Welcome to Donald Trump's Post-Fact America
This year, we entered a brave new world of bullshit. It goes beyond the fake news we've heard so much about lately – though that's a central component of our new post-truth environment. It has a conservative bias. It poses a threat to our democracy. And our institutions, including the media, appear totally unprepared to deal with it.
American presidents have always engaged in political spin, shaded the truth and, when they could get away with it, told carefully crafted lies. But with weeks to go before his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump has already proved to be a different animal. Trump was elected following a campaign in which 70 percent of his statements were rated "mostly false," "false" or "pants on fire" by PolitiFact, and he has since demonstrated a penchant for spontaneously creating his own fake news with just a few keystrokes on his Blackberry.
This story is about more than a president's ability to muddy the waters. Trump's spent hours on Twitter excoriating reporters for stories he didn't like, which unleashes his flying monkeys on journalists, many of whom have received death or rape threats.
He's also shown that he can dictate the direction of news coverage with a single wacky tweet. The political world spent just about all of Tuesday talking about flag-burning instead of Trump's many conflicts of interest or his terrifying cabinet picks. Ideally, we'd all ignore his provocations, but in the real world, a tweet from the president is news.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/welcome-to-donald-trumps-post-fact-america-w452917?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=113016_16
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