Deconstructing the Pernicious Political Half-Truth: An Analysis of Fox News and NowThis
By: Graham Glusman
Tags: Politics, Media, Free Speech, Journalism, Reporting

We live in the age of post-truth, that much is clear. Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion” — and inaugurated by the OED as the 2016 Word of the Year — few words other than ‘post-truth’ can so adroitly summarize the morbid condition of our body politic. (‘Funereal’ and ‘lugubrious’ could be competing for second and third place, however.)

Inundated though we are with fraudulent Russian Facebook accounts, maliciously edited videos, and innumerable assertions by a president whose analyzed statements are mostly or completely false a cumulative 68 percent of the time,¹ “fake news,” in the post-truth era, is actually not Public Enemy №1.

Sadly, another aberration reigns supreme in our new epoch: the half-truth.

For while deep-fake videos and anti-vaxxer conspiracies certainly poison the well of public discourse, genuine belief in such phenomena remains the purview of the (for now) relatively innocuous fringes. Our present state of affairs — in which one half of the country distrusts entirely the news sources of the other — is the dirty work of the half-truth. Notable for what it excludes and conceals, the half-truth is particularly pernicious because it is, in essence, true, ish.

The ascendance of ‘post-truth’ in popular usage began in 2016 (source: OxfordLanguages).

The half-truth’s power is its subtlety, for unlike a blatant lie, it is exceedingly difficult to refute. To understand its formidable potency, an example of the half-truth in action is perhaps needed. A Fox News opinion piece from January 27th — published in the heart of the president’s impeachment trial in the Senate — serves our purposes well.

Written by Fox News contributor Deroy Murdock, the article, entitled, “Trump Senate trial — Democrat impeachment managers voted AGAINST military aid to Ukraine,” asserts that House impeachment managers Jerold Nadler, Zoe Lofgren, and Hakeem Jeffries all voted against military aid for Ukraine on July 26, 2018 — well before President Trump’s pressure campaign.

If true, this is a damning accusation. The crux of the Democrats’ argument against President Trump in his impeachment trial was that by denying Ukraine vital military assistance, the president placed his political interests over the security interests of the country. Murdock quotes the impeachment managers, who at different points each stressed the importance of the aid intended for Ukraine.

The revelation that Nadler, Lofgren, and Jeffries voted against Ukrainian aid in 2018 seemingly exposes them as unabashed hypocrites, and undermines the foundation of the Democrats’ argument against President Trump. Murdock helpfully provides a hyperlink that redirects to the final vote count of the ‘yeas’ and ‘nays,’ confirming his damning critique. Or so it seems.

In truth, the aforementioned Democrats voted against the “Fiscal Year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act,” a 789-page omnibus bill that authorizes over $700 billion for the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and Overseas Contingency Operations. Murdock does not provide a link to the bill itself (he only provides links to the vote counts), nor does he acknowledge that it is a general appropriations bill that covers expenditures ranging from nuclear nonproliferation ($1.8 billion) to the defense health program ($33 billion). Two hundred fifty million dollars of Ukrainian aid was indeed included in the bill, but it constitutes less than .04 percent of the total allocated budget.

Ukrainian aid was a minuscule part of the NDAA’s massive 2019 budget.

Characterizing Nadler, Lofgren, and Jeffries as voting against Ukrainian aid in a bill in which Ukrainian aid amounts to less than half of a tenth of a percent is like accusing Murdock of contributing to global warming by exhaling — technically true, insofar as all of us individually contribute by breathing (that is to say, we really don’t), but inherently misleading and irrelevant. Murdock’s assertion that the impeachment managers “voted against military aid to Ukraine” is, therefore, the quintessential half-truth.

What makes claims like Murdock’s so poisonous in the public sphere is that they aren’t incorrect in the traditional sense, and they’re exceedingly difficult to prove wrong. I, for instance, had to (1) read the article (already a big step considering that 6 out of 10 people share articles on Twitter after having only read the headline), (2) go out of my way to find the referenced bill, and (3) read enough of the bill to confirm that Murdock is a half-truther.

By contrast, if Fox News’s readers are anything like 59 percent of the people on Twitter, they will read the headline, believe it, and share it without once opening the article to confirm its truth.²

Anyone who seriously tries to refute the article’s claim would have to find and read the bill itself, an act few are desirous or willing to do. And, of course, those who do stand by the article wouldn’t technically be incorrect. Technically.

With relative ease, a misleading half-truth like Murdock’s can subtly worm its way into the public forum, infect our dialogue, increase mutual distrust, and deepen the chasm that divides our political discourse. It does so, without actually being a lie.

Nor are such half-truths the exclusive domain of the political right. The far-left social media news outlet NowThis famously distributed a video on Facebook (where it has 15 million followers) and YouTube (503,000 followers) called “Donald Trump Can’t Get the Facts Right About NAFTA.” In it, they repeatedly refute Donald Trump’s claim that President Clinton signed NAFTA, superimposing words like “FALSE” and “NOPE” over clips of President Trump speaking.

NowThis alleged that Bill Clinton did not sign NAFTA. He did. Technically.

Bill Clinton signed NAFTA on December 8th, 1993. You can watch the signing on YouTube.

When asked by PolitiFact to justify this blatant lie, NowThis editor Sarah Frank argued that it was George Bush who signed NAFTA, which is true. Sort of. In December 1992 George H. Bush signed the unratified version of the treaty before it was sent to Congress for approval, but after he lost his reelection campaign to Clinton. It was Clinton who signed the final, sightly modified treaty. Much like Murdock, the editors at NowThis rely on what is ultimately a minor technicality to make a sweeping and misleading claim. They’re not incorrect, but they’re certainly not correct, either.

In 1758, Benjamin Franklin wrote in Poor Richards Almanac that “half the truth is often a great lie.” These words remain stingingly true in the post-truth era. Half-truths like Murdock’s and NowThis’s are dangerous precisely because of their prima facie veracity. It is what half-truths deliberately conceal, rather than reveal, that makes them so virulent, and it is inconceivable that Deroy Murdock and his editors at Fox News, as well as those at NowThis, weren’t aware of their duplicity.

¹ PolitiFact, a non-partisan fact-checking website operated by the Poynter Institute, found that President Trump’s analyzed statements were “mostly false” 20% of the time, “false” 34% of the time, and “pants on fire” 14% of the time. They were “true” or “mostly true” only 14% of the time.

² This fact is based on a 2016 study titled “Social Clicks: What and Who Gets Read on Twitter?” Conducted by political scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute, it found that 59 percent of shared URLs posted on Twitter are never clicked on by the posters. Meaning, the posters aren’t reading what they are sharing beyond the headline.