Lies Incorporated

During the 1930’s, Jewish and Italian gangsters created an alliance to further their illegal activities.   Characters such as Bugsy Segal and Lucky Luciano teamed up to wipe out anyone who stood in their way.  So effective were they in eliminating the opposition that the New York media dubbed them Murder Incorporated.

Today more dangerous conspirators have supplanted these felons.  The mafia-associated villains of yore were small in number and restricted in their area of operation.  As a result, their modern successors make them look like amateurs.  Nowadays, the reach is international.

What might be called “Lies Incorporated” is a massive operation.  Many tens of thousands are involved in a multi-billion dollar enterprise.  These players are, to be sure, loosely associated.  Nevertheless, they are responsible for far more damage than their predecessors.

I am talking about none other than the crowd answerable for what Donald Trump calls “fake news.”  Many of these folks are journalists, but PR firms, Super PACs, Non-Profits and Think Tanks employ legions of others.  What these scoundrels have in common is a desire to manipulate public perceptions.

What they also have in common is an utter disregard for the truth.  Many do not care whom they hurt.  If a lie accomplishes their mission, they do not hesitate to embellish and disseminate it.  The goal is to win; not to advance our common store of knowledge.

Fortunately, former CBS reporter, Sharyl Attkisson, has done a masterful job of exposing this underworld of creeps and character assassins in her new book The Smear.   She makes it plain that they reside in a universe where day can be turned into night in an instant—then change back even more quickly.

You’ve seen this sleight of hand on television thousands of times.  Alleged experts come on screen to debate the latest political sideshow.  They then spout talking points fashioned by those Attkisson describes as “shady political operatives.”  These narratives are not designed to illuminate, but persuade.

Did Hillary Clinton try to hide embarrassing emails?  No, she turned everything over to the State Department.  Is global warming about to inundate our shorelines?  Those who doubt it are unscientific “deniers.”  They are like the cretins who question the holocaust.

Oh by the way, today we talk about “climate change” rather than “global warming” because these shadowy manipulators determined that the former term worked better.  The substitution had nothing to do with an empirical discovery.  It was about effective propaganda.

A recent example of verbal slight of hand occurred once it was discovered that the Hillary campaign hired Fusion, GPS to create a Russian dossier intended to discredit Trump.  Within hours, conservatives were blamed for starting it.  Only later did it come out that the Washington Free Beacon had commissioned entirely different research.

In any event, firms like Fusion GPS are in the business of confusing us.  They invent stories out of whole cloth; they plant misleading accounts with congenial reporters; they besmirch the reputations of inoffensive bystanders.  The underlying objective is to make money or advance a particular agenda—or both.

The casualty in this?  The truth, of course.  It becomes obscured in a blizzard of lies.  So pervasive are these fabrications that it is virtually impossible to keep track.

To make matters worse, most Americans are not even trying.  They are satisfied with parroting the fake news distributed by their allies.  Many do not care if these are lies.  As long as they promote the interests of the erstwhile good guys, they are content.

This is tragic.  Not only is the truth put in jeopardy, but so is public trust.  When fake news and phony innuendo suck the air out of the public arena, people don’t know whom to believe.  Everyone becomes suspect.

The smear merchants have thus replaced the search for truth with a quest for the cleverest way to slander the next guy.  Flood the Internet with spurious Tweets.  Tell whoppers on FaceBook.  It’s all part of the game.  As long as ordinary folks cannot tell the difference between reality and fiction, the dissemblers might come out on top.

Isn’t this comparable to murder?  Aren’t we killing our souls—as well as our national integrity—when we allow this miasma of deceit to spread?

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University