The White House “has such little regard — day in, day out — for facts, for truth, and calls us fake news for stories that they don’t like.”
That was CNN anchor Jake Tapper this week, challenging President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, who has famously claimed that the administration uses “alternative facts.”
Reaction to the live interview was swift, with Tapper garnering both praise and condemnation. Some partisans argue that the media’s response to the spin coming out of the White House — and from the president himself — isn’t fair. Politics, they point out, is now in constant campaign mode for Democrats and Republicans alike, and that Trump, Conway and others in the administration are guilty of nothing more than campaign-style rhetoric.
But governing and campaigning do remain separate, if not entirely discrete, activities. And when a campaign’s tendency to embrace false narratives bleeds into governing, serious trouble can result. Take Greece as a cautionary tale. The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday published a stunning report that details just how bad things can get when a government embraces “alternative facts” and scapegoats truth-tellers.
Greece, of course, has been buffeted by a debt crisis for nearly a decade and had to impose severe austerity measures starting in 2010 to gain a bailout from the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
But it now turns out that no one should have been blindsided by the Greek economic collapse. The government of Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, which fell in 2009, fiddled with data to hide the true size of the budget deficit, the Journal writes. The government reported that its debt was 6 percent as a percentage of GDP when it was actually more than 15 percent. The European Union ultimately concluded that the Greek government had misreported economic data for years.
To solve this misreporting problem, Greece’s new government, led by George Papandreou, brought in U.S.-based IMF staffer Andreas Georgiou, a Greek citizen, to serve as the country’s first independent head of statistics. Then-finance minister George Papaconstantinou said his 2010 hiring of the well-respected Georgiou was a necessity. “Our credibility on statistics was zero,” he said. “We needed a stickler for rules.”
Andreas GeorgiouPetros Giannakouris/AP
A stickler they got. Georgiou quickly brought Greece’s books in line with accepted accounting practices, and soon the European Union certified that the Greek government had reported its deficit “in full” — at 15.8 percent.
And what did Georgiou get for his efforts? A civilian medal of honor? A bonus for all his long hours at his desk? Nope. He might end up in prison.
Greece’s descent into economic depression has unleashed a vicious nationalist element in Greek politics. “The trinity of blame,” writes Britain’s Financial Times, turns on conspiracy theories: “the IMF, Berlin and the center-left government of George Papandreou … are responsible for imposing an undemocratic and unjustified bailout program on an unwitting nation.”
As a result, for the past half-dozen years Georgiou has been on the receiving end of relentless attacks from various Greek political leaders. Nationalists insist he, as well as Papandreou and Papaconstantinou, was in league with evil foreign creditors. Georgiou has been accused of treason on national television, an accusation that caught on and helped lead to false certification charges against the statistician. One Greek economist who embraces the conspiracy theories insists the deficit in 2009 was a quite manageable 3.9 percent of GDP.
Time and again political pressure has led to investigations of Georgiou. “Four times in four years, Greek investigators or prosecutors have concluded that Mr. Georgiou merely applied EU accounting rules and committed no crime,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “Senior politicians and judges have nonetheless kept the accusations alive. He could face five trials, and life imprisonment in one case.” The latest investigation grew out of “tabloid allegations, under headlines such as ‘The Emails of Treason.'”
Truth and facts remain harried in Greece, the Financial Times reports. “Oddly, those most responsible [for the debt crisis] — the center-right government that preceded Mr. Papandreou and ran up the ruinous deficits, the clientelistic public sector that continues to leach taxpayer money, a civic culture that tolerates evasion — go almost unmentioned in political discourse.”
Georgiou left his position as Greece’s chief statistician and in 2015 returned to the U.S., where he found conspiracy theories had suddenly taken center stage in America’s political arena as well. But he hasn’t had much time to muse on whether the U.S. is following Greece down the rabbit hole. He lamented: “I’m spending most of my waking moments on defending myself.”
— Douglas Perry
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