The colour of lies

Love him or loathe him, there’s no denying that Donald Trump lies—far, far more, in fact, than any other US president before him (1) (one boast which, if he made it, would be true 😅). To put it into some sort of context, the Pulitzer Prize-winning news organisation PolitiFact rates nearly nine in every ten of his disputed statements to be untrue to some extent (11% half-false; 19% mostly false; 38% completely false; and a further 19% so false as to be ridiculous). In spite of this, today he becomes president of the United States, and for the second time.

How can this be?

Well, as this interesting article explains, the answer may lie in the type of lies Trump deploys: what psychologists have termed ‘blue’ lies.

Blue lies are falsehoods, told on behalf of a group, that benefit or protect that group’s members and/or undermine its opponents. Trump has bombarded us with so many, but let me remind you of just a few—claiming that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating residents’ pets; accusing the press of being ‘the enemy of the American people’; and perpetuating the lie that the Democrats stole the 2020 election from him.

In cases such as these, whether something is demonstrably true or false becomes secondary to its usefulness as a weapon in the battle of ‘them-against-us’. It has been argued that those in the ‘us’ group may see statements of this kind less as factual lies and more as supporting their own wider, emotional ‘truths’.

How can we stop more air ‘turning blue’?

When it comes to winning partisan audiences over to the facts, who is speaking matters hugely. As the article goes on to say, research shows the most persuasive to be those who look and sound like those audiences and are ‘ideologically sympathetic’ to them. But according to those same researchers, even if we aren’t in the same ideological group there are some things that we as information writers can do. They include:

·   Going beyond simply fact-checking and flagging up lies, to crafting compelling, truthful stories;

·   Not relying solely on text but also using imagery or graphics to illustrate our points; or better still,

·   Doing both of the above at the same time.

These techniques may seem simple but they have been found to be effective. And given the frightening degradation of both political rhetoric the world over (we have our own ‘blue liars’ here, too) and attempts to police it (2), I for one will be doing what I can to heed them. Will you?

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1 George Edwards, former editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly.

2 ‘In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced an end to Meta’s eight-year partnership with PolitiFact, citing a shift in the political and social landscape’ (Wikipedia).

Photo by Jacob Morch on Unsplash, with the wording adapted slightly by me.