2024 -- The Year When the Truth Stopped Mattering

At the end of any year, the popular thing for columnists to do is compile lists of winners and losers (which always seems a bit silly a few weeks after an election that answered that question). But not us, and not this year, because, in 2024, we all lost something much more important than any single election. We lost the truth… and that determined all of the winners and losers. Sadly, this loss wasn’t sudden or unexpected. Politics and the truth have never mixed all that well. It’s simply easier to lie about stuff than to give it to Americans straight.

After all, “Guys, there is no way that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, but, heck, let’s invade Iraq anyway and see what happens” would no more have been a winning message than “Listen, Joe Biden just referred to Nancy Pelosi as ‘Norman Podoodle’ and then ate the bill he was supposed to sign, but let’s still make him our nominee next year and keep non-senile candidates out of the primary.” However, in these cases, things kind of worked out the way they are supposed to whenever the American people are intentionally deceived. Ultimately, reality became too difficult to ignore, and the lie fell apart. Sure, those perpetuating the lies didn’t pay enough of a price for the damage they did, but at least the deception was revealed as such. And that is what’s different in 2024.

Donald Trump’s election has shown that lying to voters on a massive scale no longer comes with consequences. In fact, this time it was rewarded. It would be easy to exclusively blame Donald Trump for all of this, and he obviously plays a starring role in the death of the truth. When he arrived on the scene and began lying with reckless abandon every time the media handed him a bull(shit)horn, it was the beginning of the end. Throughout his campaign (and during Trump’s first term), the truth was placed on life support, i.e., his lies kept piling up by the thousands, but it remained to be seen whether the American people would hold him to account. And, in the 2020 election, it seemed as though they did. But then he came up with the Big Lie, and, from that point on, the truth was at death’s doorstep.

Finally, this year, Trump finished the job. Still, he couldn’t have done it alone, so let’s look at his accomplices. First, there is Fox News, which spent more than 25 years undermining the truth and presenting its audience with an alternate version of reality that appealed to conservatives. Just as importantly, Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda network taught others that there was good money in this line of business. Together, Fox and other emerging right-wing organizations laid the groundwork for someone like Trump. Still, that probably would not have been enough. Sure, Bill O’Reilly, who first broadcast his show on the day Fox News went on the air, attracted an audience of a handful million viewers, and right-wing talkers like Rush Limbaugh reached even more on the radio, but their impact was still limited. Nevertheless, it would probably be fair to say that they initiated the process of systematically brainwashing half of the US population. The internet took right-wing propaganda to a whole new level. All of a sudden, conservative voices were able to reach different audiences. However, that’s not all.

https://whowhatwhy.org/opinion/2024-the-year-when-the-truth-stopped-mattering/