EDITORIAL: How to navigate ‘alternative facts’
So how do South Africans navigate around the onslaught of manipulation and propaganda, masquerading as fact?
Politicians have always lied — it’s just part of the job description. At best they make unrealistic promises. At worst they deliberately mislead and conceal what should be revealed. Here, think Nkandla’s “security upgrades” to President Jacob Zuma’s residence, or the bugging at Watergate that eventually felled President Richard Nixon. In President Donald Trump’s first few days in office, in the face of wide protests against his accession to power, his spokesman Kellyanne Conway spoke of Trump’s “alternative facts” when challenged on one of Trump’s fibs. You can see why she did that. In a world of instant access to millions of bytes of information, it isn’t particularly hard to find the “facts” you want to massage your message — no matter how brazenly deceitful it may be. Of course, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Trump’s first gift to the American people is the debasing of truth; it’s how he ran his campaign, after all. Lie; then attack those who hold you accountable for what you sa...
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