Is All the Lying Backfiring?

[phantom power]

The right wing media has trafficked in lies for so long because they believe it suits their agenda. They know that if they tell the truth about the President’s actual agenda, most conservative viewers wouldn’t give a fuck. For instance, the Affordable Care Act will likely be imperceptible to people who already have employer-provided insurance, so the strategy to get them on board with fighting it is to tell them the government is taking their insurance away. Stripping the wealthiest of their tax cuts is something only said wealthiest actually care about, so right wing media runs a bunch of stories implying that people of color and single women are given a $50,000 a year salary for sitting on their butts or something. And so on. But what these lies have in common is that average people can’t really grasp the truth without a mediator. The reason I know that single mothers don’t actually get fat checks for not working is because reliable news media tells me that (as do government agencies you can look up online).

But the election is a different story. There’s no way for them to bullshit their way out of what was obvious, which is that Obama continues to be popular with the public and he was re-elected without any real doubt what the outcome would be. The right wing media stopped lying about stuff that’s hard to verify, and started lying about stuff that’s impossible to ignore. Alyssa has a point: Once you start down this road, maybe it is inevitable that you cross that line.

Alex Pareene has more thoughts:

Fox knows that the sort of people who clog its airwaves on normal, regularly scheduled programming days — and especially prime time — are liars, phonies, wackos and con men. It knows it’s constantly lying to its audience. In the Bush era this was fine for morale. In the first years of Obama’s term it was good for midterm election turnout. But it’s apparent that it’s clearly bad for the movement in the long term. Counting midterms, the parallel conservative media has now utterly failed to grasp the reality of the American electorate in three of the last four national elections. (And for the record, their counterparts on the left did not spend 2010 furiously pretending that everything would turn out great for the Democratic Party.)

It’s an interesting theory, and one I’ll be thinking about for a long time. The problem, however, remains: Without lies, what does the right wing media have? Not much. One thing that continues to nag at me is how the vast majority of conservatives who come at me online are simply wrong. Not in their opinion, but in their facts. And that when you inform them of the facts, they either retreat or insist their lies are truth. That’s because if they accept the facts, their entire worldview dissipates. For example, the “outrage” over the contraception mandate mostly rests on the assumption that the government is giving out free birth control to anyone who asks, no matter how rich. In reality, the mandate simply requires insurance that women pay for to cover it without a copay. When you point this out, they have nothing. Even they know that there’s no reason to be mad that women get what they pay for. They don’t like it—mostly because they’re reacting on an emotional level to their deep-seated anger about other people’s sex lives—but they don’t have an argument.

So, that’s where they’re at. I suspect the lesson for the right wing media will not be, “Stop lying.” It will be, “Lie better.” Whether or not that works for them remains to be seen.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/11/08/is-all-the-lying-backfiring/

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. What an interesting read. Thank you for it...

And you bet the lying is backfiring on them, as it should.

K&R

[PoliticAverse]

2. Until lies in politics stop working there will be lying. n/t

[Blue4Texas]

3. How do we respond to lies

My question is, do we keep exposing the truth? It seems that for most of the election cycle I was sharing fact checking with my GOP friends and relatives and it made no difference to them lol though I learned quite a bit

[socialindependocrat]

4. Freedom of choice should be the norm

"they’re reacting on an emotional level to their deep-seated anger about other people’s sex lives"

This is the crux of the problem. When you look at the right trying to stop others from having freedom of choice. The conservatives are not happy living their own lives the way they see fit. They need to try to interfere with the lives of others.

Saying that the church has to go against it's principles by providing insurance that includes birth control and women's reproductive health care - Standard insurance needs to be provided by all employers to allow the people to choose how they use their policies. If each employer got to taylor their insurance provisions we would have a confusing mish-mosh of policies. Insurance should provide for a standard variety of health care benefits. If the Catholic church has taught it's parishioners well, they will CHOOSE not to use the birth control provisions. If the people CHOOSE to utilize the birth control provisions then it should be a sign to the church that they are either not getting their point across or that they don't understand their congregation. Control of thought and/or action is only necessary for people and institutions that need to control.

For conservatives to CHOOSE to live a life based upon their beliefs is fine but when a group tries to impose their beliefs on others - this is not democratic, this is not live and let live - this is more indicative of a communist dictatorship - This is not America.

We need to figure a way to get the Teabaggers to understand that they have no control over the lives of others. They need to be happy that they have the freedom to CHOOSE how they live their own lives and see that Christians allow others to live as they see fit in spite of our own personal beliefs.