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Truth Loses Out: Lies Provide Long-term Entertainment, Truth is Boring and Momentary [1]
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Date: 2025-07-08
On the left, we must ask ourselves how lies came to dominate our news media and political culture. The right’s media landscape is a flurry of lies and distortions. The mainstream press often uncritically repeats the same lies with minimal push-back.
Lies are dramatic and entertaining, as they draw our attention and hold it. Big lies told by politicians have drawn our interest for months and even years. Reports of truths that counter and expose the lies usually last for a day or a week.
Lies are great for the media business over the long term. Reporting the truth that exposes the lie is usually a blip on the media’s radar.
The truth is sobering, rational, and sometimes embarrassing or guilt-inducing for those who believed lies and found out later they were wrong. It is not fun.
The WMD lie is a perfect example of our fascination and romance with lies. It created a whirlwind of drama resembling a political soap opera.
There were claims of immediate threat (beware the “mushroom cloud”). There was a heroic President and his deputies claiming to valiantly protect the homeland. There was the CNN coverage showing massive explosions in real time during the bombing of Baghdad. There was the 2 trillion dollars spent on the war after it was claimed by its promoters that the war would pay for itself. There were about 3,500 US soldiers who died in combat, many more wounded and an estimated half a million Iraqis killed.
And the WMD lie underpinned it all.
In March 2003, Bush had a 65% approval rating in his handling of the war. Almost all those supporters were conned by believing in Bush’s carefully orchestrated fantasy of WMDs.
It was an entertaining made for TV drama based on a colossal lie that created a sea of death, destruction, and budgetary red ink for the US. It was a disaster for US credibility and leadership in the world.
When the truth came out that there were no WMDs, the drama subsided quickly. The entertainment value went into negative territory as it was declared that the “intelligence was flawed.” Luckily for Republicans, no one was held responsible by the media or the Congress. The embarrassment was too great to acknowledge. The truth had to disappear fast. It failed the entertainment test.
But while Bush finally admitted he was wrong about the intelligence, he did not acknowledge his failure in the appointment and encouragement of the war hawks in his cabinet who clearly wanted a war with Iraq by whatever means.
Many minimally aware citizens denied they were wrong or that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell duped them. Who wants to admit they were conned? The WMDs must have been sent to Syria.
The more honest people admitted their error but “wanted to look forward and not back” as they changed their reasons for supporting the war or quickly forgot the whole affair. Many criminals and people ashamed of their past actions prefer to only look forward.
The news media was complicit in the mass forgetting not wanting to irritate the 65% of their readers and viewers who were supporters of the war or the Republican leadership who were the authors of the war.
Truth was an embarrassment and ruined most all the entertainment value of the war for voters. Acknowledging the truth ranged from being boring to irrelevant to guilt-inducing.
The war lasted 8 years. The fallout from acknowledging that there were no WMDs lasted perhaps a week or maybe a month or two but was largely invisible.
Time to move on. Here, big lies and their negative results seem to last for years while truth appears to be momentary and easily forgettable.
So, let’s move a few decades forward in the discussion of our collective paltry respect for the truth.
Another colossal lie was that the 2020 election was “stolen” from the President.
Few things create entertainment value and drama like a powerful person being victimized or brought down. One of the most powerful people in the world was cast as a poor, pathetic, victim according to the narrative. A plaintive tone suffused the President’s statements, “It’s so unfair” or “They hate me [for no reason].” The President was “robbed” of his rightful position as President by the deep state.
The media landscape became like a reality TV show as the two sides squared off – the believers and the unbelievers concerning the stolen election. The drama went on for months culminating in the attack on the US Capital by armed, violent supporters convinced of the President’s victimhood.
More drama occurred when these supporters were convicted of crimes. Yet more drama occurred when the President freed all the Jan. 6 attackers after he won the 2024 election.
Some Republican legislators laughably claimed the attackers were tourists and said they were harmless.
Lies were piled upon lies to keep viewers interested and involved.
It appeared that the truth that the election was NOT stolen would be forever suppressed and would never see the light of day.
However, the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News deposed its news personnel under oath. The network which broadcast the lies and misinformation that the election was stolen for months was put under a microscope.
A whole series of Fox broadcasters and managers, including Murdock himself, consistently said they did not believe the election was stolen for a minute. They therefore would not even attempt to provide any proof to defend their false claims about the “stolen election.” They settled the lawsuit instead.
It was all a lie designed to cast the President as a victim, energize his supporters, and make more money for the Fox network whose viewers demanded that the network support the President’s lie.
Again, the lie and its surrounding drama went on for many months. But the reporting of the truth including the $787M judgment against Fox News for defaming Dominion Voting Systems by falsely claiming that their voting machines allowed the election to be “stolen” was shot-lived and widely ignored.
The lie was just so much more entertaining and had so much more staying power and economic value than the truth.
The truth is outgunned and outmatched. It did not stand a chance, and this is how we got to the point of living in a sea of lies told to us by right-wing politicians.
I predict the acceptance of these lies will be our downfall, our nemesis, our fatal flaw that will lead to the death of our nation as we have known it.
Hundreds of millions of daily interactions depend on trust and truthfulness. When a nation’s leaders tell a continuous stream of lies for years on end, a society that imitates this behavior is bound to fail in countless ways.
It is now taken for granted by honest observers that if the President’s mouth is moving or his hands are typing, he is lying.
The Washington Post has a long, long list of the President’s lies and distortions (on average, a little over 6 per day). In contrast, the Post did not even count Obama’s or Bush’s lies since there were so few.
Truth is out of fashion with its associated negative entertainment value. No one seemed to care if they were lied to by the President and his cabinet. In fact a sizeable minority seemed to positively enjoy it as long as the negative impact was felt by others and not by themselves.
The people upset by the lies continued to watch the media either repeating or criticizing the lies. It was a win-win situation for the mainstream media as both sides are riveted by the lies for very different reasons.
Lies serve their purpose as media money-makers and magnets for attention. Attention and the advertising revenue that follows has become the currency the Internet. In a social media-based world, lies are likely to get droves of “likes” while the truth is more likely to get ignored, blocked, or deleted.
Reporting on and opposing lies is fundamentally boring — the greatest sin for a modern, for-profit media organization.
The media savvy creators of clever, fear-inducing, or amusing lies know this and take full advantage of our lack of tolerance for boredom.
Telling lies is and will remain a winning strategy for them.
We conclude with a quote attributed variously to Mark Twain or Winston Churchill describing the advantage that lies and misinformation have over truth based on their speed of adoption and travel (which has been dramatically increased in the Internet age).
“A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”
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