Art of the Lie

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21706525-politicians-have-always-lied-does-it-matter-if-they-leave-truth-behind-entirely-art?fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/artofthelie

Post Truth – Post Fact and "Truthiness" 

• Barack Obama’s birth certificate was faked, 
• the president founded Islamic State (IS),  
• the Clintons are killers  
• and the father of a rival [Ted Cruz] was with Lee Harvey Oswald before he shot John F. Kennedy.   

“Mr Trump is the leading exponent of “post-truth” politics—a reliance on assertions that “feel true” but have no basis in fact. His brazenness is not punished, but taken as evidence of his willingness to stand up to elite power.” Economist September 10 2016 

The Economist goes on to argue:  

But post-truth politics is more than just an invention of whingeing elites who have been outflanked. The term picks out the heart of what is new: that truth is not falsified, or contested, but of secondary importance. Once, the purpose of political lying was to create a false view of the world. The lies of men like Mr Trump do not work like that. They are not intended to convince the elites, whom their target voters neither trust nor like, but to reinforce prejudices.  

Feelings, not facts, are what matter in this sort of campaigning. Their opponents’ disbelief validates the us-versus-them mindset that outsider candidates thrive on. And if your opponents focus on trying to show your facts are wrong, they have to fight on the ground you have chosen. The more Remain campaigners attacked the Leave campaign’s exaggerated claim that EU membership cost Britain £350m ($468m) a week, the longer they kept the magnitude of those costs in the spotlight. 

  

Post-truth politicians such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are no joke Jonathan Freedland

Post-truth politicians such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are no joke

In this era of post-truth politics, an unhesitating liar can be king. The more brazen his dishonesty, the less he minds being caught with his pants on fire, the more he can prosper. And those pedants still hung up on facts and evidence and all that boring stuff are left for dust, their boots barely laced while the lie has spread halfway around the world.

The proof is on show most visibly in the US, where Republican nominee-to-be Donald Trump enjoys a relationship to the truth that is chilly, occasional and distant. The Washington Post’s fact-checker blog has awarded its maximum dishonesty rating – four Pinocchios – to nearly 70% of the Trump statements it has vetted. And it’s vetted a lot. That doesn’t mean the other 30% turned out to be true. They just earned three Pinocchios rather than the full four, which means the Post found a shrivelled kernel of veracity wrapped inside the thick layers of fraud, distortion and deception.

Post-truth politics

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics


Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics) is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. Post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of truth by rendering it of "secondary" importance.^[1] The contemporary origin of the term is attributed to blogger David Roberts^[2][3] who used the term in 2010 in a column for Grist. It became widespread during the 2016 presidential election in the United States and the 2016 referendum on membership in the European Union in the United Kingdom.^[4][5] Political commentators have identified post-truth politics as ascendant in American, Australian, British and Indian politics, as well as in other areas of debate, driven by a combination of the 24-hour news cycle, false balance in news reporting, and the increasing ubiquity of social media.^{[6][7][8][9][10]}

A week with CNN’s Corey Lewandowski

Columbia Journalism Review

Partisan hackery is a feature, not a bug, of many cable programs, and networks’ stables of on-air analysts are filled with thoroughbreds. CNN contributor Corey Lewandowski is not unique in that regard. What makes Donald Trump’s former campaign manager different from his counterparts on the split-screen is threefold: He has a non-disparagement agreement with his former boss; he will continue receiving severance payments from the Trump campaign until after the election; and he reportedly still advises the GOP nominee on an unofficial basis.