Fake News
12-04-2019By Roger Berkowitz
Fake news is everywhere these days. The “fake news” claim was first made by President Donald Trump a few weeks after his election. As the New York Times observes in a major editorial statement alongside graphical images, over 40 world leaders have now employed the President’s “fake news” meme to discredit press reports of their corruption or abuse of power. Just last week the Chinese government said of the New York Times report of internment and brainwashing of Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang Province: “Concocting fake news to attract eyeballs is a habitual trick of America’s New York Times….”
With the President’s attack on “fake news” resounding across America and around the world, it is important to recall the history of the charge. “Fake News” is a fair translation of the German “Lügenpresse” or “lying press”—a charge used by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to discredit independent reporting. The point is not that the President is like Hitler; it is not at all the case that the President intends to invoke this history or even knows about it. But it is true that the use of the term “fake news” is having a corrosive effect on our public culture.
As Hannah Arendt observed, a free, independent, and trusted press is absolutely essential for democracy.
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
The President’s supporters will say the fault is with the press and not with the President. As does Michael Goodwin, they argue that the New York Times and the media in general has abandoned objectivity and embraced opinionated journalism. That may be true to some extent. But most journalism is opinionated. It always has been. The New York Times mantra of “All the news that’s fit to print” was always a half-truth; the choice of which news is fit to print must reflect biases. And most newspapers and other media have always had less of a distinction between fact and opinion that did the Times in its heyday. But there is such a thing as journalistic ethics and the effort to attribute facts to reputable sources who are on the record. Such ethics are being compromised now across the political spectrum. There are many times when journalism fails and so with the Times. But the claim of fake news does not hold journalists to a higher standard, it lowers all journalism to the embodiment of propaganda. And their lies the present danger.
Benjamin Carter Hett argues in his book The Death of Democracy, that “The key to understanding why many Germans supported [Hitler] lies in the Nazis’ rejection of a rational, factual world.” And in his book Nervous States, William Davies writes that “Experts and facts no longer seem capable of settling arguments to the extent they once did,... and this is contributing directly to rising cynicism toward governments.” And to all institutions that depend upon expert authority, including the press and the universities and the judicial system. As Davies writes, “Democracies are being transformed by the power of feeling in ways that cannot be ignored or reversed. This is our reality now.” For Davies, that means that rather than denigrating feeling and hoping to return to a nostalgic era of expert authority and factuality, “we need to get better at listening to [people’s feelings] and learning from them.”
Danielle Allen offers one way to hear the feelings of both sides around the impeachment debate. She writes (Washington Post subscription required):
For Democrats working their hearts out, on behalf of one or another candidate, the discovery that President Trump appears to have marshaled the unmatchable power of his office to conjure up investigations into a leading political rival is a heavyweight punch to the gut. The unfairness of having to fight against someone willing to fight that dirty, and with the power and resources to distort the election almost at will, is enraging.
For Republicans who worked their hearts out in 2016 on behalf of candidate Donald Trump, the relentless investigations into the president are equally enraging. The unfairness of having to constantly fight against what feel like efforts to undo a legitimate election result causes them to see red. Conservative media is full of angry denunciations of Democrats for failing to accept their humiliating political defeat.
For those following the debates about “fake news,” it is thus helpful to recall Arendt’s insistence that truth and politics don’t go well together. For Arendt, politics is about opinion, not truth. That is why the claims of the expert should be kept separate from politics. A climate scientist may understand the facts and the theories about our warming planet. But for Arendt, a scientist has no better claim to judgment about how to respond to climate change than does a baseball player or a janitor. In matters of democratic politics, we are all equal. It is thus an affront to our equality and dignity when scientists claim the right to offer true opinions about how we should respond to the crisis of climate change. She worries that when intellectuals and technocrats seek to rule through claims to expertise in an administrative state, their undemocratic rule will give rise to animosity and resentment against intellectuals. Faced with such a danger from a numerically superior class of non-intellectuals, Arendt imagines that the “danger of demagogues, of popular leaders, will be so great that the meritocracy will be forced into tyrannies and despotism.”
Arendt’s answer to the problem of disagreement in politics is not that we should abandon truth or factuality. Her point is that the truth of facts and the realm of expert opinions must be protected and preserved, and that to do so we need to isolate those realms and keep them free from politics where facts will always blur into opinion and truth will always be corrupted by the claim or patina of power. Such isolation is always imperfect. There is no such thing as a purely objective journalism or a university course fully free of politics. But the ideal of a university as one of the few places to pursue truth free from power is one of the great achievements of the human species. For Arendt, the arena of politics depends upon the depoliticization of facts by experts who remain outside of politics. And it is the sense that experts today are too close to politics that underlies the dangerous attacks on the press through the accusation of ‘fake news.’
[i]Arendt, On Violence, 181.
[ii]Arendt, On Violence 197 Appendix XVI.