Trump's outrageous lies come straight from big businesses playbook
They lie for your money. He lied for your vote
By Ari Rabin-Havt
Ari Rabin-Havt is author of "Lies Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics", host of The Agenda on SiriusXM Progress 127 and is a senior fellow at People For The American Way.
Donald Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes recently told WAMU’s Diane Rehm that “there’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, as facts.” She’s right. And that’s the problem.
We now disagree not just on our political philosophies but on whether proven facts are true. In this world, Hughes’s observation is the last self-evident truth: Facts are a thing of the past. For the foreseeable future, Americans may find it impossible to debate politics clearly because of a lack of agreement on basic matters of fact; that was certainly the case during this year’s election. And no one has taken more advantage of this than Trump and his big-business cronies.
Trump and his talking heads didn’t create this world. It is a result of a decades-long strategy devised by a number of public affairs practitioners who recognized that lies were the most potent weapon in the fight against progress. Trump emulated some of these disinformation techniques, gleaned from big business, during his campaign.
Sixty-three years ago, as the scientific community neared consensus that tobacco products were dangerous, titans of the tobacco industry came together to meet with John Hill at the Plaza Hotel in New York. This was a rare gathering, as these executives were fighting one another for market share in an immensely competitive business. Hill, the founder of PR conglomerate Hill & Knowlton, recommended that they form a public relations operation, thinly veiled as a scientific institute, to argue that their products were safe. Together, the tobacco executives and Hill created the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, a sham organization designed to spread corporate propaganda to mislead the media, policymakers and the public at large.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/16/trumps-outrageous-lies-come-straight-from-big-businessess-playbook/?utm_term=.0411b6e17032&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1
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