I think with the new ethno-nationalist movements across Europe, we are in unchartered territory. They have introduced Trump-level ignorance of science, facts, and established truths into politics, and the media are struggling with that.
Here is a concrete example: "75% of all the laws that are made in our countries every year are made by these [EU] institutions" (
Nigel Farage). That is not a spin. That is an outrageous, easily disprovable, lie.
A spin is based on facts. Any normal politician uses tricks, eg cherrypicking a certain time span for crime rates, to spin his side of the story. People are used to it, because they understand that politics isn't an exact science. They know that when someone says "crime has risen dramatically over the five months, three weeks and two days in Q1/2 2014", the mid- or long-term trend will look markedly different - why else pick that particular span? As I said, it's not pretty, it would be nice if it didn't happen, but that's politics.
Ukip? Some of their core arguments were not spins. They were lies. But the media are so used to "fair and balanced reporting" that they feel dutybound to report these lies as if they somehow were just alternative representations of something that might be true. They are not. Take another example: "£350m for the NHS". That's UKIP's equivalent of Mr Trumps "big, tall, physical, beautiful wall". It's a lie. It's never going to happen. And everyone with an IQ > 80 knows that. That's a Goebbels level lie: Make it big enough, repeat it despite factual evidence to the contrary, use a barrage of media coverage, win."
No, I am not saying that Mr Farage
is Goebbels. Nor am I saying that UKIP
is a national socialist worker's party 2.0. Nor am I saying that every UKIP voter
is a neo Nazi. But Ukip has been using propaganda mechanisms that bear an eery similarity to those of the Reichspropagandaministerium. And the combination of Mr Murdoch's media reach, combined with fake news on facebook, and psychometrics makes for an abilitiy to present, and maintain, lies that is novel, and dangerous. And people have proven less resilient to ethno-nationalist propaganda than many, including I, expected.