the crisis of trust and accusations of dishonesty that a few years later others have associated with post-truth politics. More recently, scholars have followed Crouch in demonstrating the role of professional political communication's contribution to distrust and wrong beliefs, where strategic use of emotion is becoming key to gaining trust for truth statements.
The term "post-truth politics" may have originally been coined by the blogger David Roberts in a blog post for Grist on 1 April 2010. Roberts defined it as "a political culture in which politics have become almost entirely disconnected from policy ". Post truth was used by philosopher Joseph Heath to describe the 2014 Ontario election. The term became widespread during the campaigns for the 2016 presidential election in the United States and for the 2016 "Brexit" referendum on membership in the European Union in the United Kingdom. Following this, some scholars use the term "post-truth situation" to refer to such "a situation in society and politics, in which the boundary between truth and untruth is erased, facts and related narratives are purposefully produced, emotions are more important than knowledge and the actors of social or political life do not care for truth, proof and evidence".
Concepts
Information disorder has been proposed as an umbrella term for the wide variety of poor or false information being used for political purposes in post-truth politics.Post-truth
Scholars and popular commentators disagree about whether post-truth is a label that is newly generated but can be applied to phenomena such as lying in any historical period; or whether it is historically specific, with empirically more recent observable causes and is only simplistically reduced to the age-old phenomenon of political lying. Scholars and popular commentators also disagree about the degree to which emotion should be emphasized in theories of post-truth, despite the emphasis on emotion in the Oxford DictionaryPost-truth politics is a subset of the broader term post-truth, whose use precedes the recent focus on political events. While Oxford Dictionaries influentially named post-truth its 2016 word-of-the-year, current academic development of post-truth as a concept does not entirely reflect their original emphasis on "circumstances" where appeals to "objective facts" fail to influence as much as "appeals to emotion and personal belief". The use of post-truth communication as a major tool in political campaigns such as the Brexit debate in the UK and the Trump campaign in the United States resulted in intense scholarly and journalistic interest in it as an aspect of politics. The existence of "post-truth politics" as a concept that makes sense and as a problem in the political life of liberal democracies is sometimes denied by critics.
Some uses of the concept are more general, referring not to historical conditions of widely empirically documented distrust or a context of promotional capitalism, easily accessible and hard-to-control amateur mass communication of social media, but to the presence of lying and distrust in politics and bias in journalism. Reducing the concept of post-truth to dishonest political communication and different styles thereof, some scholars argue that what one identifies as post-truth politics today is really a return of previous periods of politics. Some argue that what is being called "post-truth" is a return to 18th- and 19th-century political and media practices in the United States, followed by a period in the 20th century where the media was relatively balanced and political rhetoric was toned down. Such a view nonetheless also conflicts with those in other countries at other times. For example, in 1957 scientist Kathleen Lonsdale remarked in the British context that "for many people truthfulness in politics has now become a mockery.... Anyone who listens to the radio in a mixed company of thinking people knows how deep-seated is this cynicism." Similarly, New Scientist characterised the pamphlet wars that arose with the growth of printing and literacy, beginning in the 1600s, as an early form of post-truth politics. Slanderous and vitriolic pamphlets were cheaply printed and widely disseminated, and the dissent that they fomented contributed to starting wars and revolutions such as the English Civil War and the American Revolution.