The slow, painful death of the thing we call Truth
The truth is dead.
And unfortunately it wasn’t due to a quick bullet in the head.
No, truth has died a slow, painful and agonizing death. Once mighty, it has been crushed beneath an avalanche of deception, propaganda, twisted information, corporate spin, political non-answers and outright lies.
Facts don’t matter anymore, only perception does. There’s a good reason a significant percentage of Republicans think Barack Obama’s a Muslim despite the lack of facts supporting such an accusation. Who needs facts when you have warped and incorrect information being churned out by the right wing opinion machine? It doesn’t matter what the reality is, it only matters what people THINK the reality is. Change the perception, change the reality. Simple.
There was a time when journalists were slaves to the truth. They yearned to discover it, to add to it, to clarify it. The facts were paramount.
No longer.
Now commentators and bloggers on both the left and right manufacture their own truth, facts be damned. It’s been often said that you can prove just about any point by presenting the right information in the right context to do so. Look at what happened to Shirley Sherrod. The comments she made were cherry picked so as to create a totally false reality.
Audio clips can be edited, videos can be cut and pasted, pictures can be photoshopped, quotes can be altered. It’s not about truth and facts anymore, it’s about proving a point. at any cost and there’s a lot of folks out there guilty of this hundreds of times over.
And the scariest part? They don’t care. They don’t care that they are spinning lies and present inaccurate and questionable information. So long as it makes them rich, the truth is irrelevant.
If the truth was wounded years ago, it might well have been the internet that put the final nails in the coffin. The internet is a great melting pot of information. Miuch of it accurate, much of it outright wrong.
What does the truth matter when you can use the internet to prove or disprove anything and everything?
Truth is dead. Welcome to the brave new world of information.
“When war is declared, truth is the first casualty” - Lord Ponsonby