Ethics, Truth and Post-Truth: Political and social implications – Modern Diplomacy

I want to reflect on ethics, truth and post-truth in the context ofaccelerated changes in the economy, politics, society, culture and digitalknowledge, information and communication media, which give rise to cyberspaceand the internet.

The power of a journalist, reaching millions of people from behind hiscomputer, is controlled by national and international laws; professional normsbacked by numerous journalist associations, instructions from his media and theeveryday larger and commented code of ethics. And we all know about theduty-based ethics focussed on the importance of truth; the progressive ethicsbased of investigative journalism, and consequentialist ethics focused onsociety; does the article offend someone?. Can thepublication of a certainissue do more harm than good, evenif the facts used were correct?.

What about losing my job, or been attacked verbally and physically? butethics light, pass by a coloured crystal of personal values, personalcircumstances and his own loyalties wherever they are: to the general public,to the customers, the supporters and the subscribers, to the employer, thecorporation, the colleagues and the professional community and to himself.

In the real world of reporting, ethics seen by the public or seen by thejournalist, are different.

There is a different perception of ethics between the public and thejournalist, and we must establish the differences between the media and thejournalists work. The public believes, that it is the journalists who is dedicatedto manipulate the information, and most of the time, it is the means of themedia that censures or favors the publication for financial or politicalreasons.

Yesterday I received a complaint from a journalist who after doing anextensive interview with the Russian ambassador representative to the OPCWabout the role of his country in Syria and the use of chemical weapons in Duma,no newspaper wanted to publish.

Quality, Economy and Ethics

On the side of the journalist, it is important that they be paid welland that the expenses incurred to do their work be covered; the lack ofresources makes use of second-hand information, copied from social media.

For example, last week the official visit of a president in theNetherlands was covered by the medias. To report on the official visit, ajournalist I know, had to go to a city that is three hours away and the mediadid not paid the trip; since the journalist resolved to copying and translatingthe news that he found in other media and social media, which maybe they werecopied in turn, the original source, the authenticity, the veracity of theinterviews and the context of reality were lost, causing the journalist to fallinto a lack of ethics and lack of quality of the news.

Scope of information and ethics

The limitation of resources in the media due to the economic crisis, hasbrought a fragmentation of the media that multiply and become smaller andsectorial, specializing in niches but with less scope; since the reader cannotread 80 newspapers per day, they better select their reading by topics. Forexample, we are dedicated to the diplomatic world and internationalorganizations, with a first-class content but a limited public.

The fact that journalism no longer provides a living for people who workin the industry or invest in it, has reinforced the corruption that has alwaysovershadowed journalism and has spawned more owners who buy up media to promotetheir wider political and business interests.

Working conditions in newsrooms online and offline are equally poor.A generation of young people in the journalism schools around the world havefew quality jobs to look forward to. Some will survive as freelancers, butmany, are destined for advertising, corporate communications or public andpolitical information jobs. Now more than ever before, journalism income is notdetermined by attachment to a single income ow, but it is based upon creativesolutions to the funding crisis and may include non-traditional funding, or amix of civic, market and public resources.

As commercial organisations, NGOs and governments seek to manipulatenews, profit-hungry social media platforms undermine quality journalism, andpolitical propaganda masquerade as truth, journalists unions are campaigningfor a media environment which embraces the core values of journalism.

Postmodernity has many ways from its definition to its interpretation orunderstanding.

What has become called post-truth, seems the resurrection of theimaginary of Jorge Luis Borges, called magical realism and that Borgespublished in 1935. The writer admits that it is a set of stories written, inbaroque language, by an irresponsible, that gets to falsify and misrepresentother peoples stories, although the stories are based on real crimes.

The writer also states that the volume of stories is nothing more thanappearance, than a surface of images; for that reason it can please thereaders. That is, to seduce them, attract them, deceive them.

For example, the text entitled The Atrocious Redeemer LazarusMorell, was written between 1933 and 1934, and it reinterprets and adaptsto fiction the historical, economic, political, racial and culturalconsequences derived from the claim of Father Bartolom de las Casas to EmperorCarlos V, by means of which he asks to replace the indigenous labor, already inthe process of extinction, by black slaves brought from Africa.

Could something be more like post-truth, than this eagerness tomisrepresent the facts in order to present them to the readers, to theaudience, to society as if they were true?

There are no barriers between reality and fiction, between truth andlies, between subjectivity and objectivity.

The Oxford Dictionary declared the post-truth word of the year in2016. This famous word, would not have been possible without economicconditions, such as neoliberalism, the market empire and the unethicalneoprotectionism; of a political nature, such as populism and radicalnationalism; social and moral, such as xenophobia, the rejection of the poorfor being poor and racism; of a cultural nature, such as multiculturalism;demographic order, such as mass migration flows through poverty, wars orreligion and above all, technoscientific order, especially with thetechnological revolution and what they call the digital world thenetwork society that chooses to use terms like cyberspace ,cyberworld, cyberculture, cyberpolitics.

The liberal production and consumption system, as well as itslegal-political structures, experienced in 2008 a deep fissure of an ethicalnature, generated by the black September of the United States Stock Exchange.The serious economic consequences, spread like wildfire across Europe and Asia.These conditions gave rise to forms of degradation of power and the exercise ofknowledge and politics, which are resolved, in a certain way, in what we nowcall post-truth.

From the value of the presumably false, to the presumably true; on thebasis that giving up false judgments would be giving up life. Admit thatnon-truth is a condition of life: this means, confronting ethics in a dangerousway beyond good and evil.

The act of thinking, of asking suspicious questions and of challengingestablished knowledge as absolute truths, translates into the transmutation ofall values characterized by the lack of ethical commitment and by thepredominance of individualism and particular interests, over those of commonvalue.

The history of truth, seen socially, has developed in close relation toreason and non-truth, has gone hand in hand with the history of the State, as aregulator of the order and guarantee of the rulers over the governed.

Under the pretext of owning the truth, chiefs of tribes, empires,caliphates, despotic, tyrannical, liberal and totalitarian regimes have beenerected. However, its most accepted form has been attached to democracy as apolitical system. Today, and as a result of the validity of the post-politicalas a degradation of democracy and the ethical misery of the parties, this placehas been occupied by post-truth. This phenomenon, as we stated at thebeginning, would not have been possible without the technological revolution,the digitalization of information systems, production, consumption,communication and the creation of cybersociety and technocracy as analternative to the welfare state.

Post-truth, gives rise to manipulation and discursive and politicaldeception, based on a demagogic process of impersonation of objectivity. Thepost-truth has created the smokescreen in which the post-democracy is agitated,with a serious deficit of meaning in concepts, now inflated and distorted, suchas the homeland, the people, the citizen, law, identity or freedom. To this isadded, the indifference of politics to the facts themselves, however inhumanthey may be. In addition, it gives rise to the divorce between power andpolitics, since the former is exercised in a global scope, while the latter islimited to national states.

It is paradoxical that, in the framework of the digital era, inpolitical terms, the post-tactical is worshiped, and the distance to thepost-right (tyranny or totalitarianism) is shortened. Hence the non-truth, thatis, the false and imposter of objectivity is an unpredictable danger.

The postfactual threat promotes false arguments, involving them inmoving and amplified stories in the resonance chambers of the network anddigital communication, until changing behaviors and influencing the decision ofthe masses. These resonance chambers are, in the postfactual, controlled andactivated by machines or robots and are capable of generating a huge amount ofinformation and news through the private superpowers such as Facebook,Google, Twitter, Instagram and others.

In the field of media communication, the worst threat to qualityjournalism, to honest, rigorous and respectful journalism, is the false news.The proliferation of false news that has brought the chaos to the world ofnews, at the same time, have revalued the role of the press as a reliablereference for information and to control the abuses of power

And we give way to securitization, as a trick of the politician. Thetrick, is the displacement that the governments of these times of latemodernity, globalization and interdependence make of the genuine concern of thecitizens, changing them for other problems. For example, given the inability tosolve issues such as citizen insecurity, unemployment or growing poverty, thiskind of politicians of securitization present other problems such as specularterrorism; or to confuse the problem of immigration with that of national andpersonal security; or an alleged international campaign to discredit the State.

Securitizing is, then, maintaining the state of affairs by using thepublic attention diversion resource.

Post-truth is an emotional root argument, which causes what appears tobe true, to be more important than the true itself. It creates the illusionthat there may be an alternative objectivity to ostensible objectivity. As itsfield of cultivation is public opinion, there, the post-truth makes concreteand objective facts less relevant than simply appealing to emotions or personalconvictions.

Journalist Eric Alterman spoke of a post-true political environment whenreferring to the Bush administrations misleading arguments about the tragicterrorist attacks of 9/11 and the consequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The political language that adheres to the exercise of postmodern poweruses the arguments of securitization and post-truth. After historical processessuch as Hiroshima and Nagasaky, the Cold War, and most especially, 9/11 in theUnited States, the securitization of international relations has become, in thepolitical and business field, a kind of discipline from fear.

The risk of international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction havemade internal security an unprecedented importance in the United States andprivate companies, especially in sectors such as transportation, informationtechnology, finance, health, pharma, education and oil industry who areincreasingly called and committed by the State to safeguard the internalsecurity of the nation.

The corporate environment has substantially increased the recruitment ofsecurity personnel, communication experts and specialists in digital culture,because, in addition to having to deal with the direct and collateral effectsof the fear discipline, they have to deal with strategies for managing thereputational risk, constantly threatened by rumors or discredit campaigns basedon false news and the non-sanctioned objectives of post-truth.

The political problem of the journalist is to know if it is possible toconstitute a new politics of truth by changing the political, economic,institutional regime of truth production. The truth is not somethingabsolute or immovable. The truth is a dynamic, social, historical, scientificand political product, which is built and constitutes the heat ofphilosophical, ideological, economic and social disputes, which take place in aspecific space and at a specific time.

The truth is power, and vice versa. Also the lie is a power.

The limits of truth and justice have been challenged, to promote an eraof post-truth and post-justice, full of true lies and imagery, which seem toplace us before the dilemma of having to choose between democracy or post-democracy,between elections and false referendums or Respect for laws established byconsensus or social majority. Post-truth as a resource of legitimization ofneopopulism has degenerated the exercise of politics and the performance of thefunction of the State and the rule of law, displacing rationality by emotionunder a set of massive promises never fulfilled.

In todays world we are suffering from a crisis of governance, due tothe neutrality of the institutional framework and the rule of law. The world isheading towards a bankruptcy of authority and the system of representation,which exhibits a democracy that is increasingly lacking in content andmalleable in its essence, which puts world peace at risk.

The post-truth, are nothing more than partial truths; the post-truth isneither a lie, nor innocent, but it is not the whole truth either, according toJordi Gracia (Post-truth is not a lie,) the false arguments of thepost-truth attempt to seduce the most economically and socially vulnerablesectors due to the effect of global toxicity virality generated by theinformative and misinformation of social networks and digital platforms.

Post-truth is something that operates well beyond the reach of falsenews. In fact, in its twisted logic, it is much more important than something,whether true or false, it seems to be true, because this is going to be moreimportant than the truth itself. Not only do the truths lie, but the lies liein a sinuous, invisible and everyday dialectic that ends up being accepted asthe appearance of truth.

In todays business dynamics, the market economy is giving space to thereputation economy. What it is, fundamentally, is how the reputation of acompany has as much value as that of its financial assets. What is the factorthat gives this relief ?: the risk factor.

The companys reputation translates into credibility and reliability ofits investors, customers, employees, suppliers, public opinion and society. Andin the same way that the image was preserved from the risks and dares of theadvertising language, capable of making promises not completely enforceable,or, false, also the reputation must be safe from the claims subjective andaxiologically neutral of post-truth and post-fact.

Building trust lies, is one of the great challenges of corporatecommunication. Hence the need to align, according to the approach of theconsultant and communication strategist which is to safeguard the reputationalcapital of the company or institution.

The characteristic, par excellence, of that environment is given at thealternative media, capable of, through a tweet, a message via Whatsapp, anInstagram or Snapchat image, or, a statement on Facebook, a blog particular oran alert to the virtual communities of LinkedIn, create a parallel publicopinion, more belligerent, more fierce and less respectful than public opinion,different from the published opinion, which is structured in conventionalmedia.

The overwhelming force of autonomy that fuels the digital turn ofcommunication has diminished the credibility of the media, which are afundamental support of corporate communication. The dance between non-truth andpost-truth generates a space that can only lead society, as a whole, to aninadmissible predominance of chaos.

We live in the era of digital information and knowledge. But do wecontrol the digital information or does it control us, supported by theartificial and the posthuman? Will there be an algorithm that goes ahead withthe answer? Perhaps.

From our partner InternationalAffairs

Related

More here:

Ethics, Truth and Post-Truth: Political and social implications - Modern Diplomacy