After the Election: Swimming in the Sea of Disinformation.

“It really is nothing new, but you are watching it happen in your own time and not in a book.” Writers and thinkers on where the denial of reality can lead.

From the 1500s: Pieter Bruegel’s famed Tower of Babel, depicting societies driven apart when they lost a shared language to describe reality. In the Biblical version, it was an angered God who left human beings in destructive confusion, as his punishment. Now similarly divisive work is underway, engineered by earthly creatures driven by power, vengeance, and greed. (Getty Images.)

This post is about media and public life, but in a different way from many of my media posts not just in this past election year but through the decades since my book Breaking the News came out in 1996.

All those Trump-era press concerns—about “normalizing,” “sane-washing,” “both-sidesing,” and so on—still stand, and if anything have deepened in the past ten days. For instance: Yesterday NPR ran a headline¹ describing RFK Jr’s witch-doctor anti-vaccine record as blandly “controversial.” Today’s NYT has a horse-race column assessing Democratic candidates for 2028. (Recall that ten days ago, they and everyone else considered the 2024 race “too close to call.” Now, we get forecasts of what might happen four years from now.) Last week the NYT “analysis” of three of the most reckless nominations in US history—Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, and most incredibly, Matt Gaetz as Attorney General—carried this headline:

In his now-familiar rule book for resisting tyranny, Timothy Snyder, of Yale, wrote: “Lesson 1. Do not obey in advance.” Lesson apparently not learned.

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Moving beyond media to information.

But let’s move beyond the things that editors and headline-writers might directly influence. Let’s move on to the much larger threat—which is apparently beyond control by anyone who might want to change it in a positive way. That threat is the death-cloud of misinformation, ignorance, lies, myths, fears, stereotypes… or any other terms to describe the gulf between “reality” as human beings have evolved to understand it, and the artificial reality playing out in the minds of citizens.

—This is not a new challenge in human experience, as Plato’s ‘shadows in a cave’ is just one reminder.

—It’s not a new problem in American democracy. Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, published when Warren Harding was in the White House, was about people’s inevitable reliance on “pictures in our head,” often stereotypes or half-truths, to judge events they had not witnessed themselves. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, about the convergence of information and entertainment (with entertainment coming out on top), was published nearly 40 years ago but grows ever more prophetic-seeming.

—It’s not even a new insight into this election. In the past week, while traveling, I’ve seen excellent essays by Nathan Heller, Julie Hotard, Brian Beutler (and Beutler again), Michael Tomasky, and a growing number of others on the “news” problem that extends far beyond the official “news media.”

In essence, “news” is everything you don’t see or experience yourself. And with each passing year, a growing share of the “news” on which people base their sense of reality has come neither from personal experience²; nor from “regular” news organizations, flawed as they may be; but instead from the surrounding climate of social media and other sources that have been skewed in a nihilistic, suspicious-and-hostile direction. A large part of that skewing is intentional—a supercharged version of Fox News, as those I’ve linked to above all argue. Part of it just comes with the technology. And evidence suggests that in 2024 this mattered more than anything the official news media did.³ People had “heard” that the economy was terrible and no one could find a job and illegal immigrants were everywhere and Kamala Harris was an affirmative-action cipher. And they could see that eggs were expensive—and that Donald Trump had come up, fist-first, after the bullet whizzed by. No contest.

The result explains a lot about these past week in public affairs. If nothing matters, if everything is terrible, if elections are just about swapping one liar for another, why not just shake it all up? Or burn it all down? At least it will be entertaining along the way.

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The Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

So what is the new information I have to offer? Over this past weekend, which we spent in Dayton, Ohio, Deb and I heard writers give messages of unexpected timeliness, relevance, and power.

Three days after the election, we traveled from DC to Dayton for the 19th annual ceremony of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. This is a major civic event, and is the source of the three quotations I will share below.

—Why Dayton? It was the site of three weeks of negotiations leading to the Dayton Accords in 1995, which brought an end to years of horrific mass-casualty warfare in Bosnia.

—Why a “Literary Peace Prize”? After the accords, leaders in the city created a Dayton Peace Prize, with honorees like Bill Clinton and Desmond Tutu. Then, through the leadership of a local teacher and writer named Sharon Rab, the award evolved into the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, dedicated to honoring writers and writing from around the world that advanced the cause of peace.

Each year the DLPP (as it is called) chooses one winner and one runner-up in both fiction and non fiction, a total of four honorees. The selections and awards have become a big deal; you would recognize nearly all the books on their winners’ list. Several years ago the DLPP created a lifetime achievement award named for the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, lead negotiator for the 1995 accords. Counting the Holbrooke award winner, a total of five awardees come to Dayton each year (plus five more as presenters to introduce the winners).

—Why us at this event? As it happened, I had known Richard Holbrooke since the early 1970s, before either of us worked in the Carter administration, and continuing until his sudden death in 2010. (Holbrooke, in his mid-30s when Carter took office, became an Assistant Secretary of State. I was then in my 20s and worked for two years as the head White House speechwriter.) It also happened that this year’s Holbrooke award winner was Jimmy Carter, for his lifetime of words (author of 32 books, and countless speeches), deeds, and personal example in the cause of peace. Carter obviously could not attend to receive the award himself. But my role—as someone who had known Holbrooke, and worked for Carter—was to be a connector between the two. One week ago, last Saturday, I had an onstage conversation about Jimmy Carter’s life, ideals, and legacy with his grandson Jason, a lawyer who has been active in politics himself. The next day, at the award gala on Sunday evening, I got to introduce and present the award to another grandson, Joshua Carter.

I give this back story to set up three quotes I would like to use, about this moment of Babel in our public lives.

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What the writers said.

In the photo below you see the five people honored by DLPP this past weekend. From left to right they are: Tania Branigan, who came from England, for her book about the aftermath of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Red Memory; Paul Lynch, of Ireland, for his unforgettably bleak novel Prophet Song, which also won the Booker prize last year; Joshua Carter, receiving the award for his grandfather; Anne Berest, from France, for her Holocaust-themed novel The Postcard; and Victor Luckerson, of the US, for his book about the Greenwood district of Tulsa before and after the race massacre of 1921, Built from the Fire.

Tania Branigan, Paul Lynch, Josh Carter, Anne Berest, Victor Luckerson, last Sunday at the Dayton Literary Peace Prize awards. (Photo DLPP.)

Their speeches were not coordinated in advance, nor were those of their respective presenters. When being invited to speak many months ago, none of them could have known that this would be their first big public appearance after the re-election of Donald Trump. But it happened that in the historic spotlight of this moment, and with the wide differences in their personal styles and subject matters, all of them ended up talking about reality, and what happens to a society when reality perishes.

Three examples:

Ben Fountain

Ben Fountain is a renowned American writer who made the presentation speech for the fiction winner, Paul Lynch. Nearly a decade ago, in my “Chickenhawk Nation” Atlantic cover story, I said I considered Fountain’s book Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk to be the essential work of fiction from the US “long wars” era. This is part of what Fountain said in introducing Lynch:

Here’s a proposition: It all depends on language.  Society, civilization, democracy, the entire collective project depends on the quality of our thought and expression, our ability to put words to the reality of a thing. 

Words whose purpose is to portray life as it actually is: That’s a rare and even radical act in a time where so much of the language that’s thrown at us is trying to sell us something--a product, a lifestyle, a political agenda.  Language whose sole purpose is to mislead and distort, to numb us out and dumb us down--or to put it another way, the language of advertising…

What do you suppose our prospects are for living long and happy lives… if our world-view is based on lies, delusions, and fantasies?  Or take it to the macro level: What do you suppose is the life expectancy of a country that’s lost its grip on reality?  Whose national consciousness is based on lies, delusions, and fantasies? ..Without the tools for seeing and describing things as they truly are?

Fountain was followed to the stage by Paul Lynch.

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Paul Lynch

Lynch’s Prophet Song is set in Ireland, and it’s not tied to a particular date. But while reading it, as I did en route to Dayton just after our election, I kept thinking of it as today’s counterpart to Orwell’s 1984, and that it describes the Western countries we may be about to live in. Orwell’s book is about a society in which Big Brother is already in control. Lynch tells us step-by-step how this would occur.

Here was part of Lynch’s acceptance speech. I know it was not coordinated with Fountain’s, because they both happened to use the same quote from his book. (Lynch joked about that when beginning.) And their themes, unplanned, were parallel. Lynch said:

The age of the infinite scroll and the perma-spectacle that is our modern media have fundamentally altered our perception of events. It is altering what you and I call reality.

What used to be considered truth is no longer truth to many. How are we to know the world?…

When I was younger and more naive, I used to believe that the historical arc of political ideals was the slow bend of a great river inexorably flowing towards a just and inclusive society….

But it is plain to see that the river can be diverted rightward. We live now at the mercy of ungovernable and mercenary plutocrats, self seeking politicians, malign international forces. Spend enough dark money, and you can bend the river. You can replace objective reason with subjective belief. You can unleash the primitive and irrational forces within us. Mass ideas become once again, mass delusion. Fascism, dressed in the emperor's new clothes, becomes something again for the crowd to marvel at and cheer.

There is a moment in Prophet Song where Eilish Stack’s [the main character] father, a retired scientist sliding into dementia, asks her a lucid question, do you believe in reality? He says [below I am using the comma-heavy punctuation Lynch applies in the book]:

‘We are both scientists, Eilish, we belong to a tradition, but tradition is nothing more than what everyone can agree on—the scientists, the teachers, the institutions, if you change ownership of the institutions, then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon that is what they're doing, Eilish, it is really quite simple, the NAP [the MAGA/Big Brother counterpart in the book] is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over again, people accept it as true— this is an old idea. Of course. It really is nothing new, but you are watching it happen in your own time and not in a book.’

Prophet Song is a fictional mirror that allows us to stare at the Medusa without turning to stone. The book reveals to the reader the abyss that awaits our liberal democracies when we allow reality to become smeared with lies.

Watching it happen in your own time, and not in a book.

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Josh Carter

To close the evening we had Joshua Carter—a writer, small business owner, and podcaster based in Georgia—accepting on behalf of his grandfather.

He started out with one of the few effective laugh lines of the evening. He said that the morning after the election, when he could finally crawl out of bed, “I watched HBO’s Chernobyl to cheer up—it’s true!” But he said he then began reading his grandfather’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, and his book Our Endangered Values about the moral basis of the American republic. After all, he reminded us, Jimmy Carter was being recognized for his writings in the cause of peace.

And then he really cut loose, with a speech about the risks that structural corruption, and systematic denial of reality, posed to the American experiment as a whole.⁴ I’d like to think it is the kind of speech his grandfather would have given, had been able to take the podium.

“I was not particularly in the mood to build bridges,” Josh Carter said about his mood after the election:

However, I spent my time before the election talking to friends who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. And I found that most people who supported him didn't watch his campaign. Most people tried as hard as possible to avoid looking at the presidential races.

They didn't go to his rallies. They didn't watch his speeches. I had more than one person tell me that they hated the things that he said,

But the trickle of content from four years of scrolling through articles and memes painted Harris as a polarizing, ineffective leader who blames all of her failures on identity politics. They saw Trump as a targeted outsider that had been relentlessly attacked by the entire corrupt American system, and he was doing it all for the American people.

After the election, as I started watching the blame game unfold, I received clarity from a despondent Biden staffer. He asked, ‘How do you spend a billion dollars and not win?’ The staffer missed that one of Trump's new supporters spent 44 times that much to buy Twitter and control the narrative. We have to observe that it worked.

We have to observe that it worked.

At the end of his talk Joshua Carter left the audience dumbfounded for perhaps ten seconds, before it rose in the evening’s only standing ovation. That was in response to a stark personal story about the real-world stakes in politics. He and his wife have a young son with a serious disease. A few years ago, children with his condition would not have survived. Their son has survived—but at crippling financial cost, with new drugs that cost thousands of dollars per month. Josh Carter said he spends much of his time dealing with insurance companies. He has gone deeply into personal debt. The family relies on protections introduced with the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare.

He ended his speech:

My story includes a simple truth. My son is sick. He has a rare disease. His treatment is unaffordable.

If the next administration follows through on their campaign promise to get rid of the one law that's keeping him alive, I will have to leave the United States.

Josh Carter said that telling this story had gotten through some people’s “nothing matters” inattention. The grandson of a still-living president, contemplating leaving his home country to get affordable medical care. This is a reality, which no one who has heard the story is likely to forget.

Where have we ended up? We have press problems, and we have gerrymandering problems, and we have problems that are even deeper. About a democratic population’s ability to recognize reality. In our own time, and not in a book.

We all reflect on our duties in this time. Starting with: Don’t obey in advance.

1. The embedded link about this NPR framing is to a Bluesky post, by me. I had been on Twitter since the start and had a “follower” audience that reached several hundred thousand. But after the election, I downloaded all my archives, deleted thousands of posts, and ended all further engagement on the site. (I have kept my user name in place, since otherwise names go up for grabs.) Elon Musk has made it a vehicle of propaganda, hatred, and lies.

A year ago I set up a presence on Bluesky, along with several other Xitter alternatives, while waiting to see which would gain critical mass. For now that is clearly Bsky. My address there is JFallows.bsky.social.

2. How do I know that people are not relying on personal experience? Because year upon year, poll upon poll has shown that people feel much better about the part of America where they live than they do about the rest of the country they read or hear about. That is the ongoing theme of the ‘Our Towns’ reporting Deb and I have done over the past decade, which spans Trump’s initial rise to power and now this current one.

3. In 2016, I believe it mattered that news organizations went berserk about Hillary Clinton’s email server, and thus probably moved a close election in Trump’s favor. Similarly, back in 1984, it clearly mattered that Ronald Reagan’s mastery of network-TV imagery gave him a landslide re-election victory—even when unemployment was above 7% (vs around 4% for Biden-Harris), and even when inflation was much higher than now. In Reagan’s re-election summer, the inflation rate was over 4%; this summer, it’s been a little over 2%.

But in 2024, I don’t think anything the mainstream media did made the difference. Not that many people were noticing. They knew what they’d “heard.”

4. Here is a sample from the “policy” part of Josh Carter’s speech:

Jimmy Carter has consistently reminded us that the presidency of the United States is the only elected office in the world where the person with the most votes is not guaranteed to win… Jimmy Carter has also pointed out that gerrymandering breeds extremism and it destroys civil discourse by design. In a country where politicians choose their voters, gerrymandering awards the office to whoever wins a partisan primary with no pressure for a politician to move to the center to attract opposing votes. In this system, civil discourse is seen as an unwanted threat to party loyalty and is actively rejected.

It is true that the biggest jobs—US Senator, Governor, President—are not subject to the constraints of gerrymandering. But the overwhelming majority of our elected positions are and that poisons the well. So if my grandfather were standing here today, I guarantee he would state that the most damaging Supreme Court decision in modern history was Citizens United, which removes all meaningful limitations of money in our politics.