01-30-2017, 07:33 AM
(01-29-2017, 11:50 AM)TeacherinExile Wrote: The excerpt below appeared in an article published in The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine and blog. Trump and his administration would do well to heed Rule #1:
"Trumpism Corrupts: Spicer Edition"
http://www.weeklystandard.com/trumpism-corrupts-spicer-edition/article/2006432
...Rule #1 for press relations is that you can obfuscate, you can misrepresent, you can shade the truth to a ridiculous degree, or play dumb and pretend not to know things you absolutely do know. But you can't peddle affirmative, provable falsehoods. And it's not because there's some code of honor among press secretaries, but because once you're a proven liar in public, you can't adequately serve your principal. Every principal needs a spokesman who has the ability, in a crunch, to tell the press something important and know that they'll be believed 100 percent, without reservation.
...And this comes from a news source that I don't ordinarily trust, probably because I disagree with the social values of its editorial staff.
Nobody has perfect knowledge, and the body of provable reality is always in formation. To be sure there is opinion, typically in esthetic and political judgments. But in general, mathematical and physical reality are beyond contest. Truth is internally consistent; falsehood pointlessly lies outside the realm of consistency with documented reality.
Quote:And a legendary CBS broadcast journalist had this advice for his profession:
“To be persuasive, We must be believable,
To be believable, We must be credible,
To be credible, We must be truthful.”
― Edward R. Murrow
Journalists and those who feed official data to the news media need recognize that every statement puts their credibility on the line. It is not so easy now as it was in Hitlerland, when Joseph Goebbels could control everything that went into the realm of public knowledge. Reality caught up with Scott Spicer far faster than it did with Joseph Goebbels because we have alternative media and we have people archiving reality for us. Far more people are capable of dealing with statistical measures than there were 75 years ago.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.