Are there more lies in politics today than there used to be? Rick Perlstein addresses this question in an essay in Mother Jones, though he doesn't definitively say yes. That's probably because Rick is a smart guy, and he knows that it would be a spectacularly difficult question to answer definitively. Nevertheless, the landscape of truth is certainly much different:
The protective bubble of the "civility" mandate also seems to extend to the propagandists whose absurdly doctored stories and videos continue to fool the mainstream media. From blogger Pamela Geller, originator of the "Ground Zero mosque" falsehood, to Andrew Breitbart's video attack on Shirley Sherrod—who lost her job after her anti-discrimination speech was deceptively edited to make her sound like a racist—to James O'Keefe's fraudulent sting against National Public Radio, right-wing ideologues "lie without consequence," as a desperate Vincent Foster put it in his suicide note nearly two decades ago. But they only succeed because they are amplified by "balanced" outlets that frame each smear as just another he-said-she-said "controversy."
And here, in the end, is the difference between the untruths told by William Randolph Hearst and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the ones inundating us now: Today, it's not just the most powerful men who can lie and get away with it. It's just about anyone—a congressional back-bencher, an ideology-driven hack, a guy with a video camera—who can inject deception into the news cycle and the political discourse on a grand scale.
True. In a prior era, Pamella Geller would have been holding forth in a diner to half a dozen friends, whereas today she has an audience whose size I shudder to contemplate. But it's also true that there are a lot of people who make it their business to run about after both politicians and media figures, shouting "Liar!", and they have audiences, too. Some of that happens right here on this blog, as a matter of fact. That undoubtedly makes it seem like politicians are lying more, since there are so many people calling out their lies. But does that mean today's senator is less honest than the one who held her seat a century ago? There's no evidence to suggest the answer is yes.
