I grew up in a tourist area, where every year new tourist traps would spring up to capture a few bucks from the out-of-towners. The most gullible visitors stopped at the gravity spots that promised all sorts of odd phenomena: balls rolling uphill, water slurping from below to above, people changing height right before your eyes.
But I must report here, with some surprise, that I found during a recent vacation out West that the era of tacky traps for the traveler seems to have passed its crest. The modern travel industry, its successful entrepreneurs tell us, knows that today’s tourists want authenticity. That’s why, last month, I was in a line of cars to visit one of New Mexico’s indigenous pueblos, with adobe buildings hundreds of years old.
But let’s not assume that this means we’re less gullible than the tourists of my youth. If Americans weren’t eager to embrace myths and falsehoods, our society wouldn’t be so divided along political lines, because it’s the believable lies touted by politicians that fuel our divisions. It seems, in fact, that we delight in being deceived.
Yes, of course, we’re talking first about Donald Trump -- because while duplicity is a bipartisan sport, a fair analysis would have to conclude that at Trump’s urging, today’s Republican party has embraced falsehoods and deceptions at a level unseen in American history. Distortion has become, in fact, the party’s prime tool for both governing and campaigning.
The U.S. House is moving toward votes on bills to dismantle federal law enforcement and the tax collection system, on the wholly false premise that the FBI and the IRS have targeted conservatives. Meanwhile, the party’s leaders, like New York’s conspicuously unprincipled Elise Stefanik, carelessly tout frivolous claims that the president has taken bribes. Even Donald Trump’s Justice Department didn’t buy that one.
What’s troubling is that falsehoods tend to stick. A March CNN poll found that 63 percent of Republicans (and those who lean Republican) believe that Joe Biden didn’t legitimately win the presidency, despite the absence of any evidence supporting Trump’s Big Lie.
The lies are falling on receptive ears. Communication researchers at The Ohio State University published an important study two years ago concluding that conservatives distinguish fact from falsehood at levels below those of liberals — in other words, that the right is more susceptible to lies than the left.
And the researchers found that “the most widely shared falsehoods tend to promote conservative positions, while corresponding truths typically favor liberals.” That’s what the Ohio State research said.
A solution, the professors suggested, might lie in what they described as “reducing the flow of conservative-favoring misinformation.” That is, conservative leaders and right-leaning news media could change the misguided tendencies of those on the right by more responsibly promoting the truth.
Folks, how likely do you think that is?
But we can’t blame the right-wing media and the truth-averse politicians for all of this. The human brain, scientists say, is ill-equipped to combat lies. And once a falsehood is stored in the brain, the cognitive psychologists tell us, it exists there even if a correction is stored, too. Knocking out an untruth, once believed, is nearly impossible.
So since debunking a lie is so hard, what we really need is a sort of “prebunking” — namely, stopping lies before they’re spread. And that is why it’s essential to rebuild the decaying system of news media across the country. Since 2004, an average of two U.S. newspapers have shut down each week, year after year. There are simply too few reporters now performing the watchdog function that keeps lies from happening, both on the national and the local level.
So to stop lies before they spread, here’s a three-point to-do list: First, back honest candidates who can beat the charlatans. Second, support news organizations, for-profit and non-profit alike, that hold public officials accountable. Third, turn away from social media players that don’t energetically fight misinformation.
Back to those tourist traps: If we’re not so susceptible these days to delusion in our sightseeing, why are we tolerant of the proliferation of falsehood as an instrument of governing? We’ve got to stop it. The stakes are a lot higher than the few bucks you might have wasted at a tourist trap.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.