“Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.”
This statement might have been written last year – or last week – as a comment on the current state of political reporting. It is actually from Lying in Politics, an article by Hannah Arendt published in The New York Review of Books in November 1971. Her reflections were prompted by the release of the Pentagon Papers, which provided devastating evidence of the discrepancy between US government narrative about its role in the Vietnam War and the actual policies of engagement.
