as a type specimen of post-truth, in which CNN’s
Alisyn Camerota engages the former Republican
Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich on crime
rates. The exchange is revealing:^11
Camerota: Violent crime is down. The economy is
ticking up.
Gingrich: It is not down in the biggest cities.
Camerota: Violent crime, murder rate is down. It is
down.
Gingrich: Then how come it’s up in Chicago and up
in Baltimore and up in Washington?
Camerota: There are pockets where certainly we are
not tackling murder.
Gingrich: Your national capital, your third biggest
city...
Camerota: But violent crime across the country is
down.
Gingrich: The average American, I will bet you this
morning, does not think crime is down, does
not think they are safer.
Camerota: But it is. We are safer and it is down.
Gingrich: No, that’s just your view.
Camerota: It is a fact. These are the national FBI
facts.
Gingrich: But what I said is also a fact. ... The cur-
rent view is that liberals have a whole set of
statistics that theoretically may be right, but
it’s not where human beings are. People are
frightened.
Camerota: But what you’re saying is, but hold on
Mr. Speaker because you’re saying liberals use
these numbers, they use this sort of magic
math. These are the FBI statistics. They’re not
a liberal organization. They’re a crime-fighting
organization.
Gingrich: No, but what I said is equally true. People
feel more threatened.
Camerota: Feel it, yes. They feel it, but the facts
don’t support it.
Ginerich: As a political candidate, I’ll go with how
people feel and let you go with the theoreti-
cians.
As I read it, this isn’t an example of the post-
truth equivalent of, as McIntyre describes it, a
“chilling exchange in the basement of the Ministry
of Love in the pages of George Orwell’s dystopian
novel 1984 .” Camerota and Gingrich are simply
talking about two different matters: crime rates
and peoples’ perceptions about crime rates. The
difference represents a cognitive illusion due to
the availability bias, in which one assesses a prob-
lem based on the most immediate and salient avail-able example, usually from the evening news that
features individual crimes, especially homicides.
Camerota is a journalist focusing on the long-term
decline of crime, whereas Gingrich is a politician
trying to garner support by appealing to peoples’
fears about crime, citing the equally true statistics
about recent upticks in crime in a handful of U.S.
cities, most notably Chicago, Baltimore, and Wash-
ington D.C., which Camerota acknowledges. Both
facts are true, so this is not an example of recent
post-truthiness but of good old-fashioned spin-doc-
toring, which has been around at least since the
1940s, when George Orwell noted: “Political lan-
guage—and with variations this is true of all politi-
cal parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is
designed to make lies sound truthful and murder
respectable, and to give an appearance of solid-
ity to pure wind.”^12 The problem can be traced
back even further, as when Edmund Burke com-
mented on the language surrounding the French
Revolution:The whole compass of the language is tried to find
sinonimies [synonyms] and circumlocutions for
massacres and murder. Things are never called by
their common names. Massacre is sometimes called
agitation, sometimes effervescence, sometimes ex-
cess; sometimes too continued an exercise of a revo-
lutionary power.^13McIntyre says that the purpose of post-truth “is
political, not epistemological,” but is not the former
subsumed in the latter? It’s all epistemological,
inasmuch as everything turns on what constitutes
reliable knowledge, and that is a very old problem
indeed.
Even the concept of post-truth is not new. The
Oxford Dictionarieshas tracked its use back to 1992,
the year we founded Skepticmagazine, the early
years of which were devoted to the “science wars,”
which were fought over the nature of truth and
whether or not science was the royal road to it.
Many thought not, coming to believe that there is
no objective reality to be discovered and no belief,
idea, hypothesis, or theory that is closer to the
truth than any other. In his 1996 Skepticarticle
“More Higher Superstitions,” Norman Levitt (co-
author of the book Higher Superstition^14 ) describes
the problem in language that could have been
written in 2019:Science studies...overlaps what is nowadays called
cultural studies, a tendency that has effaced tradi-
tional scholarship in a number of areas, and it has4 4 S K E P T I C M A G A Z I N E volume 25 number 1 2020