Breitbart does not lie
For those who have never descended into the cesspool that is Breitbart, now’s your chance: they have written something about Poland. Actually, don’t go there—I’m not going to link to them because I don’t want to be responsible for any traffic to their monstrous site. But the headline today tells you want you need to know: “Liberal Soros-Backed Newspaper Facing Hard Times in Conservative Poland Begs EU for Funding.” This is a wonderful example of the approach to truth and ethics that characterizes the Trumpeters. (Yes, I do realize that writing about this is both futile and redundant, but I need to vent.)
The reference is to an interview on the website EurActiv.com with Roman Imielski, the on-line editor of Gazeta Wyborcza. When asked “Can Europe do something about press freedom in Poland?”, Imielski responded “It is time to think about the media as a very important part of public life and of democracy in the European Union. I don’t understand why the EU has supported other sectors in crisis like coal mines or factories but they are not helping the media.” That’s what “begging” for support sounds like to the people at Breitbart.
Do I need to point out that Gazeta Wyborcza is a massive media enterprise that gets its income from advertising, not support from NGOs? Then again, the key for the headline writer was to put Soros’ name there, because that’s a dog-whistle for the antisemites. And the only reason the paper is in any difficult at all is because any firm that has or hopes to have dealings with the government must avoid advertising in what PiS calls the “polskojęzyczne” (Polish-language) media, distinguishing those outlets from truly Polish periodicals that support the regime. As for those “hard times”: the parent company of Gazeta Wyborcza, Agora Media, has been gaining value on the Warsaw stock exchange, and today one share costs 13.16 złoty, just below a six-year high. The stock did fall in value when PiS started its advertising boycott, but now all the losses have been recovered. Revenues for Agora grew 15.6% in 2016 (compared to 2015), and profits were up 1.6%. Advertising revenues in particular grew, but apparently the market analysts are disappointed that they didn’t grow more quickly.
Everyone is used to “spin” in the media and in politics, but now we are grappling with how to cope with the daily cascade of unabashed lying. In fact, it’s not really even lying. To use the technical term explained in a classic essay by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, it’s bullshit. According to Frankfurt’s distinction, when people lie they are trying to conceal the truth or convince people to believe a falsehood. When people bullshit, on the other hand, they don’t care about truth or falsehood, or about whether anyone believes them or not. The act of bullshitting is a form of self-styling, a performance that has no relation at all with the modes of communication aimed at transmitting information or argumentation.
So going forward, we need a translator from bullshit to regular human speech. So the headline above could be rendered like this: “We here at Breitbart hope to appeal to antisemites and we consider liberal journalists to be rootless cosmopolitans who we wish would go out of business.” See? Once translated, it isn’t a lie at all.