According to Oxford Dictionaries , the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich first used the term '' post-truth '' in a 1992 essay in '' The Nation '' . Tesich writes that following the shameful truth of Watergate ( 1972 – 1974 ) , more assuaging coverage of the Iran – Contra scandal ( 1985 – 1987 ) and Persian Gulf War ( 1990 – 1991 ) demonstrates that " we , as a free people , have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world . " In 2004 Ralph Keyes used the term " post-truth era " in his book by that title . In it he argued that deception is becoming more prevalent in the current media-driven world . According to Keyes , lies stopped being treated as something inexcusable and started being viewed as something acceptable in certain situations . Which supposedly led to the beginning of the post-truth era . The same year American journalist Eric Alterman spoke of a " post-truth political environment " and coined the term " the post-truth presidency " in his analysis of the misleading statements made by the Bush administration after 9/11 in 2001 . In his 2004 book '' Post-democracy '' , Colin Crouch used the phrase " post-democracy " to mean a model of politics where " elections certainly exist and can change governments , " but " public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle , managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion , and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams " . Crouch directly attributes the " advertising industry model " of political communication to the crisis of trust and accusations of dishonesty that a few years later others have associated with post-truth politics . More recently , scholars have followed Crouch in demonstrating the role of professional political communication 's contribution to distrust and wrong beliefs , where strategic use of emotion is becoming key to gaining truth for truth statements
9/11
September 11 attacks
Post-truth politics