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America still bestows lots of honors and wields heaps of shame, but they’re too often disconnected from the moral basis of society. If we’re serious about reestablishing the moral foundation of our life together, we must change how and whom we honor or shame, and reconnect these practices to the good we hold in common. And what we do in our own society should be a guide for what we do in the world.
CHAPTER 9
Resurrecting Truth
REVIVING THE COMMON GOOD also depends on each of us taking responsibility for finding, sharing, and insisting upon public truth. By public truth I mean facts about what is happening around us that could affect our well-being, as well as clear logic about the significance of those facts and reasoned analysis about their practical consequences.
Particular people have special responsibilities in this regard. We rely on scientists, researchers, professors, analysts, and journalists—in laboratories, universities, think tanks, government agencies, and in the media—to discover and report the truth. We depend on leaders of business, government, and nonprofits to relay the truth. We need fact-checkers, truth-tellers, whistle-blowers, and investigative reporters to help us uncover the truth when we’ve been lied to.
But in recent years, the tendency to do whatever it takes to gain wealth or power has undermined truth, and called into question all these roles and responsibilities. Even before Donald Trump became president, comedian Stephen Colbert joked that the statements of politicians only approximated the truth—“truthiness,” as he called it. The mainstream media, for their part, have occasionally slanted the news out of fear of offending major advertisers or powerful interests in government. New York Times reporter Judith Miller notoriously colluded with the George W. Bush administration in propagating its blatant lie about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, journalists have been under mounting pressure to deliver stories that attract the largest number of viewers or readers rather than inform readers and viewers of important truths. Corporate public relations professionals, who now vastly outnumber professional journalists, do whatever it takes to get favorable stories for their companies and avoid unfavorable ones. Because of ever-intensifying competition for funding, universities and nonprofit research institutions sometimes shape their research agendas to satisfy funders; some even suppress analyses that funders dislike.
All of this paved the way for Trump—his ubiquitous lies, his ongoing attacks on journalists, and his assault on scientists and researchers. They also served as a prelude to “fake news,” some of it coming from foreign sources intent on undermining trust in our democracy.
We must not normalize public lying. The common good requires vigilance against it, and the summoning of public shame when we find it. It is a central obligation of politicians as well as journalists, researchers, scientists, and academicians to inform the public of the truth, and to identify lies without fear of retribution. It is the civic responsibility of all of us to check the facts we read or hear, to find and depend upon reliable sources, to share the truth with others, and hold accountable those who lie to us or suppress the truth.
We must also ensure that every American has sufficient education to differentiate truth from falsehood, and to think critically about what they read and see. As I’ll explain shortly, public education is not just a private investment; it’s a public good. Yet that good is eroding. In 2016, one out of every four Americans believed the sun rotates around the earth; a third did not believe in evolution; a third did not accept the reality of global warming, and even among those who did, many did not believe humans are at least partly responsible. Without a shared truth, democratic deliberation is impossible.
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The only way we can understand the true dimensions of the problems we face together is with accurate facts about them from sources the public trusts, along with logical assessment of those facts. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts. He might have added that everyone is entitled to their own interpretations but not their own logic. When we accept lies as facts, or illogic as logic, we lose the shared reality necessary to tackle our common problems. We become powerless.
The challenge of reviving trust in the sources of truth is especially difficult in an era of raging inequality, when big money can suppress truth and buy off criticism. Our democracy is directly imperiled when the rich buy off politicians but no less endangered when the rich buy off the institutions our democracy depends on to research, investigate, expose, and mobilize action against what is occurring. David Koch’s $23 million of donations to public television earned him positions on the boards of two prominent public broadcasting stations. These positions also helped ensure that a documentary critical of Koch and his brother Charles, called Citizen Koch, did not air on public television. The documentary, about the secretive political spending by the Koch brothers as well as other wealthy individuals, was to be broadcast on PBS stations nationwide. Its funding was abruptly cut off when, it appears, Koch was offended by it.
Or consider Google’s financial power to marshal the facts it wants the public to know, and suppress those it doesn’t. Some background: Google’s search engine runs two-thirds of all searches in the United States and 90 percent in Europe. Such a “platform monopoly” can squelch innovation if, for example, Google favored in searches its own services, such as Google Maps and Google Shopping—which is one reason why the European Commission hit Google with a record €2.42 billion fine in June 2017. Why hasn’t Google run into similar problems with antitrust authorities in the United States? It almost did in 2012 when the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition recommended that the commission sue Google for conduct that “has resulted—and will result—in real harm to…innovation.” The commissioners decided not to pursue the case, and gave no explanation for their decision. As a former official of the commission, I can tell you it’s highly unusual for the commissioners to decide against a staff recommendation without comment. Their decision may have had to do with Google’s political clout. Google is among the largest corporate lobbyists in the United States and a major campaign donor to Democrats, who then controlled the White House and the Senate.
Google also has enough financial power to stifle criticism coming from independent researchers. In September 2017, The New York Times reported that the New America Foundation, an influential center-left think tank, fired researcher Barry Lynn, a sharp critic of platform monopolies like Google’s. Lynn had posted a congratulatory note to European officials on their Google decision, and called for American antitrust officials to follow suit. Since its founding in 1999, the New America Foundation had received more than $21 million from Google (and its parent company, Alphabet) and from the family foundation of Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet who previously served as chairman of New America’s board. According to the Times, Schmidt didn’t like Lynn’s comments and communicated his displeasure to the president of the New America Foundation. She then accused Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole,” and fired him and his staff. What really imperils the New America Foundation is firings such as this one, which distort its mission and undermine its credibility.
Google also pays off academics to help sway public opinion and policymakers in its favor. In late 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google has quietly financed hundreds of professors at universities such as Harvard and Berkeley to write research papers that help Google defend itself against regulatory challenges to its market dominance, paying $5,000 to $400,000 on a wish list of topics. Google has used the resulting research in courtrooms, regulatory hearings, and congressional hearings. Some professors have allowed Google to see the papers before they’re published, enabling Google to offer “suggestions,” according to emails obtained by the Journal. The professors’ research papers do not disclose that Goo
gle sought them out, and don’t necessarily reveal Google’s backing.
Trump’s shoot-the-messenger war on truth-telling institutions has been an extension of all this. When opinion polls have shown Trump with low approval ratings, he has attacked the polling industry, asserting that “any negative polls are fake news.” When government researchers and scientists have come up with facts that contradict positions Trump has taken, he has criticized the researchers and scientists. When, as a candidate, Trump didn’t like the positive employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing the economy improving under the Obama administration, he called the official unemployment rate “a phony number.” When the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that large numbers of Americans would lose their health insurance coverage as a result of the plan the Republicans were then promoting to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Trump’s press secretary warned that the Congressional Budget Office could not be trusted to come up with accurate numbers. When Trump disagreed with a judicial finding that his original travel ban was intended to prevent Muslims from entering the United States, he called the judge who made the finding a “so-called judge” and attacked the appellate judges who upheld it as “so political” they weren’t “able to read a statement and do what’s right.”
Trump and his administration have drummed up evidence to support positions they want to take, suppressed government data that doesn’t back up their positions, and removed fact-finders who won’t cooperate. When Trump couldn’t find evidence to support his claim that “three to five million” fraudulent votes were cast for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, he created a commission to find such evidence. When the academic members of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Board of Scientific Counselors, the outside advisory committee that reviews the work of scientists within the agency, found that climate change was a reality, the EPA did not renew their membership. An EPA spokesman said they would be replaced by industry “experts” who better “understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community.” In September 2017, the Treasury Department removed from its website a 2012 economic analysis showing that when corporations are taxed, only a small portion of the tax’s final cost is paid by workers while most falls on shareholders. The analysis contradicted Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s argument that a corporate tax cut would mostly benefit workers. A spokeswoman from the department explained “the paper was a dated staff analysis from the previous administration. It does not represent our current thinking and analysis.” Several weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, as Trump tweeted that the federal government was doing “a GREAT job” restoring the island, the Federal Emergency Management Agency removed data from its website showing that half of Puerto Ricans still did not have access to drinking water and only 5 percent had electricity.
We cannot be effective citizens in a democracy if truths unfavorable to those with power are suppressed, while lies favorable to them are offered as truth. If a cabinet secretary finds fault with an analysis done by a prior administration, he or she has a responsibility to explain to the public what those faults are. If an agency removes data that had been available to the public, the agency must explain why. Political leaders who disparage legitimate truth-telling institutions or hide the truth from the public are committing acts of intellectual treason. They are undermining our democracy. Perpetrators must be revealed and shamed.
The same standard of truth-telling must apply to the private and nonprofit sectors, and to universities. Think tanks that suppress research their funders don’t like should no longer be entitled to a tax exemption, and their subsequent research reports should give notice that they selectively report the truth. Academics who accept money from corporations or other groups with financial stakes in the outcomes of their research must disclose the sources of their funding in all their resulting papers and in all subsequent testimony. Universities must not accept any funding that restricts the range of research they do.
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Guarding the freedom and independence of the press is also essential to maintaining truth as a common good. As Thomas Jefferson wrote from Paris to Edward Carrington, whom Jefferson sent as a delegate to the Continental Congress from 1786 to 1788, the best way to ensure a responsive government is to give citizens “full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people….Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.”
Yet 230 years later, the press’s freedom and independence are under siege, and a growing segment of the public no longer trusts the major media. Distrust was on the rise even before Trump. On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, only 18 percent of Americans said they trusted national news media, according to the Pew Research Center. In a Gallup poll at about the same time, nearly two-thirds of Americans believed the mainstream press was filled with “fake news.” Contrast this with American opinion almost five decades before. In 1972, in the wake of investigative reporting that revealed truths about Vietnam and Nixon’s Watergate scandal, 72 percent of Americans expressed trust and confidence in the press.
The precipitous decline can be attributed partly to the media’s increasing willingness to do whatever it takes to maximize profits. Most large media corporations are moved by shareholder returns, not the common good. In order to generate high profits and share prices, they have to attract consumers rather than serve citizens. This has transformed journalists from investigators and analysts offering serious news to “content providers” competing for attention. Broadcast media are obsessed by ratings. A Harvard study found that in the 2008 presidential election the major TV networks devoted a total of 220 minutes to reporting candidates’ positions on issues of public policy; four years later, the networks allocated 114 minutes to policy; in 2016, they devoted 32 minutes. Hillary Clinton’s policy ideas and proposals received almost no attention while her emails commanded 100 minutes of airtime. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s antics ruled the airwaves. His eagerness to vilify, disparage, denounce, and defame others—not just Clinton but also President Obama, Mexican Americans, Muslims, new immigrants, other nations (especially China), Democrats, other Republicans, and the press—turned him into a magnet for readers and viewers, and not just on Fox News. Regardless of whether they were appalled or thrilled by his diatribes, they were entertained.
Schooled in reality television and New York tabloids, Trump has known how to drive ratings. Notwithstanding his attacks on the media, top media executives have been delighted. As the 2016 presidential race heated up, Leslie Moonves, CEO of CBS, said the Trump phenomenon “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” adding, “Who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? The money’s rolling in and this is fun….I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” No wonder Trump received more coverage than any presidential candidate in American history. As president, he has continued to dominate the news, for much the same reasons.
Moonves knew his admission was “a terrible thing to say” because he was aware that the common good required a different response, and probably less coverage of Trump. The Communications Act of 1934, which continues to be the charter for broadcast television, recognizes its responsibility to the common good—requiring that licensees serve “the public interest, convenience and necessity.” I wouldn’t want government to intrude on CBS News’s editorial judgment about how much to cover Trump or any other candidate, but the act signals that CBS and the other major networks have a responsibility to the public that transcends their ratings. At the least, network news divisions should be independent
of top executives who represent the interests of shareholders. This was the case before the 1980s—before the corporate transformation I outlined—when the news divisions of America’s three major broadcast networks made decisions based not on how much profit they generated but on what an informed public needed to know. Former CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb remembers CBS’s owner and chairman William Paley telling news reporters in the 1960s, “I have Jack Benny to make money.” Now, however, the owners and major investors in broadcast television demand that their news divisions make money.
This evolution paved the way not only for Trump’s dominance of the news cycle after becoming president, but also his ongoing assaults on journalists—“the most dishonest human beings on earth,” as he has called them, “the lowest forms of life,” “scum,” “sick,” purveyors of “fake news,” and the “enemy of the people,” even suggesting that their goal was to remove him from office (they “have their own agenda, and it’s not your agenda, and it’s not the country’s agenda”). The harangues have scored points with Trump’s base and served to discredit anything the press discovers that could damage him, but at the expense of a weakened democracy. If a large enough portion of the public comes to trust Trump’s words more than they do the media’s, Trump can get away with saying—and doing—whatever he wants. When that happens, democracy ends.
The debasement of the press has sometimes led to violence. On the eve of his election to the House of Representatives, Montana Republican candidate Greg Gianforte beat up Ben Jacobs, a reporter for the Guardian newspaper. The violence was prompted by Jacobs asking Gianforte for his reaction to the Congressional Budget Office’s report showing that the House Republican substitute for the Affordable Care Act would result in 23 million Americans losing their health insurance. At that point, in the words of a Fox News team member who witnessed the attack: “Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him….Gianforte then began punching the reporter. As Gianforte moved on top of Jacobs, he began yelling something to the effect of, ‘I’m sick and tired of this!’ Jacobs scrambled to his knees and said something about his glasses being broken….To be clear, at no point did any of us who witnessed this assault see Jacobs show any form of physical aggression toward Gianforte, who left the area after giving statements to local sheriff’s deputies.”
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