After the Fact: The Erosion of Truth and the Inevitable Rise of Donald Trump - Hardcover

Nathan Bomey is an award-winning business reporter for USA Today and the author of Detroit Resurrected: To Bankruptcy and Back. Previously, he was a reporter for the Detroit Free Press, a business reporter for publications in Ann Arbor, Mich., and a reporter for his hometown newspaper in Saline, Mich. Among other honors, Bomey has received the Michigan Notable Books Award (2017) from the Michigan Department of Education, the Outstanding Young Alumni Award (2015) from Eastern Michigan University, the Young Journalist of the Year Award (2015) from the Society of Professional Journalists Detroit, two Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) Awards, the Wade H. McCree Award for the Advancement of Justice, and Governing magazine's Hovey-Harkness Award, honoring the best public service journalism on government issues.

From the Introduction

My childhood Sunday school teacher liked to say that the most dangerous lies are the ones that contain the most truth.

He was right. Yet some measure of manipulation is normal in a healthy democracy. In America, free speech gives us the right to skew reality—short of slander, libel, perjury, or shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.

We have entire professions devoted, at least to some degree, to spinning the facts. Public relations. Marketing. Lobbying. Law. Politics. People in those fields are paid to present a filtered version of the truth to their target audiences. And we need them to do their jobs effectively. They should not have to give up their right to bend the truth.

But how much can you bend the truth before it breaks?

As former US senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is often said to have decreed, “everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.” He was right, too. With all due respect to the late Moynihan, however, few of us live by that standard. For most of us, facts are fungible and shapeable. There’s no one who better exemplifies this than President Donald Trump, who trampled the truth en route to the White House.

During his 2016 campaign—and during the first year of his presidency—Trump repeatedly skewed the facts, evaded the truth, and stirred up dissension based on rumors, innuendo, and outright concoctions. He spun falsehoods about the threats posed by refugees, Muslims, criminals, and innumerable other boogeymen. He fibbed about his own achievements, misled voters about his opponents, circulated conspiracy theories, deceived the public about legitimate journalism, and grossly mischaracterized a multitude of political issues.

You can argue, as many do, that the facts have never formed the foundation of political discourse. And that’s fair—to an extent. But “in saying that all politicians lie, dissemble, and spin, we didn’t take seriously the extremes to which that notion could be taken,” said political scientist Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College professor who has researched political misperceptions. “So when a politician like Donald Trump appears, the disincentives for promoting misinformation are a lot weaker than we think.”

Those disincentives have actually morphed into incentives. Promoting and capitalizing on misinformation is easier and more rewarding than ever. Trump simply exploited that new reality. And it helped him win the election. “People who tend to agree with him will often believe his claims, even though they’re not based on any evidence or are directly disproven by the facts,” Nyhan said. “The immune system of democracy is weaker than we’d like to think.”

Trump has always understood the power of tinkering with the truth. After all, he famously articulated in his 1987 book, Trump: The Art of the Deal, precisely how he manipulates the press and the public. “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do,” he wrote. “That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.”

It’s tempting and perhaps even reassuring to describe Trump as an outlier. That’s understandable. But the truth is there’s a little bit of Donald Trump in all of us—a willingness to misrepresent reality to achieve selfish goals, deny irrefutable facts that make us uncomfortable, and cling to our own preconceived notions of the world.

Donald Trump did not usher the post-fact era into existence. He was a product of it. He was its inevitable outcome.

To understand how this happened, we must relinquish any pretense that this is a one-sided problem. It’s a bipartisan epidemic. Democrats are also guilty, albeit not to the same degree as Republicans during the 2016 campaign. But this isn’t a purely political book because the problem transcends politics. In fact, politics is simply a reflection of our “post-truth” society, which the Oxford Dictionaries named the 2016 word of the year.

Most people who use social media are contributing to this crisis, myself included. Social media has given us the ability to twist the facts on a sweeping scale, transforming us into our own personal publicists and political spin doctors while provoking deep-seated misunderstanding and interpersonal division. Through tools like Facebook and Instagram, we cultivate false impressions, purposely or inadvertently deceiving others about our lives. This increases the likelihood that our family, friends, and acquaintances will fall prey to depression, resentment, vulnerability, and isolation—which collectively make up the building blocks of distrust and even hate.

Nearly half a century before Mark Zuckerberg cofounded Facebook in a Harvard University dormitory, sociologist Erving Goffman warned about the societal risks of people misrepresenting themselves. “A discrepancy between fostered appearances and reality” provokes social distance, Goffman wrote in 1956 in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. “Paradoxically, the more closely the impostor’s performance approximates to the real thing, the more intensely we may be threatened.”

That sounds a lot like my Sunday school teacher’s warning.

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My goal with this book is to explain why we should not be surprised by the rise of a powerful person who openly skews the facts, to discuss the threats posed by the post-fact era, and to suggest how we can begin reorienting back toward the truth.

In part 1, I’ll trace the roots of the crisis, explain why it’s disrupted our collective relationship with facts, and discuss how Trump took advantage of this. In chapter 1, I’ll explore how a transfer of trust to search engines—namely Google—has affected our basic research process and our understanding of what’s true and what’s false. In chapter 2, I’ll articulate the impact of journalism’s decline and its pivot toward sensationalism and partisanship on the pubic’s perception of the truth. And in chapter 3, I’ll highlight the rise of false and distorted content in connection with our algorithmic age.

In part 2, I’ll discuss how these changes have sparked a crisis of disconnectedness and threatened to undermine scientific and community values that were historically considered core to our well-being. In chapter 4, I’ll cover the role of fiercely ideological politics in driving misperceptions and falsehoods, particularly about scientific issues. In chapter 5, I’ll examine how social media has compromised our ability to recognize reality in each other as friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers. And in chapter 6, I’ll analyze the effects of political division and digital disruption on our democratic values, health, and welfare.

In part 3, I’ll explore the future of the post-fact era and how we need to rethink education, communication, journalism, and technology. In this section, I’ll even propose a few potential solutions—perhaps naively but at least in good faith. In chapter 7, I’ll explain the serious risk of a massive increase in fabrication via technology, social media, and online news. In chapter 8, I’ll show how educators need to adapt to these challenges to begin preparing us for dynamic economic and social changes. In chapter 9, I’ll delve into the ways in which altering how we talk to each other can help disparate groups break through barriers and restore trust. And in chapter 10, I’ll discuss potential solutions for journalism and technology to help people reconnect with reality—and barriers that could prevent social media from changing.

Finally, in the conclusion, I’ll explore why, amid a culture of distrust, so many people seem to be craving authenticity.

Throughout this book, I’ll share a few personal experiences and observations as a professional journalist. But I’ll primarily rely upon a comprehensive review of modern research, public reports, and extensive personal interviews with public figures, academics, technologists, psychologists, sociologists, entrepreneurs, educators, and others.

After all, as Winston Churchill once said, “It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.”