The tagline from the TV show The X-Files was, “The truth is out there.” The suggestion was that we can find answers to our questions about paranormal phenomenon if we look hard enough.
Do we have that same curiosity, that same desire to know what is factually accurate, about something much more normal, as in our politics?
The New York Times evaluated speeches by former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on one Friday in September. Here is what the paper found: In a speech by Trump that lasted one hour and three minutes, he made 64 false or inaccurate statements. In Harris’s 23 minute speech, she made six false or inaccurate statements.
The fact that politicians make false or misleading statements is as old as political campaigns, although Trump has taken it to a new level. The Washington Post Fact Checker reported that through 1,170 days of the Trump administration, he made 18,000 false or misleading claims.
It has been suggested that we are in a post-truth era that developed over time. Tony Rehegan wrote in Boston College Magazine, “A willful, generations-long assault on the legitimacy of the press; the rise of partisan media outlets blending opinion and dubious reporting; foreign governments creating and disseminating propaganda in the form of false news stories; and, crucially, the emergence of social media to amplify the range of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories—all of it has amounted to a sustained and potent attack on the very notion of fact-based evidence and objective truth.”
Rehegan suggests that when you add in our tradition of individualism and the belief that everyone’s opinion or experience is valid, then you have many Americans believing “that they have a right to their own truth.” That personal truth can be more powerful than expertise or authority, which is frequently viewed with suspicion.
Which takes us back to the fact checks by the New York Times and the Washington Post. A Gallup Poll last year found that 39 percent of adults have no trust at all in the mass media and 29 percent have “not very much trust.” Pew Research found that “U.S. adults under 30 are now almost as likely to trust information on social media sites as information from national news outlets.”
So, if you don’t trust the media for facts, why would you believe the Times or the Post when they report on when and how often politicians lie?
We have become desensitized to the implications of falsehoods. Ralph Keyes writes in his book The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, “We don’t just have truth and lies, but a third category of ambiguous statements that are not exactly the truth, but just short of a lie.”
Even the word “truth” ceases to have meaning in the traditional sense. F.A. Hayek in his classic The Road to Serfdom observed that when countries are sliding toward totalitarianism, truth no longer describes something to be found through evidence, but rather it is a belief laid down by authority.
We are all explorers in a vast jungle of information. It can be difficult to navigate and with AI, the correct course will be even harder to track. However, the truth is out there. We just have to be concerned citizens who are curious enough to look for it.