No Regrets Journal Essay Liars and Propaganda: Putin and the White House Clayton Medeiros April 2020 
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Liars and Propaganda: Putin and the White House “We have a right to think that truth with a capital letter is relative. But facts are facts. And whoever says that the sky is blue when it is gray is prostituting words and preparing the way for tyranny,” Albert Camus The White House and Fox News have worked hand in glove as mutually supportive propagandists. Their role model is Putin’s Russia. I will provide an overview of Russia’s approach to propaganda in the age of the internet. Propaganda is intimately entwined with lying. Many of the same tools apply to the liar and their audience. The White House and Fox News are partners in lying to their supporters. I will discuss how the supporters become complicit in the lies. Christopher Paul and Merriam Matthews have summarized the current world’s most sophisticated and successful propaganda machine, Vladimir Putins’s Russia. Their work is in the Rand Corporation publication, Perspective, with the title, “The Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ Propaganda Model.” The model focuses on “…high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions” that are rapid, continuous, and repetitive with a deep lack of commitment to consistency. Russia the White House and Fox News use “text, video, audio, and still imagery propagated via the internet, social media, and traditional radio and television broadcasting.” Multiple sources provide a sense that what is being said might be true. Many endorsements imply veracity with little consideration for the speaker’s credibility. Information from “people like me” or who share a liking for Fox News and right wing media is more likely to be accepted. Conspiracy theories and falsehoods abound. The same is true of Russia’s absolutely controlled news-like programming. In keeping with the current White House occupants, “Russian propagandists do not need to wait to check facts or verify claims; they just disseminate an interpretation of emergent events that appears to best favor their themes and objectives.” A classical rhetorical tool is repetition which tends to promote acceptance in the listener. The White House, Fox News and Putin used this tool with the term “fake news” as part of an overall plan to undermine journalism. The attack is accompanied by vehement denials of the factual truth. “Russian propaganda makes little or no commitment to the truth (but not) all of it is false…It often contains a significant fraction of the truth… however events reported in Russian propaganda are (often) wholly manufactured.” This is equally true of the White House and Fox News.
Russia’s “RT and Sputnik News, are more like a blend of infotainment and disinformation than fact checked journalism, though their formats take on the appearance of proper news programs” to provide them with the trappings of being real news organizations. Fox News takes a similar approach. Once false information is in the world, it is difficult to be overturned. False information can be comforting to true believers. This is particularly true of emotionally laden content tied to presumed racial or foreign differences. Linking the false information to anyone who is different from the audience can raise their emotional temperature. “Angry messages are more persuasive to angry audiences” and can often lead to violence. Current false beliefs are difficult to overturn and easy to encourage. False charts and graphs can be helpful in giving a sense of legitimacy. As with Fox News and Russian news programs, they “are perceived as more credible than other online formats, regardless of the veracity of the content.” Consistency is irrelevant, “If one falsehood or misrepresentation is exposed or is not well received, the propagandists will discard it and move on to a new (though not necessarily more plausible ) explanation.” This is standard procedure in White House briefings. “…while credible and professional journalists are still checking their facts, the Russian (or White House) firehose of falsehood is already flowing: It takes less time to make up facts than it does to verify them.” The current classic examples have been the White House briefings on the coronavirus. They moved from denial of the threat to minimizing the threat with false case numbers. Once they had to accept the facts of the pandemic, they shifted to how quickly the economy could b opened without any hard evidence to that end. At each step they blamed others for the disaster and tried to deny their initial lies. Like propaganda, truth and lies have been at the heart of our public discourse for as long as people have tried to build societies together from the cave to New York City. The idea that we live in a “ post truth” world is nonsense. Lies and false information of all kinds have existed throughout history. Often they were used to paint the enemy in war times as an inhuman monster. Today’s internet provides a more accessible information market place for propagandists and liars to ply their trade. In a recent article, Colin Burrows notes, “Of course we live in the age of lies because the age of lies is without beginning and without end.” * There is an intimate relationship between the liar and their audience. The liar entices the audience with an idea that is untrue, but could be true as something that might be the case. The audience becomes complicitous in the lie because it is something that they want to be true. They want to believe what the liar is saying.
The liar says that a group of people carry dangerous diseases, they are all thieves and murderers. They are not like us. We should not allow them to be in our town, city or country. They are painted as a threat to the liar and a threat to the audience. Liars know or think they know what will appeal to their audience. They are trickster psychologists who offer something false that the audience might agree with. The beliefs of the audience are critical to the success of the lie. Foreigners or anyone who is other are a threat. They cannot be trusted. The goal is to drive an emotional response to what is being said. This always involves a mix of fear and anger. “Being lied to can make us hate ourselves for being manipulable, but it can also make us hate other people who we judge are being jerked around by irrational appetites and ill-grounded opinions.”* Fake news is a classic trope that can be used to attack the media. It was used originally in Hitler’s Germany and is still used in Russia and by the White House. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s advisor, Vladimir Putin and the White House understood that if you tell a lie enough times, it can become the truth in the minds of your supporters. In some ways, truth is simpler than lying, “…a key feature of truth; from a narrowly psychological perspective, is that unlike a lie it doesn’t have overt designs on you. That’s why we can talk about being lied to but we don’t talk about being truthed to. A liar knows what he wants from you and believes he knows how to get it. A truth-teller, however doesn’t claim to be telling you what you want to hear. Indeed, he may tell you things you really don’t want to hear.”* How do you respond to a liar, in this case, the White House. You listen to Nancy Pelosi. She will have clear facts about any socio-economic policy or legislative act. She will affirm societal values that include the right to vote, the right to an education, the right to health care and the right to Social Security. On a regular basis she will refer to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. She will call out the lies of the White House. *Fiction and the Age of Lies, Colin Burrow, London Review of Books, February 20, 2020