The conference theme was The Faltering International Rules-Based Order and New Zealand - a proposition in line with the thinking of one of the hosts, Robert Patman, Professor of International Relations at Otago University.
Robert, a regular guest on the podcast The Hoon I do with my friend Bernard Hickey, asked me to contribute to a panel billed as The Age of Uncertainty: Some Reflections on Current International Trends. Here is pretty much what I said, minus Q&A:
Lying and liars: the international struggle for truth and the importance of being there
Some of you may spot that I was influenced in the title of this commentary by a 2003 satirical book by the comedian and former US senator Al Franken: Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right
Looking at a book that poked fun at the era of the George W Bush presidency and the rise of Fox News, it feels like an historical document of a kinder time. We may have gone to war in Iraq on a lie about weapons of mass destruction, but we now live in an era where truth has alternative meaning and facts are what you make them.
In the book, Franken, whose political career was destroyed by what now seems a tame #MeToo incident, wrote of the machine created to perpetuate the lies he was focusing on: the right wing in politics, society and the media. And, there was a lasting warning:
‘Turning the public arena into a wasteland of personal destruction takes an army of like-minded ideologues hell-bent on shredding the already tattered standards of decency that once permitted reasonable discourse on matters of import.’
Truth, truthiness, and alternative facts
It is no accident that Franken was brought down not just by his own behaviour but the work of Republican operative Roger Stone, a man so devoted to Donald Trump he was prepared to go to jail for him and has a huge tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back.
A couple of years after the Franken book, the TV host Stephen Colbert coined a term that poked fun at tribal politics and the lies of politicians: truthiness. It was the word of the year in 2005. In a skit, Colbert explained truthiness:
“We’re not talking about truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth – the truth we want to exist”
Jump forward a few years to the first Trump administration, and we were treated to the astounding concept of “alternative facts” – an expression coined by the then Trump counsellor Kellyanne Conway when questioned about one of the early lies of the Trump era about the size of the crowd at his inauguration.
How we miss those simple days.
I have a personal connection to the Kellyanne Conway “alternative facts”:
Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, was so alarmed by her words that he created Wiki Tribune, an attempt to create a live news website devoted to factual reporting by real, ordinary people. I was the launch editor of Wiki Tribune. I learned the hard way that most people are not journalists or do not do journalism as I then knew it: seeing a story, bearing witness, assembling a story based on facts, events, and the very basics of journalism: answering Who, What, When, Where, Why. Wiki Tribune did not succeed in what Jimmy had hoped it would do to “fix journalism”.
Being there (yes, in part a reference to the eerie and prescient Peter Sellers movie)
I don’t intend this commentary to be a defence of journalism as such: mistakes are made, commentary gets blended with reportage too much; and the pursuit of a fragile business model built on engagement, clicks, and fickle advertisers has caused a crisis.
However, as with the skilful defence of what we used to call the rules-based international order from Professor Patman and others — Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder for example – we may need to ask why powerful politicians and business and cultural leaders want to undermine journalists and journalism.
Yes, I know we as journalists often do ourselves few favours sometimes with shallow, shoddy work, biased, ill-sourced, also what I sometimes think of as non-sequitur journalism: asking questions that no one cared about or needed to know the answer to.
There is a simple question we need to ask when politicians and others seek to undermine journalists and journalism: In whose interest is it to weaken the 4th estate? I had an epiphany about that – you may think I was a moron before – at a seminar on Māori and Pasifika journalism: someone asked exactly that question: Who gains from undermining trust in journalism and journalists?
We see this daily, and it is really accepted fact that journalism writ large – the MSM – cannot be trusted. Trump practically patented the idea of “fake news”. He is really saying: listen to me, not them. I am the way, the truth and the life, or the light.
We see this in New Zealand from our politicians, whether it is David Seymour declining to appear on RNZ (the ACT newsletter is really called The Free Press), or Winston Peters being Winston, or National colluding to destroy a leading journalist.
Covid and the anti-vax movement and a ham-fisted application of the Public Interest Journalism Fund created a perfect storm for trust in government and media to collapse at the same time – a correlation found in every country where the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism measures trust in journalism.
Our politicians, often on the right but also for example, Ti Pati Māori, see the Trump effect and deploy it almost instantly. I was shocked, or not shocked at all, to see Winston Peters describing trans protesters as “mouth-breathers” with learning difficulties driven by the “woke mind virus”.
Elon Musk has been the great advocate against the woke mind virus. Our first trillionaire, which I do not hold against him or any other aspirant billionaire, exerts immense influence through his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter to create X. He stripped it of restraint and caution, declaring the singular virtue of free speech. He intervenes in UK politics to advocate and fund extreme right views, talks of race wars and genocide in South Africa, and is a fixture in the manosphere where everything is blamed on women.
We are in their world
On the topic of free speech: I have long believed that we now live in a First Amendment World where US attitudes to free speech dominate. Our defamation laws, proposed hate speech laws, are ludicrous in this new world where social media is unregulated and, in fact, only ordinary old media is regulated by law. I have at times welcomed this new world or at least urged colleagues to understand it.
To go back briefly to Jimmy Wales, he has a deep belief that the way to counter bad speech is to create more good speech. It is a wonderful idea. However, I believe – from my experience – that speech is like currency and can be debased. It is directly connected to Gresham’s Law: the idea that bad money drives out good money – that an adulterated currency – in his case based on precious metal – will take over. Funny to think about that with the enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies now.
I am not sure I have an answer to the dilemma I have raised: the debasement of facts and the fungibility of truth.
However, (there always is a however, isn’t there?) we need journalists who witness events, describe the indescribable, and give us access to things we need to see. The internet is actually brilliant for this: links give us the chance to go from the specific to the much deeper and the source material – if we are prepared to let the reader explore.
This commentary is not meant to be about me and my war stories. However, in 15 years at Reuters News Agency, I learned the importance of bearing witness and the cost. In a sense, I am bringing this chat back to the international affairs arena. In my era at Reuters, when you visited an emerging democracy in Eastern Europe, or a Middle Eastern emirate, or a new post-colonial African state, it seemed that the best, most reliable, most honest locals worked or wanted to work for Reuters. Some had backgrounds in old regimes, but they now wanted to convey the truth. I am sure something similar is said at the BBC World Service, AFP, and maybe RNZ.
Events drive our lives, to paraphrase Harold Macmillan.
You are all foreign affairs, defence, and intelligence experts. However, your access to events is often mediated by journalists – and analysed in real time by associated experts who now have easy ways to publish directly – like Philips Payson O’Brien, Mark Galeotti, or John Mearsheimer – but they are not usually on the spot.
When shit happens, it is the reporters who are there and the academics and analysts who give their impressions of the implications.
To conclude, we will miss Donald Trump. He, like Lord Byron, may be mad, bad, and dangerous. Yet he is also transparent: he is a fountain of bullshit but at the same a stream of disclosure – his motives, his madness, his grift. He does not hide who he is or what is on his mind in the moment. Who comes after him will have learned the lessons but will not be him, the uncontrollable spigot of lies and ramblings in which there is a weird clarity if we have the right guides to interpret the stream.
We will need people who bear witness, who do the gumshoe detective work, get the leaks, expose the lies and find the truth, not the truthiness of the lying liars.
Thank you (and thank you to anyone who has read this on my Substack.)
Go deeper:
- The Reuters Trust Principles that govern the work of its journalists and is linked to from every one of the thousands of stories published daily.
- Jimmy Wales on the terrific Past, Present, Future podcast with David Runciman.
- Jimmy’s book The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last.
The disclaimer that billionaire status is not held against Musk rings hollow when the paragraph proceeds to attribute his alleged harms precisely to the influence that his vast wealth has enabled. The argument implicitly condemns extreme wealth while explicitly denying that it does.