Irish Examiner view: A chill wind along the Potomac
Cartoon by Harry Burton
It is appropriate today to remind ourselves that one of the founding stories of the US is about a little boy who couldn’t tell a lie. When George Washington was six, he received a hatchet as a gift and chopped away at a cherry tree at the family farm on the Rappahannock River in Virginia. When challenged by his angry father, he confessed immediately.
It’s the oldest and best-known American fable about the virtues of honesty. Unfortunately for those who believe that truth is an absolute, it is a fabrication. This improving tale was invented after the death of the first president by an early biographer, Mason Locke Weems, who correctly estimated the appetite of citizens for information about the man who led his country to independence.
This is a reminder, on the occasion of the inauguration of the 47th POTUS, that what we now call spin has been with us for centuries, and was accelerated by mass media. It was the jaundiced journalist Maxwell Scott in , a film which conjoins the worlds of newspapers and politics, who stated: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
It was Trump who commandeered the phrase “fake news”, which is an actual thing with real-world consequences, and turned it into a stick with which to dismiss opposition.
In doing so, he has been aped by politicians, rabble rousers, apparatchiks, social media blowhards, tub-thumpers, anyone who will not brook alternatives to the simple certainties and assertions of their lives. Google records 1.8bn references to its use as of last night.
The irony is that Trump, who most regard as a property developer, is a publishing magnate himself.
Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent of the platform Truth Social, transferred bn (€3.9bn) of shares to a trust controlled by his son, Donald Jr, just last month.
While Truth Social has operated mainly as a personal loudspeaker for the president, it also has an acquisitions arm.
Trump will be accompanied today by three of the “tech bros” who have signed up for the journey: Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Elon Musk of Tesla and X — formerly Twitter — and Jeff Bezos of Amazon and The Washington Post.
His resumption of power is seen as a defining opportunity for crypto currency, for AI, and for the apparently relentless rise of social media and political influencers on YouTube — a platform on which ex-newspaper editor Piers Morgan is a star.
Morgan last week predicted that Trump would win the Nobel Peace Prize in two years, an achievement which almost like no other would fulfil Hamlet’s dictum that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.
The Republican return to the Oval Office presages a challenging landscape for journalists with — like the city it serves, no friend of Trump — warning that reporters and editors are increasing their reliance on encrypted communications to “help shield themselves and their sources from potential federal leak investigations and subpoenas”.
Others have advised that notes and background should not be stored in the cloud because hosting companies could be legally forced to disgorge them. Some titles are encouraging that their staff use “burner phones”, a long-time staple of drug dealers, to carry out sensitive business.
Publishers are checking their libel insurance; a non-profit investigative journalism outlet is preparing for the possibility that the government will investigate whether its use of freelancers complies with labour regulations; TV stations fret that their federal broadcast licenses will be threatened for revocation because of perceived anti-conservative bias.
All of this carries a whiff of the environment created by the Stasi, the KGB, and Iran’s Savak. But why should we care what takes place in American media? It is simply because what happens can, in our interconnected world, be easily and quickly copied by authorities, organisations, and political movements.
It is incumbent on all who care about personal freedom, in an era of AI and algorithms, to choose our sources carefully and ask ourselves whether they are primary or second- and third-hand; does content contain a range of alternative views; are we prepared to financially support independent journalism; are we being too credulous; should we adopt the self-testing question of any good interviewer: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?”
In that story about George Washington, the myth has it that his father told him that his honesty was worth more than 1,000 trees.
If society loses its ability to gauge the truth in news, and for news to hold our attention, then we will become eternally diminished. Instead of active citizens in a functioning democracy, we will be passive consumers trapped in a technocracy. And we will deserve that dismal fate.
It is impossible not to be moved by the sight of Palestinian people returning to Gaza, much of which lies in ruins after relentless bombardment by Israeli forces.
Images and videos, mostly captured on mobile phones, showed processions of thousands of people — a number displaying grievous injuries — walking and hobbling back to their destroyed homes. It is likely to take a decade of rebuilding, although reconciliation may take much, much longer.
For now, we can but hope and prepare ourselves for truth to emerge about the many months of horror which have scarred the Middle East and the world order.
The death of Denis Law robs us of one of the most charismatic footballers of the past 60 years, and another link to Manchester United’s 1968 European Cup-winning team.
Law, aged 84, who suffered from dementia in his final years, was the youngest of seven children of an Aberdeen trawlerman. He manifested a severe squint, which forced him to play with one eye permanently closed until he was a teenager and could afford a corrective operation before joining his first professional club, Huddersfield Town, aged 15.
He was the only Scotsman to become European Player of the Year and scored 237 goals for Manchester United — who signed him for the then stunning sum of £115,000 from Torino, as part of the club’s post Munich rebuilding.
With George Best and Bobby Charlton, he formed what football supporters called “The Holy Trinity”. A statue of them, Law with his arm characteristically raised in salute, stands outside Old Trafford.
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