QOTD: Brian Stelter
by digby
#bothsides
#oy
He made up for it in his newsletter:
Either you reject the lies, or you accept the lies.
Of all the divides in American life today, this is the divide I keep thinking about. President Trump and his allies lie with reckless abandon. They make dishonest politicians from the past look like amateurs. When they get called out, they lie about the lying. Trump did this on Wednesday after Robert Mueller contradicted several of the president’s fictions about the Mueller Report. When PBS “NewsHour” correspondent Yamiche Alcindor pointed this out to him, citing Mueller’s own words, Trump denied it and insulted Alcindor.
I’m often told that people are “numb” to Trump’s noise and nonsense. But let’s examine this for a minute:
Why is there not more outrage?
Some people, primarily fans of Trump, excuse or rationalize the lies for various reasons. Other people simply cannot. So much of the anti-Trump outrage from progressives and anti-Trump conservatives and columnists and pundits boils down to “He’s deceiving you. He’s lying to your face. Don’t you care?”
And the press is right smack dab in the middle of this because advocating for facts gets you labeled “fake news.” Which is, again, another lie.
Old-fashioned tenets of the news business fade away in this fog of disinformation. For example: “What the president says is news.” I still think that’s true, but when he’s telling you not to believe your own eyes and ears, is it really news?
Uhm, no, not without context.
Rationales for the lies
“Lying to the public used to hurt presidents,” Allen wrote. Well it HAS hurt Trump too — he’s never been able to crack 50% in reliable approval rating polls, and about two thirds of voters describe him as dishonest, which means even some of his supporters know that he’s deceitful, and they accept it.
What are the explanations and excuses for the Pinocchios? I’ve heard many:
— Some Trump supporters say he is speaking to a “larger truth,” even though he’s not getting the smaller facts right. Example: When he tells stories about illegal voting, he’s calling attention to a threat they perceive to be real and looking out for their votes.
— Other Trump supporters openly accept his personality flaws, and sometimes tepidly criticize his worst impulses, in exchange for long-sought-after policy achievements.
— Some backers also say “all politicians lie,” ignoring the fact that Trump’s lies are in a league of their own.
— They also excuse some of his deception as trolling, you know, “owning the libs.”
— And there are two powerful words that make it a lot easier to look the other way: “We’re winning.”
— Academics typically note that the conservative media machine doesn’t do a lot of fact-checking, preferring to promote even the president’s most unhinged statements.
— Influential members of the pro-Trump media dismiss fact-checking as liberal propaganda, further insulating the base.
— Hardcore members of “the resistance” like to say Trump fans are members of a cult.
(Yes, his following is very cultlike. In their eyes he literally can do no wrong. What else can you call it?)
“Motivated reasoning”
I asked political scientist and Dartmouth professor Brendan Nyhan about this. “We often struggle to tell why people believe stuff,” he told me candidly. “There’s a lot of research on ‘motivated reasoning’ including my work that finds people apply less scrutiny to information that affirms their priors and more scrutiny to information that contradicts them. Other theories are that people affirm things they know to be false at least to some extent to express their political feelings / affiliations or that doing so is a way to signal your loyalty to a leader.”
Thus, a profoundly important probe into a Russian attack on the U.S. election becomes a “hoax” because the leader says so…
Does the brain adapt?
I also called up Tali Sharot, the director of the Affective Brain Lab and the author of “The Influential Mind.” Along with several colleagues, she looked at how people adapt to lying over time. “When they lie, they have a negative emotional arousal in the mind,” she said, akin to self-punishment. But emotion “really adapts quite quickly.” The more people lie, the less they feel that emotional reaction.
Sharot wonders: As a person lies more egregiously, do the people around them adapt, too? “It kind of becomes a norm,” she suspects. When I brought up Trump, she said, “I think many people get used to the lying and they no longer see it as negative as they did a few years ago.”
Trumpworld even lies about the lies!
This exchange happened outside the W.H. on Tuesday:
Reporter: “The President said that he had been asked by Indian Prime Minister Modi to mediate between India and Pakistan. India says that is not even close to truth. Did the president just make that up, sir?”
Larry Kudlow: “No, the President doesn’t make anything up. That’s a very rude question, in my opinion. I am going to stay out of that. It is outside of my lane.”
The lying should be front and center
Reject the lies or accept the lies. That’s the divide. But there IS a third option: Report. Document all of the deception. That’s what journalists like Daniel Dale, now of CNN, do. He wrote about one of Trump’s falsehoods on Wednesday evening.
But Dale is still the exception. Most media outlets still aren’t putting the lying front and center most of the time. Many news outlets are still wary of using the word. And I get it — not everything is a lie — but many of the president’s tweets and quotes can fairly be described as misleading, manipulative or illogical even when not completely fact-free. A growing number of White House correspondents, broadcasters and columnists are forthright about that. But there’s still a reluctance in some newsrooms to tell that truth. (Look at the recent debate over whether to label his racist tweets racist.) The result: The bar is set far lower for Trump than for other political leaders.
I think the bar is set lower for Trump in every respect. He’s a narcissistic, ignoramus, pathological liar. And yet the consensus is that there’s nothing anyone can do about him. Everyone knows what he is but it’s just too risky to really take him on so … oh well.
The consensus from yesterday is that Mueller didn’t put on a Robert DeNiro-level performance in the hearings, so all the incriminating information in the reports is just going in the trash.
Never mind.
.