A hearing tailor-made for the post-truth era

Couch-surfing the US Congress’ January 6 hearings has been an interesting experience. These contrast startlingly with the hearings of the post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1996 in South Africa. Their structure is also totally different from the Bangladesh International Crimes Tribunal (2009), and worlds removed from the war crimes trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II.

I am referring to the structure and presentation of these tectonically important events, not the legal issues. The war crimes trials were formalised courtroom affairs. Bangladesh used a three-judge Bench, and the presentation was chaotic.  Nuremberg had four-member Benches (with alternating judges) drawn from four nations, Tokyo had 12 judges, including, famously, Radhabinod Pal, as a token colonial. South Africa relied on the personal reputations of Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela.

The January 6 hearings are clearly designed to be widely accessible in real-time on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and other social media, as well as TV. The vice-chairperson, Liz Cheney, is at centre-stage. That’s no accident, since she’s a Republican with a strong conservative pedigree.

The Q&A sessions have been crafted for easy understanding to run like media interviews, rather than court hearings. There have been careful “teaser-trailers” thrown in to hint about the direction in which the narrative will go.

These hearings pay heed to Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism “The medium is the message”. McLuhan died in 1980, when the Internet was just a research project. He believed the medium affects our behaviour and responses as individuals and as a society, more than the content carried.

He was spot-on when it comes to social media. Social media has democratised messaging and content creation. Its platforms allow random individuals to reach millions. However, it has also eroded the credibility of institutions, and downgraded public belief in expertise.

A random lunatic (or many lunatics) can, for example, assert vaccines are bad. That lunatic can reach bigger audiences than the World Health Organization, with its constellation of researchers. Who is more credible? Anti-vax loonies have been responsible for the deaths of untold numbers during the Covid-19 pandemic because they seemed credible.

There have always been anti-vax loonies. In earlier eras, when the medium was different and access to media was curated, the audience for loonies never achieved critical mass. They were not considered credible, unlike the scientists and doctors who created and evangelised vaccines that eradicated smallpox, and polio and drastically reduced cases of cholera, typhoid, measles, etc.

Fact checking and debunking nonsense doesn’t work very well, given the structure of social media. The fact-checker is usually reacting to some egregious nonsense that has already gone viral. The checker may even provide irrefutable evidence it is nonsense. But too many people have already seen, believed and amplified the nonsense before the fact-checker can react. The fact-check will reach only a slice of the people who have seen the nonsense, and not everybody who sees the fact-check will believe it, and a small number of those who believe, will bother to amplify it.

This quirk has been variously exploited by influencers, bad actors, and authoritarians to discredit institutions and expertise. It works for influencers who can better monetise any viral message, regardless of the truth quotient. It works for authoritarians since authoritarians depend on the erosion of trust in institutions, to generate trust in them.

Donald Trump told 30,573 verified lies during his presidency — that’s a daily average of 20 lies. The biggest lie he bellowed— that he won an election which he lost —was rebutted again and again.  But an armed crowd was all set to storm the Capitol, implying the rebuttals were not believed by a large chunk of Americans. If criminal charges had been filed without ado against Mr Trump and his coterie, they would just have screamed “witch-hunt” and been believed.

The hearings provide a slow-burning, social media-friendly narrative that might shift opinions and lead to a gradual transfer of credibility away from Mr Trump. Will this structure penetrate the MAGA armour? It is a tedious, expensive way to counter a lie. But it may be the only form of rebuttal that works with social media.