Kellyanne Conway. (photo: Getty Images)
24 January 17
readersupportednews.org
I’ve spent my career being scrupulous about the truth, whether on crowd size or healthcare. I know an attempt to deceive the American public when I see it.
just bought my first official souvenir of the Trump era. No, it wasn’t a
pink pussycat hat. It’s a black T-shirt with white typography that says
“Alternative Facts are Lies”.
The shirt commemorates a piece of Orwellian newspeak that flew from the lips of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway
on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. She made the absurd claim that the
new White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, hadn’t lied to reporters
about the size of the inaugural crowd, he had merely presented them with
“alternative facts”. The salient part of her exchange with host Chuck
Todd is worth setting out in full:
Chuck Todd: ... answer the
question of why the president asked the White House press secretary to
come out in front of the podium for the first time and utter a
falsehood. Why did he do that? It undermines the credibility of the
entire White House press office ...
Kellyanne Conway: No it doesn’t.
Chuck Todd: ... on day one.
Kellyanne Conway: Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. What ... You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point remains ...
Chuck Todd: Wait a minute ... alternative facts? Alternative facts? Four of the five facts he uttered, the one thing he got right was Zeke Miller. Four of the five facts he uttered were just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.
By the time Meet the Press aired, I had actually grown tired of the argument over the size of the crowd
at Trump’s swearing-in. It’s the kind of trivial issue that catches
fire on social media and in the press, something Trump knows better than
anyone. In this case, anyone on the internet could see a comparison of
the Obama and Trump in photographs and catch the new president in his
lie. Nonetheless, obsessive attention to crowd size dominated several
news cycles.
The New York Times was right
to call out the White House on obvious falsehoods, but its big headline
was part of the reactive news coverage that Trump gamed throughout his
campaign. Through a provocative tweet or gross insult, he could ignite a
firestorm on social media and in the press. The timing is always
interesting because when these storms blew, it was often to obscure a
deeper and more serious menace. All the attention paid to the number of
people at the inauguration obscured the import of both the executive order on healthcare he signed on Friday and the huge women’s protests on Saturday.
The farrago Trump has created on healthcare is
consequential and shameful. Conway happily presented some “alternative
facts” about it in the same television appearance, claiming:
He signed executive orders to stop Obamacare and
all of its problems. Many people have lost their ... millions of people
have lost their insurance, their doctors, their plans. So that stops
right now.
He’s going to replace it with something much more free-market and patient-centric in nature.
It’s hard to imagine offering anything more
patient-centric than providing more good health insurance. The
Affordable Care Act has driven the number of Americans without insurance
to an all-time low. Conway’s claim that “millions of people have lost
their insurance” comes directly from specious Koch-funded ads during the
campaign. It’s a provable fact that far more people gained coverage
than had their policies cancelled. And in the latter cases, some
individual market plans were discontinued, but policyholders weren’t
denied coverage. They were often offered cheaper alternatives, because
many qualified for federal subsidies or could buy new policies with
better coverage on state and federal marketplaces.
Repealing Obamacare could deny more than 18 million
people health coverage, and Republican proposals to replace it are a
muddle of insufficiency. Some proposed bills may cover more people but
the coverage is skeletal and won’t begin to pay for many procedures. The
new secretary of health and human services, Republican Representative
Tom Price, has offered a plan
in Congress that makes good health care less affordable and less
accessible for most people. The health care savings accounts that many
Republicans embrace won’t help people who can’t save enough to cover
anything approaching catastrophic treatment.
Trump and Conway are playing Three-card Monte
with their alternative facts on health; “condemn the policy you don’t
like, propose something far worse as a replacement and claim that it is
much better”, as the New York Times described their hypocrisy.
The new president doesn’t seem to understand the
actual facts. Spicer, who so viciously attacked the press on Saturday,
had to hurriedly walk back the comments of his boss when Trump, during
an interview with the Washington Post before the inauguration, promised
“insurance for everybody”. Spicer’s amendment to his comments dragged
Trump back to Republican orthodoxy: access to insurance would be
increased and costs cut through marketplace competition, not huge new
government spending for universal coverage.
When you’ve spent your career being scrupulous about
facts, it’s hard to adjust to life in Trump’s post-truth America.
Certainly, the press has made its share of mistakes and had serious
flirtations with what Steven Colbert labeled “truthiness” during the
Bush years, when news organizations, including the Times, published
stories based on false intelligence. There were far too many fake news
stories in 2016 from sketchy sites. But I agree with Susan Glasser, the
editor of Politico, who recently wrote an important essay
for the Brookings Institution called “Covering Politics in a
‘Post-Truth’ America”. She concluded that serious political reporting
(not poll prognostications) has never been better. But there is too much
of it, and so little of it, even the fine investigations of Trump’s
business dealings or past treatment of women, seems to matter to people.
The world, however, does pay attention to the words of
the leaders of the last remaining superpower. The “American carnage”
that President Trump described doesn’t comport with the American
reality. We do not live in a country that is economically shattered and
crime-infested. Crime rates are historically low and there has been
record job growth over the last eight years. His cry of “America First”
evokes Charles Lindbergh’s
isolationist and antisemitic poison, not the inclusive and empathetic
beliefs shared by most Americans. Globalism and technology have hollowed
out some industries and parts of the country, but an interconnected
world has benefited more people than it has hurt.
Most people believe there is truth and there are lies. “Alternative facts” are lies.
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