The Post Office Mess Is Meant to Exhaust You. Don’t Let It.; The New York Times, August 17, 2020

Charlie Warzel, The New York Times; The Post Office Mess Is Meant to Exhaust You. Don’t Let It.

Trump is “flooding the zone.” It’s a form of modern censorship.

"Despite Mr. Swan’s persistent and admirable grilling and calling out of the president’s lies, a number of Mr. Trump’s claims (including one about climate change) slipped past unchallenged. Had Mr. Swan rebutted each one, the conversation would have ground to a halt — there were simply too many lies per minute.

It’s exhausting and deliberate, part of a strategy best explained by the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon to “flood the zone” with garbage information. Vox’s Sean Illing detailed this in February, suggesting that the strategy was one reason that Mr. Trump’s impeachment did little to change public opinion of the president.

Flooding the zone, Mr. Illing wrote, “seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stories. And it produces a certain nihilism in which people are so skeptical about the possibility of finding the truth that they give up the search.” It is, as many have noted, a form of modern censorship and has an effect on the media, causing journalists to waste time not just chasing lies but also repeating them. Each time we speak out against a lie — especially if we’re not careful in how we frame it — we risk also giving it the oxygen it needs to spread."