"FAKE NEWS" OPINION PIECE

Opinion: Fake news

There is no need to panic: ‘fake news’ will ultimately lose

by Gideon Rachman

Aug. 6, 2018

https://www.ft.com/content/81c4bcca-9968-11e8-9702-5946bae86e6d

Modern politics is increasingly a battle over the truth. President Donald Trump loses no opportunity to accuse the media of propagating “fake news”. Mr Trump’s critics respond that it is the US president himself who is lying. Last week, the Washington Post solemnly reported that “President Trump has made 4,229 false and misleading claims in 558 days”.

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Those who are worried that the Trump White House, or Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, or Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist party, might succeed in creating a new politics, in which lies triumph over truth, can take comfort from the history of the 20th century. Regimes based on lies ultimately collapse because reality catches up with them.

Many historians of Germany under Adolf Hitler no longer portray the Nazi regime as ruthlessly effective. Instead, they emphasise the inefficiency and weakness that stemmed from the need to feed comforting lies to a führer who dismissed discordant events as either fake news or evidence of treachery.

The fatal weakness of the Soviet system was even more closely connected to the regime’s resistance to truth. In his 1974 essay Live Not By Lies, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian novelist and dissident, argued that “the lie has been incorporated into the state system as the vital link holding everything together”. When, a decade later, the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, attempted to allow greater openness, the system began to crumble. As the writer Arkady Ostrovsky observes, “the Soviet collapse was determined . . . by the dismantling of lies”.

The gap between the lies propagated by the Soviet system and the lived experiences of ordinary people (and Soviet leaders) ultimately became too large to be sustainable. Something similar is likely to happen to contemporary political systems that rely on lies. They, too, will encounter a brutal reality check.

Comparisons with Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union may not be terribly comforting, given that both regimes unleashed appalling horrors before their ultimate collapse. As totalitarian regimes, with control of the press, the judiciary and an apparatus of terror, they were in a position to suppress the truth for many years — although not forever. But western democracies are likely to deliver a “reality check” to dishonest leaders and political programmes much more swiftly.

Take the unravelling of Brexit. It is debatable whether the Brexiters were purveying “fake news” when they claimed that leaving the EU would free up £350m a week to spend on the UK’s National Health Service. I would argue that they were guilty of a consciously-misleading claim, rather than an outright lie. But whatever the precise epistemological status of the Leave campaign’s claims, they are now being subjected to a brutal reality check.

The sunlit uplands of Brexit are disappearing over the horizon, with the arch-Brexiter, Jacob Rees-Mogg, now claiming that it could take 50 years for the benefits of Brexit to manifest themselves. The reputations of leading Brexiters are unlikely to survive the chaos of a no-deal Brexit or the capitulation of continuing to follow EU law.

The claim that climate change is “fake news” is also being subjected to a reality check, as soaring temperatures reduce the ranks of sceptics to a sweaty and shrinking minority.

At some point, reality will also catch up with Mr Trump. It could be the damage done to American industry and agriculture by the US president’s trade wars. It could be the collapse of his self-proclaimed diplomatic triumph in North Korea. Or, it could be the judicial process unleashed by Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The courts are a particularly important check on politicians, since the laws of perjury and the careful weighing of evidence make it much harder to lie freely.

It is easier for the leaders of China and Russia to control political narratives, since they do not have to contend with an independent media or judicial system. But even the Russian and Chinese leaders have reason to be nervous about events that undermine official propaganda. Mr Putin is experiencing a backlash against the increase in the pension age in Russia.

One reason for the robustness of China’s one-party state may be that the official government line (life is getting better) has largely matched the life experiences of the Chinese middle-classes in recent decades. But a slowdown in the economy, or an international setback, could easily undermine Mr Xi’s narrative about the “great rejuvenation” of the Chinese nation.

The assault on truth is one of the great problems of our time. But history provides some reassurance. Ultimately, the truth will out.

gideon.rachman@ft.com