Meaning-
“Post-truth” has been named as the word of the year for 2016 by Oxford Dictionaries. It is referred with the meaning as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” According to Oxford Dictionaries, as this word is used as an adjective, it is mainly used in terms of politics and this term is known as “Post-Truth Politics”.
HISTORY
According to Oxford, it was first used in a January 1992 article in Nation magazine by the Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich. He sought to describe what he called “the Watergate syndrome,” whereby all the sordid facts revealed by the presidency of Richard Nixon rendered Americans disdainful …show more content…
Due to such a harsh political climate, a forceful presidential campaign seemed essential to the president and some of his key advisers. Their aggressive tactics included what turned out to be illegal espionage. In May 1972, as evidence would later show, members of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President broke into the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate headquarters, stole some of the copies of top-secret documents and bugged the office’s phones as well.
WATERGATE: THE COVER-UP
It later came to light that Nixon was not being truthful. A few days after the break-in, for instance,
• It was not immediately clear that the burglars were connected to the president, though suspicions were raised when detectives found copies of the reelection committee’s White House phone number among the burglars’ belongings. In August, Nixon gave a speech in which he swore that his White House staff was not involved in the break-in. Most voters believed him, and in November the president was reelected in a landslide.
• He arranged to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in “hush money” to the …show more content…
But truth prevailed and a once-again proud nation proudly patted itself on the back; despite the crimes committed in the highest office in our land, our system of government worked. Democracy triumphed.
But in the wake of that triumph something totally unforeseen occurred. Either because the Watergate revelations were so wrenching and followed on the heels of the war in Vietnam, which was replete with crimes and revelations of its own, or because Nixon was so quickly pardoned, we began to shy away from the truth. We came to equate truth with bad news and we didn’t want bad news anymore, no matter how true or vital to our health as a nation. We looked to our government to protect us from the truth.”
The Iran/Contra scandal under the Reagan administration only emphasized the point, Tesich argued: “President Reagan perceived correctly that the public really didn’t want to know the truth. So he lied to us, but he didn’t have to work hard at it. He sensed that we would gladly accept his loss of memory as an alibi. It had simply slipped his mind what form of government we had in our
“Post-truth” has been named as the word of the year for 2016 by Oxford Dictionaries. It is referred with the meaning as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” According to Oxford Dictionaries, as this word is used as an adjective, it is mainly used in terms of politics and this term is known as “Post-Truth Politics”.
HISTORY
According to Oxford, it was first used in a January 1992 article in Nation magazine by the Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich. He sought to describe what he called “the Watergate syndrome,” whereby all the sordid facts revealed by the presidency of Richard Nixon rendered Americans disdainful …show more content…
Due to such a harsh political climate, a forceful presidential campaign seemed essential to the president and some of his key advisers. Their aggressive tactics included what turned out to be illegal espionage. In May 1972, as evidence would later show, members of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President broke into the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate headquarters, stole some of the copies of top-secret documents and bugged the office’s phones as well.
WATERGATE: THE COVER-UP
It later came to light that Nixon was not being truthful. A few days after the break-in, for instance,
• It was not immediately clear that the burglars were connected to the president, though suspicions were raised when detectives found copies of the reelection committee’s White House phone number among the burglars’ belongings. In August, Nixon gave a speech in which he swore that his White House staff was not involved in the break-in. Most voters believed him, and in November the president was reelected in a landslide.
• He arranged to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in “hush money” to the …show more content…
But truth prevailed and a once-again proud nation proudly patted itself on the back; despite the crimes committed in the highest office in our land, our system of government worked. Democracy triumphed.
But in the wake of that triumph something totally unforeseen occurred. Either because the Watergate revelations were so wrenching and followed on the heels of the war in Vietnam, which was replete with crimes and revelations of its own, or because Nixon was so quickly pardoned, we began to shy away from the truth. We came to equate truth with bad news and we didn’t want bad news anymore, no matter how true or vital to our health as a nation. We looked to our government to protect us from the truth.”
The Iran/Contra scandal under the Reagan administration only emphasized the point, Tesich argued: “President Reagan perceived correctly that the public really didn’t want to know the truth. So he lied to us, but he didn’t have to work hard at it. He sensed that we would gladly accept his loss of memory as an alibi. It had simply slipped his mind what form of government we had in our