re: #36 freetoken

Many are lamenting that the Trump election shows that our politics are now “post factual”.

But this is not a new phenomenon.

Looking at the headlines that come across the feeds and Google News… clearly demonstrates that “facts” are not so valued.

Maybe facts never were.

We need to be careful about building our own mythology about the “good ol’ days”.

Just like some Americans today believe the 1950’s was some idealistic era, we ought not think there was an era in which American society was somehow more factual, more scientific, more rational than it is today.

That is a good point. But I do think there’s been a shift. It used to be that the public got their news as presented by the “experts” in the MSM, and alternative media did not have the same possibility of getting heard. These experts of course bring their own biases, and their reporting and framing of facts often did (and still does) reflect the dominant ideology of the country. But they understand themselves as having a fidelity to truth above all else, and they have something like a shared sense of what objective reporting looks like.

I do believe that something has significantly changed when so many people are “informed” by stories trending among their facebook friends etc. (This also drives what counts as a “news” site for google news, I believe.) The function of informing the public is thereby taken away from the experts in the MSM and democratized. Everyone can have direct access to a lot of the source data, as in the Wikileaks dump, and anyone can put their own interpretation of the data before the social media marketplace of ideas, build a blog, and gather followers without the kind of capital investment required to start a newspaper or tv network.

In a way, we are thereby returned to the era before there were professional journalists at all. It’s like a small town where news spreads by word of mouth leading to a lot of a false rumors since people have heard it from people they trust.