Political items? Or items about people who don’t quite live in the real world? Is there a psychological term for them?
NY Times, Linda Qiu, 4 Mar 2023: Fact-Checking Trump’s Speech at CPAC, subtitled “The former president made inaccurate claims about the murder rate in New York, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and windmills at a conservative conference.”
Ten different claims, from Trump’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday night, are challenged. I’ll just quote one, as an example.
What Mr. Trump said
“Killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan.”
False. Murders declined in New York by about 11 percent from 488 homicides in 2021 to 433 homicides last year. It was the lowest level since 2019, according to the city’s Police Department. Murders continued to decrease this year to 30 in January (compared with 31 in January 2022) and to 26 in February (compared with 36 in February 2022).
Those numbers also pale in comparison to the height of crime in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, when Mr. Trump was a mainstay of the city and when it regularly recorded more than 1,500 murders annually. Homicides peaked in 1990 at 2,245.
My comment: you can always appeal to a conservative base by exaggerating crime, promoting tax cuts, increasing spending on the military, and dismissing fact-based liberal policy propositions. That is, lying to them.
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For example. You won’t hear about Fox News’ admission they lied about the 2020 election being stolen, not if you only listen to right-wing news sites.
NY Times, 3 Mar 2023: Conservative Media Pay Little Attention to Revelations About Fox News, subtitled “Even in today’s highly partisan media world, experts said, the lack of coverage about the private comments of Fox’s top executives and hosts stands out.”
Fox News and its sister network, Fox Business, have avoided the story. Newsmax and One America News, Fox’s rivals on the right, have steered clear, too. So have a constellation of right-wing websites and podcasts.
Over the past two weeks, legal filings containing private messages and testimony from Fox hosts and executives revealed that many of them had serious doubts that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election through widespread voter fraud, even as those claims were made repeatedly on Fox’s shows. The revelations, made public in a defamation lawsuit against Fox brought by Dominion Voting Systems, have generated headlines around the world.
But in the conservative media world? Mostly crickets.
On 26 of the most popular conservative television news networks, radio shows, podcasts and websites, only four — National Review, Townhall, The Federalist and Breitbart News — have mentioned the private messages from Fox News hosts that disparaged election fraud claims since Feb. 16, when the first batch of court filings were released publicly, according to a review by The New York Times.
The majority — 18 in all, including Fox News itself — did not cover the lawsuit at all with their own staff.
There are some interesting graphics further down the article that identify those 26 most popular conservative sites. Of those, I occasionally look at National Review (the intellectual conservative opposite of New Republic) but know better than to look at any of the others.
This is the conservative equivalent to how Russia blocks news from the outside world, so its citizen will believe the war against Ukraine is somehow justified.
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And this.
CNN, Daniel Dale, 4 Mar 2023: Fact check: Republicans at CPAC make false claims about Biden, Zelensky, the FBI and children.
Topics about which Republicans made false claims, which I will list.
- Zelensky’s remark about American ‘sons and daughters’
- Fox and the 2020 election
- Biden’s attempted deportation pause
- The media and the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago
- Two-parent households
- The literacy of high school graduates
- Biden’s speech on threats to democracy
- The Biden administration, gas stoves and electric vehicles
- Biden’s laugh
- An exchange about Justice Brett Kavanaugh
- The Trump-era economy
- Unemployment under Trump
- Fentanyl deaths
False. Not true. False. False. Again and again. False False Not True.
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In the broadest sense, we can understand how humans tell falsehoods in order to solidify their identities within their tribes. But there’s much more to it. Which I will keep exploring.
