422 | 27, pp. 421-428 | doxa.comunicación

July-December of 2018

Beliefs, post-truth and politics

ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978

1. Introduction

On November 9, 2016, most of the world was stunned by the news of Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential elections in the United States. The chronicles and editorials of the mainstream media highlighted the turnaround that had taken place in opinion polls, which for months had predicted the victory of Democratic Party candidate Hilary Clinton. The day before the election, on November 8, the difference in the polls exceeded three points in favor of Clinton (46.8 to 43.6) (Real Clear Politics, 2016).

A few months earlier, on June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom had shaken international public opinion with the decision to leave the EU. Against all odds, supporters of Brexit won the victory with 51.9% of the votes cast in a referendum. However, up until the last day, the polls had forecast a victory for the remainers, with 48% compared to 46% of the vote (Financial Times, 2016).

All of the international publications have dealt extensively with both electoral upheavals.

In a brief review of leading US newspapers, we can see that beyond the historical consequences, Brexit was a wake-up call to analysts of that country, due to the fact that Donald Trump had been nominated by the Republican Party as its candidate. The possibility that Trump could win the presidential election elicited numerous analyses that correlated both events, and from the beginning this correlation was established in relation to the appearance of fake news into the public debate and the post-truth context that had flooded the Brexit campaign, which was already influencing the presidential campaign to be held in November 2016.

In August of 2016, The New York Times openly denounced the inaccurate, incomplete, and blatantly false information disseminated during the Brexit campaign in its piece entitled, “The age of post-truth politics”, by Williams Davies. The pub-lication also warned of the decline in the authority of facts, and made a call to other newspapers not to forget their duty to resist populist demagogy (Davies, 2016).

Along the same lines, the Economist offered its opinion in a September 2016 editorial that warned of the risk of fake news and the creation of a state of political post-truth that could lead to other events similar to Brexit.

In the “Art of the lie”, the Economist warned of the risk of these types of political campaigns based on feelings rather than facts, and that such crusades, as in the case of Brexit, force opponents to fight on unfamiliar battlegrounds not of their choosing (The Economist, 2016).

In September of 2016, the Director of The New Yorker, David Remnick, opened a series of in-depth reports entitled, “Trump and the Truth”. Remnick announced the launch of fact-checking departments, not only at The New Yorker, but also at other leading newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washignton Post, and a site specializing in data verification known as Politifact, whose reporters took on the task of verifying the accuracy of prominent news regarding the electoral campaign in order to guide and assist public opinion on some of the central issues, such as immigration, crime, unemployment and conspiracy theories (The New Yorker, 2016).

In December of 2016, once the victory of Donald Trump had become a fact, the head of the Washington Post’s editorial page, Ruth Marcus, titled her commentary, “Wellcome to the post-truth presidency” (Washington Post, 2016). As in previ-