A country which gives its mass media the freedom to lie will cease to be a democracy.
There, my contribution to the creation of aphorisms. Or maybe not, I expect it's a point which was made, in one form or another. It has a sort of Lao Tsu ring to it, though he'd be talking to an emperor about extending his reign, not democracy.
It is just about the stupidest feature of our intellectual class that it has observed and participated in the catastrophic permission of our mass media to lie, to bear false witness against individuals and against entire races and religions and ethnicities and other classes of human beings, an effect heightened by the 24 hour "news" stations and universalized through the banal attempts at construction of story lines by idiot writers and producers and directors in their overtly entertainment wings. All of which is geared towards attracting eyes to the screen to maximize profit instead of to tell the truth. There is something rather blatantly obvious in what a disaster that has been with Ronald Reagan, a b-list movie actor on one end and a man who is most known to most people as the avatar of The Apprentice being talked about seriously as a contender to the most powerful office in the country. They share little more that would have brought them to the notice of voters than their face being sold to them on TV.
The fact is that a nation of people which is informed mostly by such corporate, mass media will not be able to have a vote which is informed by media which is honest and accurate. If someone watches entertainment which promotes racism, xenophobia, fear and loathing, anger and ignorance and whose alleged news reinforces those messages, either because they want to attract such people to their channels or in some calculation to game them to produce a government more profitable to their financial interests, they will not have anything like a realistic view of the world. In large numbers they will be susceptible to a TV provided demagogue like Trump, they've been trained for that from infancy by TV and other electronic media.
The fact is that this situation is the product of lawyers and judges using lines and slogans from the late 18th century, written by men who had little to no practical experience in even the proto-democratic government they were founding and no intention of founding a modern democracy in which people other than prosperous white men are not the only people who exercise self-government through the vote and holding office. That their words, applied under what is alleged to be a recreation of their intention is harmful to the interest of virtually all others than rich white men is little to wonder at. But such is the power of those words and their mystique that the obviously bad effect of those interpretations for the political and real life interests of the middle class, the poor, women, minority groups are all swamped by the exigencies of "freedom of speech" "freedom of the press" and other such words as "right to bear arms". For the left, "freedom of speech-press" is what the "right to bear arms" is for the right, only the idea that words will protect you from guns is one of life's more obvious delusions.
The fact is that lies have a persuasive advantage that the truth often doesn't. Lies can be constructed in ways unhampered by a need to hew to reality, they can be constructed out of fantasy for the purpose of appealing to peoples' weaknesses, appealing to their desires instead of the necessities of reality. The truth is often not an easy sell because it is not pleasant and flattering. it often carries an accusation instead of gratifying and emollient praise. It is often used to blame other people for what its intended audience has done when the consequences of those aren't avoidable anymore. In just about every way it is obvious that lying has both a sales advantage and the potential to destroy the absolute prerequisite for democratic self-government a sufficient grasp of reality on the part of voters.
There is nothing liberal, in the traditional American meaning of the word, to this absolutist, oligarchy enabling regime of "free speech, free press". There is nothing good at all, nothing that could rationally be expected to be good about permitting lies, especially in politics where dishonesty and duping people with easily swallowed lies are an obvious democracy destroying practice. Yet the widely lauded and praised, the alleged liberal group, the American Civil Liberties Union has been in the forefront of promoting this insane legal regime in which judges and Supreme Court justices are allowed to pretend they can't distinguish between lies and the truth when that is what their job consists of in its ultimate terms. That this practice also enabled what has become the massive porn industry is a fitting example leading to the decision that the entire thing was in service to a degraded view of humanity which is also in opposition to the view of humanity which mandates democracy.
The fact is that much if not most of truth can be distinguished from lies, it is insanity to allow those cases in which it is not easy or possible to swamp the benefits possible when you can make that determination is insanely irresponsible. In one of his introductions to one of the Rumpole stories on TV, the delightful lawyer-writer John Mortimer talked about the defense of a man who murdered his wife by strangulation involved selling the idea that it could have been accidental when he accidentally squeezed the vagus nerve too tightly, while strangling her, and, so, her death with his hands around her neck was an accidental death. As I recall the story, his defense rested on an assumption of gullibility in the judge and jury, the ability to sell a lie to them. He gave
an interview to the Paris Review in which he noted the similarity between that kind of lawyering and writing fiction as "documentary".
It’s a funny trick that you learn, writing documentaries, or being a barrister, for that matter. You can prepare yourself to cross-examine a doctor on the vagal nerve. You don’t really know all about it but you know how to put it so that a jury can understand it.
Now, I know what will be important for such "liberals" of the ACLU type in my mentioning that and it will be an accusation that I didn't like the Rumple stories - which I both watched and read all of - or that I hate on dear, amusing, John Mortimer, when I don't, Though thinking about this, I can't pretend that I really respect him anymore or can read the Rumpole stories in quite the same way. Someone who could dismiss the part his profession plays in allowing wife murderers to get off by appealing to either the ignorance or sexism or bigotry of judges and juries can't retain my respect, no more so can lawyers and "free speech-press" absolutists who blithely and self-righteously do the same politically, the consequences be damned.
If we want democracy instead of what comes in its absence, we are stuck with the messy, often risky and quite often wrong responsibility of trying to discern what the best choices are for society in general. If we choose not to take that responsibility or allow our society to be disabled through the PR sold lies which are permitted, we will get despotism, dictators and the entire range of moral and material catastrophe that comes with them. Our developing experiment with democracy has lost its way just as its promise of fruition was at hand. If you want to know what made black lives not matter a half a century after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were signed into law, it was through the constant racist propaganda of programs like C.O.P.S. of hatred and resentment sold through TV plots and story lines, and what passes as the news. It is a product of the very "free press" and its "free speech" which, absolved of any responsibility to the truth, found lies more easily constructed and far more profitable. All of that is a product of the ACLU and similar facilities of the free-speech industry. Once the corporate right abandoned its anti-smut wing it realized that porn was profitable and the legal regime which such liberals as provided judicial rulings allowing lies as well as smut was a gold mine for them.
