In banning three major news outlets from the White House, Donald Trump made some of his broadest claims about “fake news.” He wrote on Truth Social:
Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.
The legality of his action has been discussed elsewhere. What I want to look at here is a broader goal than banning insubordinate reporting. His bigger aim is to make his followers disbelieve any reporting that comes from sources he hasn’t approved of. Here, as he’s done so often, he isn’t asserting particular claims are false; he wants his cult to treat the news as fiction intended to deceive them. A court declares Trump’s actions illegal? FICTION. ICE harasses people exercising their right to criticize it? FAKE NEWS. Thousands of people are protesting its fictional actions without getting paid? LIES.
Let’s grant that journalism is in poor shape. News writers often can’t separate facts from opinions. The selection of facts is often biased, and the phrasing is technically accurate but misleading. Stories are padded with canned material about past events, with inadequate details about what just happened. Reporters experience outrageous pressure to deliver stories quickly; read this unusually serious piece by Dave Barry. Headlines are the worst, being written to pull in readers rather than to summarize the story accurately. Sometimes stories have outright errors. But this is a long way from the news being outright fiction, as Trump claims.
People who believe his assertions drift into a reality bubble, where things are true only if they fit his narrative. We’re all susceptible to that kind of thinking, but for some it’s the whole of their world. It’s not that they have a different, self-consistent set of alleged facts. Rather, whenever they encounter something that doesn’t fit their manufactured reality, their minds go blank.
We can see the same kind of thinking in apocalyptic religious cults. Their leader is right. The world will end on Saint Melvin’s Day. Doubts aren’t allowed. When the world fails to end, the leader has an explanation and reschedules the Apocalypse. Only a few followers drift away. Religions that say you must believe to avoid Hell damage people’s cognitive health, often from childhood.
On the left, there’s the “guilty until proven guilty” phenomenon. It’s forbidden to question certain kinds of accusations. As I’ve noted before, a popular Mastodon site bans defending people against accusations of racism, even to the extent of presenting a devil’s advocate argument. Recently I’ve seen several Bluesky posts quoting New Hampshire Senate candidate John Sununu as apparently advocating a work requirement for Medicare. He later said he misspoke and meant Medicaid. That’s plausible; after all, Medicare is specifically for retired people, and a work requirement wouldn’t make sense. Thinking that people might not have seen the correction, I replied to a couple pointing it out. One of them replied saying the Democrats were “fighting fire with fire”, taking pride in the attempt to trick readers like me. There are also the persistent assertions as fact that Trump is a child molester, though the evidence is weak and he’s never faced formal charges.
Social pressure and rational ignorance help to create and sustain reality bubbles. “Rational ignorance” is a technical term, not necessarily indicating rational thought; it means not having reasons to expend the effort to learn something. Truly rational ignorance says “I don’t know,” but it’s a slippery slope from there to agreeing with what some influential person claims. When everybody you know says something is true and your disagreement won’t improve anything, it’s easier to agree than to question it.
Distrust of elites is a factor. People with experience and expertise are often seen as adversaries trying to impose their will on ordinary people. “Influencers” who sound like regular folks know how to persuade people that everybody else is lying to them. Their lack of expertise can actually enhance their credibility with some groups.
For many people, truth has a weak connection to objective reality. This shows up in the rhetoric of the right and the left. On Truth Social, posts are automatically called “truths.” On the left, people talk about “their truths,” implying that they’re different from other people’s truth.
It isn’t easy to pop someone’s reality bubble. The very fact of disagreeing with it makes you untrustworthy, if not outright evil. But understanding why people think that way can make them less bewildering.
Further reading:
