“Alternative Facts” Will Be Kellyanne Conway’s PR Legacy

Kellyanne Conway’s “altern­at­ive facts” will be her PR legacy.

The term “altern­at­ive facts” was coined by US President Donald Trump’s coun­sel­lor Kellyanne Conway. She was attempt­ing to explain why a lie was­n’t a lie when told by the Trump administration.

It’s a große Lüge.

So, what?

Anyone can utter a stu­pid phrase in pub­lic, espe­cially under pres­sure from tough report­ers. As PR pro­fes­sion­als, should­n’t we cut a fel­low prac­ti­tion­er some slack?

Conway did more than say some­thing wrong on one occasion:

“After Trump’s inaug­ur­a­tion, Conway was embroiled in a series of con­tro­ver­sies: using the phrase “altern­at­ive facts” to describe fic­ti­tious and dis­proven attend­ance num­bers for Trump’s inaug­ur­a­tion; speak­ing mul­tiple times of a “Bowling Green mas­sacre” that nev­er occurred; and claim­ing that Michael Flynn had the full con­fid­ence of the pres­id­ent hours before he was dis­missed. Members of Congress from both parties called for an invest­ig­a­tion of an appar­ent eth­ics viol­a­tion after she pub­licly endorsed com­mer­cial products asso­ci­ated with the pres­id­ent’s daugh­ter, Ivanka Trump. In June 2019, the US Office of Special Counsel recom­men­ded that Conway be fired for “unpre­ced­en­ted” mul­tiple viol­a­tions of the Hatch Act of 1939.“
Source: Wikipedia

It’s not like we’re mak­ing a hen from a feath­er here. Conway’s beha­viour is delib­er­ate. “Alternative facts” is a dan­ger­ous turn of phrase bor­der­ing on fascism.

In his fam­ous nov­el Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a new lan­guage favoured by the min­ions of total­it­ari­an powers. He called it Newspeak.

“Newspeak is the fic­tion­al lan­guage of Oceania, a total­it­ari­an super­state that is the set­ting of the 1949 dysto­pi­an nov­el Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. In the nov­el, the Party cre­ated Newspeak  to meet the ideo­lo­gic­al require­ments of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania. Newspeak is a con­trolled lan­guage of sim­pli­fied gram­mar and restric­ted vocab­u­lary designed to lim­it the indi­vidu­al’s abil­ity to think and artic­u­late “sub­vers­ive” con­cepts such as per­son­al iden­tity, self-expres­sion and free will. Such con­cepts are crim­in­al­ized as thoughtcrime since they con­tra­dict the pre­vail­ing Ingsoc ortho­doxy.“
Source: Wikipedia

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It does­n’t mat­ter if someone tries to shut down the oppos­i­tion by scream­ing “fake news” or “words are violence.”

Such con­cepts are man­u­fac­tured by fac­tions who can­not stom­ach being ques­tioned, which seems to be the new black in today’s media land­scape. Oxford Dictionaries even named “post-truth” Word of the Year in 2016.

Fear might also be an under­ly­ing psy­cho­lo­gic­al factor for want­ing to under­mine and blame the news media:

The US pres­id­ency under Donald Trump sure has made its mark in more than one way:

“If you use his­tory and philo­sophy as a guide, it’s easy to see par­al­lels between Trump’s words and those of the most reviled fas­cists in his­tory. That scares me and should scare you too,” says Jason Stanley, a philo­sophy pro­fess­or at Yale University.

Thanks to Kellyanne Conway, we can now add more Newspeak to our post­mod­ern vocabulary.

“Alternative facts” will become Conway’s defin­it­ive PR legacy.