Rolling back America’s 21st-century scandalmongers

By Steve Clemons 
Real Clear Wire

America’s struggle with facts versus fabrication and truth versus conspiracy theories has been going on for centuries.

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton – three early founders of the United States – detested each other through much of their political lives, but they had one thing in common. They had a common enemy in the slurs and “scandalmongering” of James Callender, who started out as a hired slanderer working for Jefferson and then later turned on his early patron, exposing Jefferson’s relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings. While the Hemings revelations were indeed accurate and turned out to be facts, Callender engaged in significant malicious slanders that were invented and not true. Callender eventually mysteriously died by drowning in three feet of water in Richmond, Virginia’s James River.

The fabrication of mistruths to rip at a political opponent or party has been part of America since its inception. Other early scandalmongers with political intent were Philip Freneau, known as the “poet of the American Revolution” but also a hired polemicist by Thomas Jefferson to relentlessly attack George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Federalists; Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin, who was eventually arrested under the Alien and Sedition Act for his incendiary writings and attacks on President John Adams and such fabricated suggestions that Washington conspired “with” the British during the American Revolution; and William Cobbett, who savaged Thomas Jefferson to the advantage of Federalists. These scandalmongers and cadres helped rip at the reputations of political opponents and remind one today of Alex Jones on Sandy Hook, or fake news about FEMA in the wake of Hurricane Helene, or Donald Trump’s assertion about Springfield, Ohio, where he said migrants “are eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.”

Fake news or disinformation is not new in American politics. But today, we have algorithms that expose much more easily who is susceptible to scandalous misinformation, conspiracy theories, and outright lies. What James Callender deployed in the late 1700s is now practiced at a nationwide and even global scale. Cambridge Analytica’s exploitation of Facebook’s platform vulnerabilities in the 2016 presidential race and other elections around the world may be only a minor example of massive operations today to seduce, cajole, and trick voters in elections. But what is really confounding is that while the American public’s trust in government officials has fallen to about 40% and trust in media to 39%, according to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, the trust many hold in purveyors of false news and conspiracy theories seems unchecked and rising.

Democracy in America, and perhaps democracies everywhere, have a major problem. The lying industry is booming, and the gap between empirical reality and what is talked about or even perceived politically is ever wider.

What is needed is a revival of facts. Facts are anchors that help generate smart debate.

Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft CEO and founder of USAFacts, recently launched a six-part video series, Just the Facts, to bring government data to the forefront on critical election issues such as immigration and the federal budget. He wrote to me, “When anxieties are high, people may be vulnerable to misinformation. We must begin debates on what is or what isn’t working in our country by starting with the same set of numbers.”

I’ve spoken with dozens of Republican and Democratic political leaders in the last several weeks who have radically different policy prescriptions for what the country needs, but behind closed doors, they don’t contest how big America’s debt is or that climate change is wreaking real-time havoc on families today, or that America has a significant illegal immigration challenge that needs to be managed and corrected. But conspiracy theories and fabricated lies also move through America’s social media channels on all of these topics.

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler has built a well-respected mini-industry by dispassionately calling out those political leaders who fabricate and lie, using a scale of one to four Pinocchio noses to emphasize the DEFCON level of the lie. But some doubt these types of efforts. GOP Congressman Rodney Davis told me, “Facts do matter and the fact-checking cottage industry cannot use selected facts to justify their own political biases.” Moving from a reality infused with fabrications to one solidly built from facts isn’t easy. Joseph Conrad, in his masterpiece Heart of Darkness, wrote, “For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.”

Too many are scared away. The Dodgers beat the Yankees 7-6 in the final game of this year’s World Series. Running and swimming times in the Olympics are facts. So, too, are data points about how large the government debt is. Where are America’s large stream of undocumented migrants coming from? How many high school students are choosing a college path? A fact is that 62% of those high school students are not going to college. What is the death rate today of COVID when compared to auto accidents or heart attacks? Answer: lower than it used to be. How has recent inflation or its slowing impacted the price of steak, eggs, and bread? Those are facts that matter and concern voting citizens.

Debating whether Americans are better off or worse off than four years ago is an important debate – and facts must inform the discussion. To return to a founder whom I hope had it wrong, John Adams once wrote, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Adams lived in a time when scandalmongers thrived in America’s dark corners. But a more contemporary voice, former Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, wrote me on this subject, saying, “Facts dictate precision and discipline; without both democracy slowly unwinds.” Re-anchoring facts as the foundation of our debates could be democracy’s savior.

Steve Clemons is founding editor of The Washington Note and former editor at large of The Atlantic, The Hill, and Semafor.