The Exclusivity of Fact

As the campaign trail draws to a close and the election nears, it’s become common knowledge that today’s political candidates fudged more than a few details in their speeches and debates.  (I won’t call out a particular candidate, as even if one is more egregious than another, both sides are objectively guilty of such behavior.)

Let’s not pretend that this year’s political candidates are the first to jump on the Hyperbole Train, or even the Fiction Express. Their behavior nonetheless begs the question:  In this age of transparency, why do politicians still lie right to the camera, when there is a near certainty they’ll be caught?

A look at the changing landscape of news sheds some light. Maybe you missed the memo, but breaking news is owned by the web and mobile these days, amplified further by social platforms.  And with that comes a marked decrease in turnaround time. Breaking news used to be “a day later.” Then it became “later that day.” Then “later that hour.” These days, it’s right now. If you take the time to check facts and don’t report the story immediately, someone else will report it first. Worse, that someone may or may not be a legitimate journalist.  We can call it sexy names like citizen journalism and crowdsourcing, but that doesn’t change the practical reality that amateurs now compete with the professional journalists. The very existence of digital platforms, and the reporting immediacy that ensues, challenges a previously presumed component of journalistic integrity: truth.

In other words, politicians lie because they can. Our world may be transparent, but for every fact checker who points out a fallacy, there are dozens, maybe even thousands, of amateurs who already tweeted their support of that fallacy hours earlier.

Compounding this is the changing role of TV news. With digital platforms taking over the breaking news role, TV has become a platform for depth and feature reporting. Some of the blame for today’s entertainment-driven sensationalist approach to TV news arguably goes to Fox News, the first of the TV nets to really good at entertainment and really blasé about accuracy. But they’re not alone. The Daily Show, not intentionally setting out to be a news destination, got really good at being one anyway. MSNBC then followed. And eventually, infotainment became the way of most television news. Personality began to trump professionalism; entertainment trumped accuracy.

Of course it’s not really “ok” that fact checking has become a separate discipline, rather than part of the fabric of news reporting and campaign politicking. On the consumer front, we’re tired of having to look up the facts. Time is a scarcity in life, sometimes our biggest one. The more that news organizations skip fact checking, and the more that politicians hyperbolize the truth, the more we will deprioritize them in frustration.

Of course, as a researcher, what perhaps confounds me most is that the pollsters haven’t curtailed this. Political researchers further the partisan divide and sweep the real issue under the rug, by asking about abortion, gay marriage, the economy, and healthcare. Maybe it’s time to ask voters this: at what point will you become so tired of the exaggerations and fact-shrouding, that you disengage from politics altogether?  

There’s nothing quite like a universal crisis to unify a country, and there’s no crisis quite like a public that is so fed up, they stop caring. Voter turnout is projected to be lower this year than in the past two Presidential elections. For the benefit of society, and the future of government, I hope those projections are wrong. But if they're right, may it be an eye opening call to action to the media and politicians alike that truth remains as critical as ever.