Trump wins because he lies: Truthiness, Fox News, and why the right likes a fact-free zone
The right-wing media bubble is real. New data explains why post-truth campaigns succeed in the Republican Party
Conservatives decided years ago, as a matter of strategy, to attack the mainstream media as hopelessly liberal. There’s a kernel of truth to this, in that there are likely more liberals than conservatives working in media. But the coverage, if it’s biased at all, isn’t biased in favor of liberals. If anything, the media favors the sensational and the attention-grabbing – this is what drives ratings and clicks.
The media, after all, is a commercial enterprise, and so its biases are financial, not political.
But the persecution mania among conservatives has served the Republican Party well. It has insulated them from credible criticisms. When a conservative candidate distorts the truth or misrepresents his record, media members will point this out, but the conservative base is primed to ignore it. The messenger is already tainted and therefore untrustworthy.
The simple act of fact-checking is now controversial and mostly pointless.
Conservatives live in their own media bubble, free of “liberal bias” and free also of troublesome facts. This is great news for candidates like Donald Trump and Ben Carson, who remain totally unconstrained by the facts.
Trump’s capacity to lie is the very lifeblood of his campaign. He exaggerates and fabricates and conservatives love him all the same. His latest claim about “thousands of thousands” of Muslim Americans rejoicing in the streets after 9/11 is patently false, but he simply doubles down on the original lie and he gets away with it.
As a NBC News report notes, “Trump is by far the campaign’s worst offender when it comes to exaggerations and falsehoods. According to fact-checking project Politifact, Trump has so far clocked in with 41 percent of his statements rated as ‘false’ and 21 percent as the most egregious level, ‘Pants on Fire.’”
Naturally, Trump is dominating the Republican race.
Ben Carson’s offenses against the truth have been well-documented, but that hasn’t hindered his campaign – not yet, at least. Politifact has rated 46 percent of Carson’s assertions false and 13 percent as “Pants on Fire,” but he’s still comfortably at the top of polls.
A new Pew Research Center study helps explain why Trump and Carson and even Fiorina have surged in the polls despite lying mercilessly. The simple answer is that most Americans don’t trust the media, and this is particularly true among conservatives. 65 percent of Americans say the media has a “negative effect” on the country (In 2010, the number was 57 percent).
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