Lee McIntyre — Post-Truth

197 published claims from this book.

• 60 Minutes proved news could profit, ending the loss-leader era.
• 60 Minutes was the first profitable TV news show in history
• A doubt campaign reached 43 million Americans on a settled question.
• A founder of social constructivism publicly regretted that his ideas aided right-wing climate denial
• A larger fear-processing amygdala may make conservatives more susceptible to threats
• A newspaper circulation war helped spark the Spanish-American War
• A single alt-right blogger promoted multiple viral conspiracy theories during 2016.
• A single fabricated news story fabricated at a kitchen table reached six million readers
• ABC launched Nightline mainly as a cheap marketing counter to Johnny Carson.
• Accusing science of bias is a stepping-stone to admitting ideologically tainted alternatives
• Algorithmic feeds convert the open Internet into personalized echo chambers
• American newspaper circulation dropped almost seventy percent between 1950 and 2010
• An unexplained 1898 explosion was blamed on Spain by the yellow press
• Anti-factual tactics normatively rebound hardest onto the vulnerable they were meant to protect
• Anti-government ideology independently motivated climate-change denial beyond industry funding
• Audience laziness and entitlement, not just technology, enable modern fake news
• Authoritarian propaganda exploits cognitive biases while hiding the manipulation itself
• Balanced-reporting norms let fringe deniers distort coverage of settled science
• Believing all media are biased pushes partisans toward their own echo chambers.
• Believing all media are biased pushes people toward sources biased in their favor.
• Brexit and Trump’s election resulted from rather than caused post-truth
• Cable news networks profited enormously by giving Trump free media coverage
• Calling something post-truth is inherently a normative judgment
• Climate-change denial organizations were directly funded by tobacco and fossil-fuel interests
• Cognitive bias plus curated information feeds industrial post-truth vulnerability
• Cognitive biases alone cannot explain post-truth without later media factors
• Cognitive biases are an inherited feature of all human brains, not curable
• Cognitive biases are hardwired parts of human brains rather than avoidable mistakes.
• Cognitive biases toward group acceptance are the precursor for post-truth
• Cognitive dissonance resolves primarily to protect self-worth, not truth
• Colbert’s joke term ‘truthiness’ now describes mainstream political reality
• Conservatives believe threatening falsehoods more readily than liberals do
• Conspiracy bloggers explicitly cite postmodern relativism to justify distrusting mainstream news.
• Conspiracy promoters adopt postmodern relativism to license fabricating news.
• Corporate science denial was born when tobacco firms funded fake research.
• Correcting false beliefs can strengthen them rather than reduce them
• Deliberate misinformation weaponized for profit or power can outcompete true news
• Desires and emotional comfort shape what people believe is true
• Digital media isolate people from contrary opinion which face-to-face life once forced
• Disconfirmed prophecies get reinterpreted rather than abandoned when believers are invested
• Drama-driven media coverage of bogus claims breeds lasting public harm
• Echo chambers convert the social-corrective group effect into conformity pressure
• Emotional reactions signal confirmation bias, not evidence against a story.
• Equal-time objectivity norms create false equivalence on settled factual issues
• Erosion of truth-telling is a warning sign preceding authoritarian politics
• Even disconfirmation evidence often fails to break a person’s confirmation bias
• Even fully exposed disinformation strategies succeed because facts cannot override trained media habits
• Even the most partisan reasoners eventually change beliefs under repeated corrective evidence
• Exposure to local climate impacts can convert a Republican mayor to climate activism
• ExxonMobil planned Arctic drilling to exploit the very melting its funded skeptics denied
• Face-to-face interaction historically countered cognitive bias by forcing diverse viewpoints
• Fact-challenging arises from motive to protect beliefs and enables political domination
• Fake news has nearly triggered inter-state nuclear conflict
• Fake news is better countered by flooding with real news than censorship.
• Fake news is deliberately false and evolved from clickbait to political manipulation
• Fake news softens trust in sources before status-based propaganda replaces persuasion
• Fake news technology is a neutral tool whose harm depends on human response.
• Fake news transitions from a profit motive to political weaponization
• False equivalence between sides is itself a hallmark of post-truth
• False equivalence can disguise bias under a show of balance
• Falsifiable claims coexisted with advisers rejecting evidential standards outright
• Fear of Fox comparison pushed mainstream media toward false balance
• Fifth-graders can learn to detect fake news through practice games.
• Fighting post-truth requires doubting one’s own favored beliefs first
• Filtering fake news invites charges of censorship bias.
• Flooding discourse with dishonesty can displace censorship as a control tool
• Fossil fuel funding manufactured doubt that made climate change a partisan media issue
• Fox News succeeded because market demand for partisan news already existed
• Fox viewers were measurably less well informed than people watching no news.
• Free-market advocates rejected market-based carbon pricing for political reasons.
• Freedom from monarchical reality-control is recent and requires active citizen participation
• Group affiliation alone can override moral condemnation of cheating.
• Hearst fabricated visual atrocity propaganda to provoke a war
• Ideologues pair extreme doubt toward disfavored facts with total credulity toward favored ones
• Ignoring a false attack let it define the message
• Intelligent Design creationism fuses Christian fundamentalism with postmodernism
• Intelligent Design theory deliberately borrowed postmodernist tactics from evolution’s opponents
• Intelligent Design theory furnished the blueprint later used by climate deniers
• Intelligent Design’s founder reframed the evolution fight to avoid a science-versus-Bible framing
• Intelligent Design’s godfather openly declared himself a postmodernist deconstructionist
• Intent to deceive can be inferred from persistence despite the falsity being revealed
• Journalistic objectivity means facilitating truth, not equal time to falsehood
• Journalists lack the expertise and time to verify scientific claims
• Kahneman and Tversky’s cognitive psychology reshaped mainstream economics
• Liberals resisted corrections but showed no backfire effect, unlike conservatives
• Limbaugh pioneered positioning himself as truth against mainstream media.
• Limbaugh’s call screening aimed at community feeling, not debate.
• Limbaugh’s call-in format built community through screened agreement, not debate.
• Major news outlets abandoned false-equivalence coverage of climate change
• Manufactured ‘both sides’ coverage made the public believe science was genuinely divided
• Manufactured doubt is the replicable engine of science denial.
• Manufactured doubt, not genuine debate, explains public confusion over climate science consensus
• Manufactured scientific doubt was the proving ground for today’s wholesale rejection of truth.
• Media profit incentives over truth drove audiences toward social media
• Modern academic postmodernism grew from 1980s literary deconstruction
• Motivated reasoning engages different brain circuitry than neutral reasoning.
• Motivated reasoning is the motive while confirmation bias is the mechanism
• Network news divisions existed largely as loss leaders to satisfy broadcast licensing law
• News aggregators strip away the visual and contextual cues that once signaled reliability
• News fragmentation across alternative media enabled Trump’s election success.
• News outlets demanded false balance on climate because backers and advertisers bought it
• News silos cannot protect audiences from post-truth because both exploit the same biases
• Newspaper circulation, revenue, and staff collapsed sharply since 2014
• Newspaper objectivity can be compromised by editorial sympathy for powerful figures
• Observers fear current politics is re-enacting 1984’s truth-as-casualty dynamics
• One small Macedonian town hosted over a hundred pro-Trump fake news websites
• Openly subordinating facts to feelings is a new strategy for political dominance
• Over a third of people deny clear sensory evidence to conform with a group.
• Partisan cable news abandoned objectivity to confirm viewer biases at the public’s expense
• Partisan misinformation flourished during both the French and American revolutions
• Partisans trust news sources sorted by ideology, with liberals trusting even comedy outlets
• People can choose how to react to attempts to manipulate truth
• People discount their own sense evidence to conform to group consensus
• People excuse immorality from in-group members arbitrarily defined
• People paid less to lie rationalize the lie as genuine belief
• People preferentially seek confirming evidence and avoid testing their own hypotheses.
• Physical reality eventually punishes those who deny it
• Physical reality overrides spin, as Feynman’s O-ring test showed
• Political impact of fake news is independent of its creators’ actual motives
• Politicians can disregard evidence openly when partisanship outweighs facts for their voters.
• Post-truth is a choice of response to reality, not a fixed condition
• Post-truth predates 2016 with roots in cognitive bias, philosophy, and media change
• Post-truth roots lie in ancient cognitive bias, academic relativism, and media change
• Post-truth spans a spectrum from bullshit and spin to self-deception and delusion
• Post-truth spans distinct attitudes from bullshitting to delusive self-deception.
• Post-truth tactics first matured in right-wing science denial campaigns
• Post-truth’s novelty is denying reality’s existence, not lying or spin.
• Postmodern interpretive relativism, once applied to politics, licenses alternative facts
• Postmodernism holds that truth claims are really bids for political power
• Postmodernism overreached when it turned from literary texts to natural science
• Postmodernism’s popularity stems partly from its definitional obscurity
• Postmodernist premises applied to politics yield post-truth reality denial
• Postmodernists enabled misuse of their ideas by retreating into subtlety
• Pro-Trump fake news earned vastly more ad revenue than pro-Clinton content
• Proper scientific method requires acknowledging gaps and provisional positions rather than hiding them.
• Public climate inaction takes four distinct psychological evasion forms
• Questioning science may have been borrowed from postmodernism by right-wing ideologues.
• Refusing to answer lies allows them to spread unchallenged among the undecided
• Refuting a lie aims at its audience, not the liar
• Regulatory license threat made news divisions unprofitable loss leaders that shielded network profits.
• Repeated truths eventually overcome even motivated reasoners’ resistance
• Reporting routines themselves, not political views, produced pro-climate-denial coverage.
• Revisionist-believing subjects demanded the full text believing it supported their view
• Right-wing attacks make critical self-examination nearly impossible for academic radicals
• Right-wing denialists weaponized academic leftist skepticism of experts
• Satire aims to ridicule absurdity rather than to deceive viewers
• Science denial pioneered tactics now applied across all factual reality
• Science denial trained today’s politicians to deny any inconvenient facts.
• Science deniers do not reject science itself, only its inconvenient conclusions
• Science deniers exploit science’s unfalsifiability-of-proof to demand equal standing for pseudoscience.
• Science studies arguments were co-opted by science deniers
• Science’s self-correcting attitude is a model for resisting post-truth.
• Seeding doubt about settled science effectively confuses the public
• Self-affirmation weakly aids acceptance of corrective facts, but graphics outperform narratives
• Self-deception about our own limits, not deliberate lying, drives overconfidence.
• Serial falsehood complicates the lie-truth distinction when speakers believe their claims
• Shared social reinforcement amplifies irrational rationalization of mistaken beliefs
• Social constructivist critics described science’s methods as exploitative and even sexual violence
• Social constructivists aimed to undermine science’s single privileged perspective.
• Social media let confirmation bias drive news consumption, undercutting paid mainstream outlets
• Some critics framed science’s language as exploitative toward nature.
• Some fake news outlets deliberately mimic legitimate news brands to exploit trust
• Some post-truth speech is magical thinking rather than mere lying
• Split-screen debates made settled science look genuinely controversial to viewers.
• Talk radio monetized confirmation bias by giving audiences a voice in echo chambers.
• Talk radio succeeded by giving alienated audiences a voice, not by informing them
• The 1979 Iran hostage crisis created the demand that birthed a new news format
• The 1996 Sokal hoax succeeded because Social Text lacked peer review
• The Associated Press’s shared-client model invented journalistic objectivity
• The backfire effect does not occur symmetrically across the political spectrum
• The concept of news itself dates only to the Jacksonian era
• The concept of news itself was invented in the 1830s Jacksonian era
• The correspondence view of truth dates to Aristotle but remains contested among philosophers
• The Discovery Institute has long used postmodernist arguments to attack evolution
• The goal of objectivity is to facilitate truth, not equal time.
• The least skilled performers show the largest overestimation of their own ability.
• The New York Times rose by serving a niche market of wealthy readers
• The political right moved from attacking postmodernism to weaponizing it
• The post-truth problem’s roots trace directly to academic postmodernism
• The prefix ‘post’ in post-truth means truth is eclipsed, not past
• The Sokal hoax backfired by publicizing postmodernist ideas to right-wing readers
• The term post-truth entered public discourse through 2016’s Brexit and US election
• The tobacco industry invented science denial as public-relations strategy
• The tobacco industry’s manufactured-doubt playbook became a template for all later science denial.
• The wire service model created journalism’s objectivity ideal
• Theoretical doubts about objective truth need not override practical reliance on evidence
• Tobacco companies suppressed cancer evidence for decades before paying a $200 billion settlement.
• Tobacco’s deceit paid so well that a $200 billion settlement still turned profit.
• Traditional media face contradictory demands that make competent truth-telling punishable.
• Transactional speech values truth only by whether it advances the speaker’s goals
• Trump symptomizes rather than causes post-truth
• Trump treats truth as socially confirmed approximation rather than correspondence to fact
• Trump’s advisers explicitly claimed facts no longer exist in politics
• Trump’s early presidency began with a pattern of easily verifiable false claims
• Trumpspeak treats belief and usefulness as substitutes for factual truth
• Viewers eagerly grazed on 24-hour cable news, degrading coverage quality.
• Weaponizing the term fake news lets leaders dismiss verified reporting