In November 2016, Oxford Dictionary declared that the international word for the year was post-truthan adjective relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
The Dictionary explained that the words usage across various media increased in 2016 by roughly 2,000 percent compared to 2015, saying that the spike came in the context of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the US Presidential elections.
Trumps election and Brexit are among the most significant political upheavals of 2016, not just because pundits and pollsters failed hugely to predict them. They also demonstrate the very real dangers of the emerging post-truth world.
During the Brexit campaign, Nigel Faraage, leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), and Boris Johnson, former mayor of London, repeated vigorously that if the UK left the European Union (EU), up to £350 million a week could be allocated for the National Health Service (NHS)Englands publicly funded, single-payer healthcare system. The amount would supposedly come from what the UK sends to Brussels every week, as part of its membership to the EU.
Various quarters proved that claim to be false. For instance, the Guardian calculated that the actual figure is £100 million, and does not consider how much the EU spends on the UK. No amount in fact is actually sent to the EU headquarters from Britain. However, many still voted Leave in part because they believed that UK money earmarked for the EU could be better spent on UK matters like Englands healthcare system.
Even before he ran for the presidency, Donald Trump openly questioned the US citizenship of President Barack Obama and pushed the assertion that the commander-in-chief is a Muslim. As early as 2011, he led the so-called birther movement pressuring President Obama to release his birth certificate and prove his faith and commitment to the United States.
The claim was of course false, as President Obama was clearly born in Hawaii and had earlier professed his Christian faith. But even in the face of definitive evidence, many of his political opponentsincluding Trumprallied support against him by creating skepticism, if not outright belief, in the fiction.
Facts matter less today, as false information and demagoguery become dominant. Unscrupulous individuals can say outrageous things that feel true but arent necessarily true to score political wins. Politicians are now free to stoke popular support on mere conjecture if not outright fictionwith impunity.
Keyes, in his book The Post-Truth Era, described this as a sign of the routinization of dishonesty, where people get away with lying even if they get caught doing so. Susan B. Glaser, founding editor-in-chief of Politico, wrote in a Brookings Institution article that a lot more transparency may have been achieved in todays journalism, but not necessarily with the accountability that was supposed to come with it.
Without such accountability, how then shall our democracies thrive?
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