The new zombie lie
by Tom Sullivan
Yes, it’s satire.
The Washington Post’s fact-checker this week rolled out a new translation of something the left has long known as the zombie lie, “lies that just won’t die, no matter what the facts are.” The Post’s Glenn Kessler dubs it the “Bottomless Pinocchio,” explaining the extension of its Pinocchio rating system:
Trump’s willingness to constantly repeat false claims has posed a unique challenge to fact-checkers. Most politicians quickly drop a Four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging.
Not Trump. The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation.
The Bottomless Pinocchio recognizes repeated statements deployed as weapons in “campaigns of disinformation.”
The sitting president is the most prominent purveyor of zombie lies. Russian president Vladimir Putin, if not Trump’s soulmate might be Trump’s mentor. More subtle than his protégé, Putin employs programmers, scammers, and bots to do such dirty work on his behalf. Trump is too cheap to pay Fox News celebrities for doing what state employees do for Putin. The Washington Post explains in “Agents of Doubt“:
Intelligence agencies have tracked at least a half-dozen such distortion campaigns since 2014, each aimed, officials say, at undermining Western and international investigative bodies and making it harder for ordinary citizens to separate fact from falsehood. They say such disinformation operations are now an integral part of Russia’s arsenal — both foreign policy tool and asymmetrical weapon, one that Western institutions and technology companies are struggling to counter.
“Dismissing it as fake news misses the point,” said a Western security official who requested anonymity in discussing ongoing investigations into the Russian campaign. “It’s about undermining key pillars of democracy and the rule of law.”
[…]
“The mission seems to be to confuse, to muddy the waters,” said Peter Pomerantsev, a former Russian-television producer and author of “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” a memoir that describes the Kremlin’s efforts to manipulate the news. The ultimate aim, he said, is to foster an environment in which “people begin giving up on the facts.”
Many Americans have given up, willingly if not as the result of conditioning, the Post finds in an unusual new poll. Pollsters set out to uncover whether Americans could separate truths from lies told by Trump:
The survey included 18 pairs of opposing statements – one true, one false – without identifying who made the statement. Eleven questions gauging belief in false claims by Trump were mixed among four false claims by Democrats, a true claim by Trump and two probing other factual statements.
Only among a pool of strong Trump approvers – about 1 in 6 adults in the survey – did majorities accept several, though not all, of his falsehoods as true.
That news is not exactly cause for celebration. No surprise, where people get their news influences what they believe. Fox News is tops again in misinforming its audience. Pollsters found 33 percent of adults for whom Fox News is one of their top news sources accepted the false claims. People who rely on NPR or newspapers were the least likely to accept the false claims, at 16 percent and 17 percent respectively, on average:
The Post poll also suggests Republicans have grown less concerned about presidents being honest than they were a decade ago. In 2007, an Associated Press-Yahoo poll found 71 percent of Republicans saying it is “extremely important” for presidential candidates to be honest, similar to 70 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents. The new Post poll shows identical shares of Democrats and independents prioritizing honesty in presidential candidates, but the share of Republicans who say honesty is extremely important has fallen to 49 percent, 22 points lower than in the AP-Yahoo poll.
It is no wonder then that the sitting president has such an affinity with the Russian strongman. His attraction is to Putin’s money and power, naturally, but also to Putin’s facility with disinformation for bending reality to suit him. Dissolving external reality is a goal shared by both the White House and the Kremlin, even if the president’s attorney, Rudi Giuliani, declaring, “Truth isn’t truth,” showed less finesse.
When Stephen Colbert’s character announced in 2005, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” he thought he was “being farcical.” Now the joke is on us. For #Cult45 , truthiness is all that matters. The Post poll may have data, but data from the liberal press is tainted.
Dictionary.com selected “misinformation” as its word of the year. The choice of “mis” rather than “dis” was deliberate, linguist-in-residence Jane Solomon told the Guardian:
“Disinformation is a word that kind of looks externally to examine the behavior of others. It’s sort of like pointing at behavior and saying, ‘THIS is disinformation.’ With misinformation, there is still some of that pointing, but also it can look more internally to help us evaluate our own behavior, which is really, really important in the fight against misinformation.
Solomon allows that misinformation can be spread unwittingly. Thus, “mis” versus “dis” is like the difference between dupes and duplicitous?
How reassuring.
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