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NationofChange / Op-Ed
Published: Thursday 30 August 2012
“Presumably the Romney campaign continues its false claims because they’re effective. But this raises a more basic question: How can they remain effective when they’ve been so overwhelmingly discredited by the media?”
How Romney Keeps Lying Through His Big White Teeth
“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” says Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster.
A half dozen fact-checking organizations and websites have refuted Romney’s claims that Obama removed the work requirement from the welfare law and will cut Medicare benefits by $716 billion.
Last Sunday’s New York Times even reported on its front page that Romney has been “falsely charging” President Obama with removing the work requirement. Those are strong words from the venerable Times. Yet Romney is still making the false charge. Ads containing it continue to be aired.
Presumably the Romney campaign continues its false claims because they’re effective. But this raises a more basic question: How can they remain effective when they’ve been so overwhelmingly discredited by the media?
The answer is the Republican Party has developed three means of bypassing the mainstream media and its fact-checkers.
The first is by repeating big lies so often in TV spots – financed by a mountain of campaign money – that the public can no longer recall (if it ever knew) that the mainstream media and its fact-checkers have found them to be lies.
The second is by discrediting the mainstream media – asserting it’s run by “liberal elites” that can’t be trusted to tell the truth. “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” Newt Gingrich charged at a Republican debate last January, in what’s become a standard GOP attack line.
The third is by using its own misinformation outlets – led by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and his yell-radio imitators, book publisher Regnery, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, along with a right-wing blogosphere – to spread the lies, or at least spread doubt about what’s true.
Together, these three mechanisms are creating a parallel Republican universe of Orwellian dimension – where anything can be asserted, where pollsters and political advisers are free to create whatever concoction of lies will help elect their candidate, and where “fact-checkers” are as irrelevant and intrusive as is the truth.
Democracy cannot thrive in such a place. To the contrary, history teaches that this is where demagogues take root.
The Romney campaign has decided it won’t be dictated by fact-checkers. But a society without trusted arbiters of what is true and what is false is vulnerable to every lie imaginable.
This article was originally posted on Robert Reich's blog.
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ABOUT Robert Reich
ROBERT B. REICH, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including his latest best-seller, “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future;” “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; and his newest, an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org.
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By Richard (RJ) Eskow
14 comments on "How Romney Keeps Lying Through His Big White Teeth"
August 31, 2012 5:20pm
I think that the romney/ryan ticket, and likely all politically active conservatives, have taken a page from the Q'uran. It states that it is not a lapse of ethics to lie to an infidel. A may in fact be a useful strategy when dealing with those who are beneath contempt. I think this alleviates any cognitive dissonance in mitt's mind, (if he has any thoughts like that). It should also tell you something about how mitt actually regards his "fellow" Americans.
I believe I've heard mitt saying that he wants to TAKE THIS COUNTRY BACK. I believe he meant to finish the sentence with..... "to the 19th century".
August 30, 2012 4:44pm
'Presumably the Romney campaign continues its false claims because they’re effective. But this raises a more basic question: How can they remain effective when they’ve been so overwhelmingly discredited by the media?"
One reason is that people have not been educated to a degree they can validly question assertions that have no foundation. They have been taught that what they feel or believe creates truth. It's a powerful manner in which to control people--lead them to believe that whatever their emotions lead them to believe is truth, and then appeal to their emotions.
Of course education gives the astute student the tools to effectively question that sort of mind control. That's why public education is evil to those who lack facts.
August 30, 2012 2:36pm
In answer to some previous comments, there is no point of going to court to sue for slander or libel, because those cases go on for years and the election campaign is over long before then.
Another comment: In my 1964 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, there is a paragraph in the article on Hitler which describes how he used the power of the industrialists to gain political power. It is remarkable and frightening to see how the actions of the current Republican Party are following the same pattern.
August 30, 2012 11:17am
Don't we have laws about truth in advertising? I believe public figures (poiticians, celebrities) are an exception to the libel and slander laws if I remember my law classes correctly. But broadcast media does have a duty (I thought) to ensure what they broadcast is truthful. Has the ACLU weighed in on this?
August 30, 2012 10:38am
Are there no libel laws???? Or can one just say untruths about anything or anyone?
August 30, 2012 9:51am
Republicans are pathologically dishonest and shameless about it/proud of it.
August 30, 2012 9:46am
“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” says Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster. A half dozen fact-checking organizations and websites have refuted Romney’s claims that Obama removed the work requirement from the welfare law and will cut Medicare benefits by $716 billion.
The New York Times even reported on its front page that Romney has been “falsely charging” President Obama with removing the work requirement.
Democracy cannot thrive in such a place. To the contrary, history teaches that this is where demagogues take root. A society without trusted arbiters of what is true and what is false is vulnerable to every lie imaginable. This is what Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney have made the Republican and Tea-Party. The Party of the MASTER LIARS.
August 30, 2012 9:57am
Reich is correct, and it demonstrates the truth of what Nazi propagandists long ago discovered:
Lie, and lie big, and then keep repeating the big lies until they become popular truth.
With all those millions of dollars bankrolling the big lies, the Romneyite 1%ers plan to overwhelm the truth, and with the "Idiot America" created by Fox News and Rush Blimpbag, it will be accepted soon enough. One can recall that the notion that Iraq was involved in 9/11 was believed by 70% of our inattentive public, when there was not an iota of fact for its foundation. Most of those people got their slants and spins and outright lies from Fox News and its male prostitutes delivering their "opinions."
Can reality have any influence on this election?
"Aw, they're all crooks, anyway, so let's watch Dancing with the Stars and forget all this BS."
Is this the educated and enlightened populace that our Founders saw as a requisite to ensure the survival of democracy?
August 30, 2012 3:19pm
My husband and I have been saying this exact thing for some time now!
August 30, 2012 11:21am
Of course the Founding Fathers didn't believe in a democracy, hence we have a republic with a President elected by an electoral college and (originally) a Senate selected by state legislatures. Only white male citizens (in some cases only property owners) could vote. So now the Repugnicans want to go back to the original intent. I think I am beginning to see why.
August 30, 2012 2:02pm
Perhaps I should have said, "survival of a free government" instead of survival of a democracy. Yes, we have a republic, that is the structure of it, since obviously we're not a nation where everything is voted on by its citizens, but this government is supposed to be free, and controlled by popular vote, so I would still consider it democratic in character.
James Madison once wrote, "a popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a tragedy or a Farce, or perhaps both."
You have only to read some of the statements of Jefferson and Madison to conclude that they believed in a "popular government," obviously meaning a product of democratic exercise, and not something that is the rage in the media. And they believed that the population had to have a certain level of education and enlightenment to ensure the survival of this popular government. I believe this was the basis for Jefferson's push for popular education.
Yes, only white male citizens first had the right to vote in America, just as only citizens of the polis, exempting women and slaves, was the form democracy first took in its birthplace of ancient Greece. But saying that suffrage was limited to white males in the early days of our republic doesn't mean it was not a revolutionary idea, and was a rejection of Divine-Right monarchs and such.
Nonetheless, America has changed considerably from the time of the Revolution, but America always claimed to be a free and democratic government of the people, and by the people, and this is what America has tried to sell to other nations in the world. So I won't quibble with you about whether we are a republic or a democracy, only to state that it was clear, from the wishes of our Founding Fathers, that this would be a government ultimately controlled by the people.
The unfortunate thing is that if people don't have the right knowledge, or information, clearly the free and popular government could degenerate into something quite ugly. And we are facing such a prospect in the near future.
I thought it was a tragedy that Bush was elected to his first term, but that he was re-elected is impossible to understand unless we recognize the power of the Big Lie repeated endlessly in a virtually unregulated media.
August 30, 2012 11:20am
Ron, I view trash tv/internet (all those celebrity and reality shows) as the modern day equivalent of Roman gladatorial contests. I'm sure our founders did not envision the lack of respect for science and one's civil duty in their vision of America (after all, they existed in the age of Enlightenment).
August 31, 2012 2:46pm
A late comment.
I like to watch movies on my TV, along with some good documentaries; also, I play Wii games. I also watch lectures from The Teaching Company. But watch most of the network programming? No way. I'm constantly offended by the vulgar screaming and yelling of people in the studio audience. And there are shows that have canned laughter, which really rubs me the wrong way.
TV has such tremendous potential for enlightening and informing, even educating the public. And I have no great problem with entertainment shows like NCIS, although I realize there's a great deal of fantasy in it, despite all the graphic images on the autopsy tables.
But all of the so-called "reality shows?" They're just some stunted kind of emotional fare using inexpensive and no-name actors, and since it's all scripted, what do they have to do with reality? And Bachelor and Bachelorette and what-have-you? What sane person would court total strangers in the search for a mate with cameras recording the whole silly performance?
Dancing With the Stars? I don't mind stylized strutting by dancers in a stage show, but as TV entertainment? It all looks so phony and pretentious, like the prancing of courting prairie grouse or whooping cranes.
I too thought of the Bread and Circus sops of the Roman emperors who wanted to mollify the plebes and keep them distracted from what they were doing. Since TV was deregulated the fare seems to be even more degenerate, and lies are not held to account; in fact, they're the backbone of political advertising these days. Reminds me of all those phony pharmaceutical ads, supposedly showing a "slice of life" of real people, instead of the scripted acts of paid performers.
About the only glimpse of reality we get is on some of the news programming that shows smashed-up cars or the latest massacres of gun freaks. Sad, so sad, such a waste of time and money to deliver trash to our living rooms and dens.
August 31, 2012 3:39am
Totally agree, I've held that opinion for years that trash TV is the modern equivalent of the Bread and Circuses that kept the Roman Mob from thinking too much of the shenanigans their Rulers were upto. Re the Article above and to paraphrase HL Menken " no-one ever went broke underestimating the dishonesty of the GOP "