Translating Bullshit

Guh. What a bad day yesterday! What a bad night!

I'm still getting over the shame of it, trying to turn a negative experience into take-away  lessons for the future.

One of the signs I was bombing was when I was talking blithely about Donald Trump as a bullshitter. I'm using Harry Frankfurt's specific usage of the verb to bullshit, a term that's become well-known in the field of political communication. To bullshit, Frankfurt argues, is not to lie. Lying requires that you know the difference between truth and falsehood. The liar knows and intentionally chooses falsehood. The bullshitter, however, neither knows nor cares about the distinction between true and false. The bullshitter just talks, makes stuff up.

I'm hardly the first person to call Trump a bullshitter. Even his advocates will admit that he has a casual relationship with facts, that in his public rhetoric he's quick to insult, suggest innuendo, and make grandiose claims. His fans, we've been told, know to take him seriously but not literally.

And Frankfurt's notion of bullshit underlies the Calling Bullshit media literacy project I was talking about.

I expected to be talking to adults who were passingly familiar with that term and willing to go along with characterizing Trump as a bullshitter. A page or two into my talk, though, I saw this was not the case. My audience was primarily undergrads taking some gen ed course and attending this event for credit. They were disoriented that I was cursing and unsure what to think of my making casual, isn't-it-obvious references to Trump's bullshitting. I'm sure that for many of them I was the stereotypical liberal professor who just hates Trump because I'm liberal.

It went downhill from there.

This mismatch was my fault. I should have inquired more carefully about who was going to attend. I'd have created a lesson rather than given a paper otherwise.

On another level, though, the mismatch, the translation gap, speaks to a larger difficulty with fake news. We teachers and scholars want to be able to say that fake news--misinformation and disinformation alike--are problems on right and left, that everyone struggles with confirmation bias. But the fact is that, as Benkler, Faris, and Roberts argue (assuming they're right), the right-wing mediasphere has over decades (predating the internet) created a closed system of authority and trust based not on journalistic standards of truth and evidence but on identity-based standards of loyalty to the party line.

Just saying that is, as BFR note, awkward. The right-wing media absolutely thinks that about the MSM, the mainstream media. And to be sure there's bias on the center and the left. But, BFR argue, the center and left tend to cluster around established news sources like The New York Times or The Washington Post (or even the news part of The Wall Street Journal)--sources that adhere to journalistic norms of fact-checking, mutual accountability, and corrections. There's simply nothing on the left or center to compare to the persistent conspiracy narratives that drive the right, such as the deep state or the notion that global warming is a hoax. Multiply, repeatedly, thoroughly debunked narratives (the Clinton Foundation's corruption, Seth Rich's murder--heck, even birtherism) remain in strong circulation, fed oxygen by sources like Fox News and Breitbart.

There is a disinformation asymmetry between the extreme right and everyone else.

How would you possibly convince someone on the right that this is so? It's akin to persuading someone they're brainwashed or in a cult. How would I react--how have I reacted in the past--if someone were to tell me that, despite my feeling that I'm rational and ethical, I'm actually caught in the grips of an all-consuming, evil ideology: gayness, perhaps, or Methodism. Or progressivism. I'd resist. More--I'd take offense. And rightfully so!

As Dan Kahan has argued, we have good reasons, usually, for holding the deep beliefs we do. These reasons may not be based on an accurate picture of the relevant facts of the issue. But they're likely based on our sense of what the social groups we belong to value. It makes every sense for us to prefer those kind of beliefs that align us with our primary social groups. I'm not sure this is something you can convince people out of.

I can tell you--trying to do so? Well, it feels akin to the kind of hopeless despair  I felt as I was telling these students about Trump's bullshitting. I could tell that, to them, I sounded like the bullshitter.

What's to be done?