Tag: era

In the last two week, there has been an intensification of the ongoing spat between the media and U.S. President Donald Trump. It took on a different dimension when Trump break with tradition by opting out of the White House correspondents’ dinner and by calling the media the “enemy of the people.”

There are several perils I can point out with this style of governance and communication. Like I mentioned in previous parts, I’m concerned that leaders with dictatorial tendencies – especially in Africa and the third world – would latch onto this style and limit the fundamental rights of free speech. In the first instance, deliberate misinformation is notoriously hard to correct once it is released, and social media, in particular, has a reputation for spreading factually inaccurate statements and conspiracy theories. A classic example back home is the controversy surrounding President Muhammadu Buhari’s health.

One study I came across examined five years of Facebook posts about conspiracy theories. The authors found that people tend to latch onto stories that fit their preexisting narratives about the world and share those stories with their social circle. The result is a “proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumours, mistrust, and paranoia.” They found that although corrections to errors eventually emerged, they didn’t have the same reach as the original misinformation.

Second, because Trump’s communication style relies heavily on anger, people who are predisposed to his message may become even less critical of potential misinformation. Research suggests that when people are angry, they evaluate misinformation in a partisan way, typically accepting the misleading claims that favour their narrative. Most Nigerians can relate to the pre and post 2015 elections events in the country; something that is still very much around and shaping several narratives.

Thirdly, a communications strategy based on Trump style inherently makes enemies of anyone who would seek to reinstate the truth and expose statements as misinformation. Journalists, scientists, experts and even government officials who disagree with this style are subject to charges of ineptitude, partisanship or conspiracy.

Let’s now switch focus to how Trump was able to “bulldoze” his way into the White House against “all odds” and the communication lessons we can learn from it. This is against the backdrop of his speaking mistruths with little consideration for their factual accuracy.

It doesn’t matter whether you love him or hate him; it’s hard to deny the man is a master of communication. His style simply resonates with many people. Although Trump’s candidacy will undoubtedly change how future politicians approach communication, the implications of his success are much broader.

The first lesson is “understanding the time.” It is glaring now that we live in a post-modern and post-trust era where citizens looks at every institution – government to business – with incredible scepticism. Voters are anxious, angry and open to alternatives – whatever alternatives. Trump understood this and worked feverishly to fill this void. Gaffes aside, Trump used his strategies to shift his image from an insensitive capitalist billionaire to influential ‘man of the people.’

He has a “clear narrative,” a master story that he sticks to. He preys on the people’s fears of terrorists and immigrants and made that a consistent narrative. Not even former President Obama’s reminder that all Americans – except Native Americans – were once immigrants could deter those that believe in him. Everywhere he went, this message was consistent; “no shaking,” to use a popular Nigerian lingo.

He also understands and taps into simple, emotional truths. As a result of globalization and competition, some jobs left the U.S seeking cheaper sources of production and profit – in tune with classic capitalism. This shift left a lot of workers jobless – the so called “white working class.” In reality, this cuts across all races, but Trump cashed in on this to gain the support of disgruntled whites.

Understanding the people’s emotions meant he also speaks their language. He reframes every debate question into language he prefers. He is deliberately; decidedly different from his peers in both his style and approach. He defined this as not being “politically correct.” He hit hard on the “establishment” which was why all his fellow contestants fell on the wayside.

Fundamentally, Trump consistently relates all of his ideas back to a master slogan: “Make America great again.” While he was doing this, a more experienced candidate like Jeb Bush did not even clarify to the public just what he stood for – beyond being anti-Trump. None of the contenders questioned what being great again portends. On the other hand, Trump ensured his campaign carries momentum by practicing consistency and discipline in his message.

The struggle for power – in some instances – is sometimes fought using unconventional means. This means that elections are not fought using reason; they’re fought using emotion. Trump recognises this, and while his rivals focused on debating various issues, Trump was busy leading an emotional movement. Lindsay Graham had the best technical understanding of any of the candidates, but he dropped out of the GOP race because he couldn’t convey his message in a captivating way.

Often, the way to persuade people is to tap into what matters to them emotionally. Trump offers that by persistently raising issues that strike emotional chords with voters. A close parallel in Nigeria is Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State to whom “stomach infrastructure” was attached. Fayose knows his people and they know him. He effectively branded opponents as “arrogant” and “far from the people.” He has continued with his unique system of governance to date.

Trump was probably the wealthiest of all the candidates, but he came across to many as “deeply human” by using the peoples’ vernacular. He cuts through the complexity of political conversations and talks as he would every day. For example, Rand Paul had more populist ideas, but his language is often “academic” and “sophisticated” to the people. Paul comes across as though he was speaking only to an intellectual elite; Trump aims to speak to everyone.

In 2013, it was widely believed that Mitt Romney’s 47 percent comment derailed his campaign. Although he had many of the same vulnerabilities that Trump had in the just concluded election, but Trump dealt with his problems more effectively. If voters accuse him of being racist, he says he’s for security. When he’s accused of being sexist, he reframes the argument – and says he’s not sexist, but simply against imposed “political correctness.” Whatever the issue, Trump often reframes the question of his character and puts things into more favourable narrative.

Though his peers fight to be better than one another, Trump focuses his time on a simpler task: “being different.” Most voters can predict what will come out of the mouths of most politicians, but Trump keeps people interested with the possibility that he’ll say something unexpected. Every other GOP candidate sounds similar, but there was only one Trump.

Trump really did his homework by understanding citizenship communication. He fully and expertly exploited the discontent in the society just like Daniel Kanu did with the Biafra issue in Nigeria. If we dig deep, the hundreds of thousands of youth falling over the rallying cry of Biafra have other grievances at the back of their minds, Biafra happens to provide the springboard for them to vent their frustrations.

The lesson: whenever there’s discontent in the society you need a higher kind of communication to counter populists who would exploit it. Two things are critical in analyzing Trump. First, there is definitely a pattern to his patois. And second, whether deliberate or not – and there’s reason to think it may be more deliberate than it seems – the man’s style of speaking developed into a remarkably effective delivery mechanism for his message. No matter how much the media mocked it; “Trumpese” – as we’ve seen – helped Trump rather than hurt him.

Interestingly, Trump didn’t employ speechwriters. He rarely relies on Teleprompters. He barely even uses notes. He basically “improvises his speeches.” At a point in his campaign, his twitter account was “taken away” from him to prevent his angry tirade on twitter which can come at any time of the day. This is the uniqueness of the post truth era.

“It is crazy what we are watching every day, it is absolutely crazy. He keeps repeating ridiculous throwaway lines that are not true at all and sort of avoiding this issue of Russia as if we are some kind of fools for asking the question.”

Shepard Smith, Fox News anchor made this comment after a blustery press conference by President Donald Trump last Thursday. At the conference, Trump slammed the media as peddlers of “fake news” – or, when it comes to CNN, “very fake news.” For the benefit of those who don’t know, Fox News is the unofficial mouthpiece of the Republican Party, so this comment by one of their news anchors is a big deal.

Not done, Smith added, “Really? Your opposition was hacked, and the Russians were responsible for it, and your people were on the phone on the same day it was happening, and we are fools for asking those questions? No sir, we are not fools for asking those questions, and we demand to know the answer to this question. You owe this to the American people.”

Smith was referring to reports in the Washington Post and New York Times that Russian intelligence meddled in the last elections and that Trumps campaign team was in contact with them before and after the election. One of the fallouts was the resignation of the National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn who resigned after it was revealed that he discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. and then lied to the Vice President.  It is now getting clearer that the intelligence community is leaking sensitive information to the media to let the American people know what is happening.

These developments indicate we are indeed living in very interesting times. I’m concerned for one reason: whatever happens in America has a strange way of touching other nations. For us in Nigeria this should be worrying because we have a set of politicians who do not care if the entire country burns down, politicians we all know do not play by the rules. I’m talking about politicians who have enough resources to start and finance a war. This is why we have to pay careful attention to what is happening in the U.S. and Europe.

What just happened in the U.S. has emboldened extreme right wing groups in Europe. We have to wait to see how the elections in Germany and France go to fully comprehend the Trump bug. Already in Nigeria, we have government officials who speak like Trump and have the capacity of turning truth on its head when it suits them. So what Trump is doing may end up being a good case study for our politicians: in essence, say whatever you want to say and damn the consequences thereafter.

While trying to make meaning of what is happening in our post truth world, I came across an interesting article written by Lauren Griffin of the College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida. “Don’t Call Trump a Liar – He Doesn’t Even Care About the Truth” is as incisive as they come. “A liar,” she wrote, “cares about concealing reality; a bullshi**er, like the president, is totally indifferent to how things really are.

“If you’ve been paying attention to the news over the past week or so, you know that last weekend America was introduced to the concept of “alternative facts.” After Trump administration Press Secretary Sean Spicer rebuked the media for accurately reporting the relatively small crowds at President Donald Trump’s inauguration, senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Spicer wasn’t lying; he was simply using “alternative facts.”

With that interview a new lexicon “alternative facts” was included in political lexicon. Analysts are still working through the process of figuring out what to call these mischaracterisations of reality. To me, this is simply looking people straight in the face and saying what you “think” is right to the detriment of whether they are factual or not. This – I can deduce – cannot be divorced from Trump’s obsession with TV and other ratings.

Jake Tapper of CNN was amazed that for close to 80 minutes nothing was discussed about the American people who voted Trump into power. He simply told Trump to grow up “stop whining” and face governance.

The media is divided on whether “alternative facts” is an outright lie or another way of putting an issue across. Griffin pointed out that some outlets have resisted labeling Trump’s misstatements as lies. The Wall Street Journal’s editor-in-chief Gerard Baker, for instance, insisted that the Wall Street Journal wouldn’t label Trump’s false statements “lies.”

Baker argued that lying requires a “deliberate intention to mislead,” which couldn’t be proven in the case of Trump. Baker’s critics pushed back, raising valid and important points about the duty of the press to report what is true. As important as discussions about the role of the press as fact-checkers are, Griffin stated “Baker’s critics are missing the point. Baker is right. Trump isn’t lying. He’s bullshi**ing. And that’s an important distinction to make.”

And what does that mean? Bullshi**ers, as philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote in his 1986 essay “On Bullsh*t,” don’t care whether what they are saying is factually correct or not. Instead, bullsh*t is characterized by a “lack of connection to a concern with truth (and) indifference to how things really are. Frankfurt explains that a bullshi**er “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

In addition to being unconcerned about the truth (which liars do care about, since they are trying to conceal it), Frankfurt suggests that bullshi**ers don’t really care whether their audience believes what they are saying. Indeed, getting the audience to believe something is false isn’t the goal of bullshi**ing. Rather, bullshi**ers say what they do in an effort to change how the audience sees them, “to convey a certain impression” of themselves.

In Trump’s case, much of his rhetoric and speech seems designed to inflate his own grand persona. Hence the tweets about improving the record sales of artists performing at his inauguration and his claims that he “alone can fix” the problems in the country.

I quite agree with Frankfurt. Each time I listen to Trump, I miss former President Obama greatly. The way Obama connects with people is simply legendary. I’ve not seen that with Trump, except maybe with people who cherish his ideology. It is therefore little wonder that Obama is rated the 12th best president ever in U.S. history by presidential historians.

I listened to an interview on Aljazeera where a former Bush adviser said if he were not an American living in America, he would’ve thought Trump was talking about another country. He was referring to Trump’s inaugural address which contained rhetoric about the “decayed” state of the country and rampant unemployment. He said this is a verifiably false statement which most Americans know.

So why does misinformation spread so quickly, especially on the social media? Why doesn’t it get corrected? When the truth is so easy to find, why do people accept falsehoods? That’s a big question in this era. A new study led by Michela Del Vicario of Italy’s Laboratory of Computational Social Science, explores the behaviour of Facebook users. It provides strong evidence that the explanation is confirmation bias: people’s tendency to seek out information that confirms their beliefs, and to ignore contrary information.

This finding highlights a wide range of issues, especially the last presidential campaign in the U.S. where the acceptance of conspiracy theories and competing positions in international relations became the norm.

Next week we shall conclude on how Trump was able to “bulldoze” his way into the White House, what impact his approach played and the communication lessons therein.