Whatever happened to the simple truth?

Transcription

1 Whatever happened to the simple truth? We live in a country which claims to be a democracy. The term democracy can be difficult to pin down, and we could easily spend hours discussing just what it is. But putting it in the simplest terms: in a pure democracy all citizens would be involved in all decisions. Clearly, that is not a practical proposition in the modern world. So we have developed a system which allows citizens to participate indirectly. We participate by deciding collectively how and by whom we will be governed, and then leaving things to our elected representatives for five years or so. This system can only work if we have faith in our representatives. We need to be able to trust them to inform themselves properly about the issues on which they will take decisions on our behalf, so that they have a fuller understanding than most of us have the time or inclination to acquire. And we need to be able to form judgements, at election times, as to which of the candidates placed before us will do the best job. So, for a representative democracy to work, certain pre-conditions need to be in place. Crucial among these are: Slide 1 an electoral system which delivers a government broadly representative of voters preferences; the ability for voters to make a genuinely free, informed choice; access to information on which to base this informed choice; freedom to debate political issues without unreasonable constraint. There is a quite widespread perception that in recent years politicians have become less likely to tell the truth; and that the media has become increasingly polarised and biased with the result that it becomes more difficult for us to make the properlyinformed choices on which our democracy depends. How true is this? Politicians are in the trade of persuading people that their views and above all their policies are better than those of their opponents. So the fact that they present things in the way that suits them best should not be a surprise. The question is whether they now do this to a greater extent, or with less honesty than in the past. Or, to put it another way, are spin and fake news new departures or simply the modern manifestation of something that has always existed? Let s start by looking at some of the techniques used by politicians.

2 This photograph purports to be of an ancestor of a current politician who was hanged for horse-stealing and train robbery in the late 1800s. He was imprisoned for horse-theft, escaped from prison, went on to rob trains, was re-captured, and put to death. So how did the politician s staff deal with the story? They issued a statement which read: was a famous cowboy in the Montana Territory. His business empire grew to include acquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the Montana railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years of his life to government service, finally taking leave to resume his dealings with the railroad. In 1887, he was a key player in a vital investigation. In 1889, he passed away during an important civic function held in his honour when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed. That story is, of course, fake news. But it does illustrate the essence of the art of the spin doctor, which is, essentially, to put the most positive possible gloss onto even the most disastrous news item. It developed in an age when news was becoming ever more immediately available, so political responses were more urgent. In earlier days politicians perhaps had more time. Political activity depended much more on mass rallies and public meetings. Many years ago I used to teach a course on Political Rhetoric in Spanish, based mainly on a stylistic analysis of the speeches of Eva and Juan Domingo Peron, the overall message being that in analysing political speeches, the way things are said is much more important than the actual content. One night I happened to see a a TV programme in which an ordinary working class woman had been given an intensive course in the skills of political speech-making, learning all the skills I had been teaching my students to look out for keep the message simple, use repetition, find emotional trigger-words, build to climaxes at the end of each paragraph, seek ways of making your message inclusive, use three synonymous words wherever possible etc etc.

3 The programme ended with shots of this woman making a speech at the SDP conference, using all these techniques and absolutely electrifying the audience. Analyse any of the great speeches of the last century and you will find the same things rhetorical devices deployed to persuade the audience to the speaker s point of view. Mass rallies and political speeches are much less a feature of British political life nowadays. They have survived better in the USA, where Trump s speeches use many of the traditional tricks of the trade e.g. the use of stock phrases which inspire an emotional response from the audience ( Lock her up! Build the wall! etc etc). A speech he made in Dallas in September 2015 is illustrative. It contains this section: I made a beautiful speech. I thought it was wonderful. Everything was fine. A week and a half later they attacked me. In other words they went through- and then they lied. They made it up. I m talking about illegal immigration We have to stop illegal immigration. We have to do it. Have to do it.(audience shouts USA! USA! USA! USA!) And when I hear some of the people I am running against, including the Democrats, we have to build a wall, folks. We have to build a wall. All you have to do is go to Israel and say how is your wall working? Walls work. (Audience shouts Build the Wall! Build the wall!) It is all there in that extract. Short sentences to emphasise certainty and determination, mounting to an emotional climax. Trump uses alliteration, repetition, rhythm to achieve his effects. The speech appears to reject the conventions of normal political speech-making. It is off the cuff - or at least crafted to appear so. It flows like a stream of consciousness. He starts what seems likely to be a conventional politician s sentence In other words they went through.. leading us to expect something like and twisted my words and took them out of context. But instead he switches, and avoids the conventional whining complaint. Instead we get the much punchier and then they lied. He then abandons his next sentence, too, halfway through. Instead of going on to talk about what his opponents say, he switches to the wall, which he knows will get the right emotional response. Whatever one thinks of Trump it has to be admitted that he is a master of the dark art of leading his audience by the nose. It is a style which transfers easily to twitter; Lightweight Marco Rubio was working hard last night. The problem is he is a choker, and once a choker, always a choker! Mr Meltdown! Trump s impact is increased by his re-discovery of skills largely abandoned by contemporary politicians in the USA and the UK. For most politicians now, the art of speaking directly to real people has been largely replaced by media-management (spin).

4 As far as the UK is concerned, this began under Thatcher, but was given a whole new dimension by Blair s New Labour, which was the most media-obsessed government Britain had had in modern times.. From the first, New Labour tended to browbeat and cajole journalists, to fight over every comma and exclamation mark in every headline, contest every quote, challenge every piece of analysis. Some of this had started in the Kinnock years, and it was originally defensive. Blair, Brown, Mandelson and Campbell had watched Neil Kinnock being torn to shreds by hostile journalism, abetted by a pretty ruthless Number 10 operation in the Thatcher era, and had resolved "this will never happen to us again". Attempting to manage press coverage was understandable, given the background. More worrying was the tendency to tell different newspapers and proprietors what they wanted to hear. With Rupert Murdoch, Blair seemed robustly anti-euro. With pro-eu papers, he seemed strongly europhile. Sometimes he sounded a keen civil libertarian. At other times, he was Mr Law and Order. He and his team masterfully combined the two in Tough on crime: Tough on the causes of crime. A string of scandals followed, and the Number 10 press operation began to win a reputation for deviousness as well as aggression. More and more, newspaper reports began with words like: "Well, the spin is that...," Media cynicism grew and grew. The spinning became angrier still. All this culminated in the crisis over who had really thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and whether journalists and the country had been misled. Media management has continued to develop under Cameron and May. We are now in a situation where news is rarely presented straight. Political speeches are trailed in advance ( Theresa May is expected to say today ). Lies and half truths have become so much the ordinary currency of politics that people have largely lost any belief in the accuracy of news reports, choosing to believe the facts are as their side presents them. Witness some of the tweets following attempts to debunk Trump s false claim about terrorist attacks in Sweden. Significant numbers of tweeters said things like So now they are covering up what really happened in Sweden. Alongside these developments we have seen, I believe, greater polarisation of political coverage in the press. There are complex reasons behind this, but a factor which should certainly not be ignored is the increasing concentration of ownership of the printed and other media.

5 In terms of newspapers, if Sundays and London-only papers are included, Lord Rothermere has 27.3% of press, Rupert Murdoch 24.9%. News Corp, Associated Newspapers and Telegraph Media Group are all effectively owned by billionaires who are not UK tax-resident. Many people argue that a result of this concentration of ownership is that readers of newspapers get only one point of view, that of the owners and editors of their newspaper. Against this it is argued that it was always thus for anyone who read only one newspaper. Not all information comes from newspapers. Much is acquired from or via search engines. That market is overwhelmingly dominated by Google: Which gives Google potentially huge influence over opinion. The picture is a little different when one looks at Television, with the publiclyfunded BBC a major player: Nevertheless, if one looks at revenues a more worrying picture emerges, with Sky the biggest (and growing) player; the BBC s revenues declining as the government restricts the growth in the licence fee:

6 At the same time, foreign and off-shore ownership is growing: Slide 12 So wherever one looks in the media, the trend is for ever more concentration of ownership; and ever-growing dominance of foreign and off-shore investors and the political views they espouse. That said, it should also be noted that people under 40 rely less and less on these traditional media for information. Instead, they use on-line sources, which has led to concern that they can easily be taken in by news which has not been thoroughly researched; and by opinion pieces which deal in propaganda rather than rational argument. The extent to which this is worrying possibly depends on the extent to which we believe that journalists on the print and broadcast media behave any more responsibly. (Katie Price?)

7 Whatever, it is perhaps because the print and broadcast media are so dominated by a few people with strong political views that social media have become increasingly prominent in political campaigning. We have seen politicians like Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump use it very effectively to communicate directly with voters. But we have also seen the development of sophisticated targeting techniques which use psychological profiling to identify people likely to respond to particular messages. Using these techniques campaign managers can identify the people to target with about 70% accuracy. And it seems to work the Trump team was able to send well-targeted messages to key groups in three swing states in the last 48 hours of the campaign. Trump won all three states, and the election, despite getting 3 million fewer votes nationally than Clinton. So where does all this leave us? Well, I don t think the fact that users of social media self-select the views they find acceptable is actually much different from newspaper readers choosing one paper rather than another. But when it comes to the actions of politicians, I cannot help thinking that the use of the skills of the speech-maker is somehow more legitimate than the more sneaky manipulations of the spin doctor but I accept that this is probably just a reflection of my age. I am, though, much more worried by the kinds of techniques developed by Russian hackers and organisations like Cambridge Analytica, which seem to me to be manipulating opinion in a quite new way which risks undermining the validity of the whole political process, by seeking to influence voters without their ever realizing they are being manipulated. Recommended reading: Lee De Wit What s your Bias Elliot and Thompson, 2017.