Truth has always been something I’ve long valued, yet these days, truth has increasingly been less and less valued.
One of the biggest things I’ve valued as a journalist and commentator is the truth. What do the facts say? What does the evidence say? Is it possible to project where things are going to go? If so, where are things likely to head and what are the factors that go into that direction?
To me, this mindset has carried me through the decades as someone who writes the news. It’s less about the people involved, but more how people get into certain mind sets and challenging the ideas as opposed to the person. It’s what also builds that credibility as well. What separates my writing from things like AI generated trash content or propaganda outlets? The answer has always been that commitment to what I have been able to determine is truth. Solidifying this is being completely open to admitting when I am wrong on something. It rarely happens, but if I find out something I wrote turned out to be not entirely accurate, I can admit to that mistake. Open transparency solidifies that credibility.
While it helps explain my longevity in the news business, fewer and fewer are sharing that commitment to that fact-based reporting and the truth.
A great example of this is the Online News Act debate. Endlessly, publishers who love to brag about how they are the credible ones out there pushed blatantly false lies about what happens on social media. One example is how platforms scrape whole articles, re-post them on their platforms, slap ads on it, and take the profits afterwards. Another lie is saying how platforms owe publishers for the use of their work. A third example is how Google allegedly put ads up next to their content and take ad revenue for themselves. All of this is, of course, straight up nonsense, yet the blatant and obvious lies the publishers pushed got them the Online News Act.
So, faithful to the truth, I went to work to determine where things will go to from here. Using basic logic, I had determined, among other things, that platforms would likely drop news links in response to this. Unless the Canadian government concedes their position, then the consequences of the media’s actions would cost the whole industry dearly. As far as I could tell, my analysis accurately predicted what happened. Meta dropped news links, the Canadian government, realizing the writing was on the wall, folded to Google. The results for the sector were devastating, littered with stories of traffic decline and bankruptcies – a legacy that will only continue from here on out.
To me, I thought this was ultimately a triumph of the truth and reality. We rebutted the lies and disinformation, stuck to the truth, and was able to determine quite accurately what was going to happen.
Yet, barely after reality had sunk in, the mainstream media was on to their next disinformation effort. That was to portray US President, Joe Biden, as a senile old guy that is not mentally there. My ability to challenge this was, admittedly, limited given that this site is about technology and digital rights. The narrative that the media pushed was that Biden is old, not mentally competent, while Trump is a spry young guy, respectable, and has a united party who is happy and upbeat and is practically a shoe in to win the next election. It was as if every major outlet immediately turned into Fox “News”.
What’s more, the mainstream media pushed the narrative that one of his key speeches would be the one at the NATO summit. At the time, I wondered if something big had really changed about Biden in recent weeks. So, I had watched the NATO speech in full along with a few others. By the end of it, I had concluded he had done fine. No major mess ups or anything like that. Just a president that delivered a speech. Yet, the media peppered Biden with questions about when he was going to step down, his age, his mental acuity, whether he was going to see a doctor, and more. This was the NATO summit – an opportunity to talk about important international issues, yet the media wasted that opportunity for the sake of domestic politics.
Even worse, the coverage afterwards from the media was just a cut of the couple of stutters he did make during the speech and concluded that the NATO speech was a disaster. I was left with the question of whether I witnessed the same speech the media witnessed. The few that were with me were just as frustrated and said that the media is just trying to stir trouble for ratings.
Yet, what I witnessed in the days since was that everyone that witnessed what I witnessed (and agreed with my “WTF?” sentiment) eventually concluded what the media messaging was. Without explanation, I got to hear others about how Biden had “problems” without really elaborating on what those were beyond the talking points pushed by the media. I was left stunned by this. Ultimately, the media got what they were after and got Biden to not run for re-election.
My immediate worry was that this presents a real risk of the election of a far right autocrat who has made no secret his plans to ensure that democracy dies on his watch. This mixed with the terrifying objectives of Project 2025 – something the mainstream media regularly downplays. Subsequently, the fight to preserve nice things like freedom of expression, security, and a better digital life for all would seem like quaint silly little pet projects by comparison to what would be in store for the American population. If anything, you’d have a reason to fear for your own personal safety if you relayed facts that might inconvenience Orange Hitler.
In all of this, there is this notion that we live in a post-truth era where what is fact, what is honest, and what is true really matters little to society. Narrative, whether truthful or not, is more important than actual reality and truth. Compounding this is a recent article I saw on TechDirt:
If you’ve been paying any attention to the political news in the last week, you may have seen stories about couch fucking, or dolphin porn, or burnt monkey testicles, or even cat ladies. Or really just about any of the comments coming out of the Harris campaign, or from other Democratic supporters, calling out the fact that Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance are just fucking weird, man.
For years now, so many have insisted that the best way to respond to the Gish Gallop of Donald Trump is to try to actually debunk his many falsehoods. The emphasis on “fact-checking” everything has been an obsession of the media, though Republicans have turned fact-checking against the media.
I wrote eight years ago that fact-checking is mostly useless in convincing voters. As I wrote then, fact-checking often seems to reinforce and entrench opinions, rather than change them. Yet, so many Democrats (and media folks) seemed to think the way to deal with the non-stop flood of falsehoods from Republicans is to counter them with facts and policy ideas.
And, of course, those things have their place. But they suck as the main strategy for getting voters interested.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had long ago with Susan Benesch from the Dangerous Speech Project. She has spent many years studying so-called “dangerous speech,” which is speech that leads to real harm, as well as ways to counteract it. She pointed out that one strategy that is effective in some cases is mockery/humor as counterspeech. That’s not to say it’s the only strategy, but it’s often a useful one.
And it’s one that hasn’t really been used that much in response to Trumpism. Until now.
There’s just something powerful about taking back control over the framing. The MAGA world has moved the Overton window so much on certain issues. Perhaps the best way to make people understand this is to just shine a light on how fucking weird their positions are, and how out of touch they are with what most people actually believe.
Who knows if it will be effective in the long run. I have no sense about the political viability of it all. But at a first pass, it seems like it’s done an impressive job in reframing the debate away from this idea that Trumpworld are plotting to destroy everything (which feels unbelievable) to just: get a fucking load of what these dumbasses believe, and how incredibly dorky they are.
All of this is just exasperating to me. Specifically, the notion that truth and facts have a time and place, but that is for another time and another place, not in the here and the now. If truth and facts don’t have a place during an election, do facts and the truth have a time and place, well, anywhere else? We certainly aren’t seeing it in the mainstream media who are largely content with narrative driven “reporting”.
All of this does feed into the belief that we do live in a post-truth world these days. Facts and evidence do seem to matter less and less to the general public these days. While the general public may say that these things are valued, but the behaviour of many seem to suggest otherwise. After all, the excitement over the story of JD Vance’s love affair with a couch certainly is an indicator that a tall tale is generally more exciting to the population than, well, any story of substance. It certainly does make me question whether people really value the truth these days or not.
From a business perspective, sure, I could just write complete nonsense for the sake of getting clicks. All indications I’ve seen suggest that this is certainly a much more marketable thing than spending my days doing something weird like reporting on facts and evidence all day long. After all, there may not be a viable market for the truth these days. After all, why do you think sites like the Daily Mail get so much traffic despite the obvious garbage reporting it showcases? Unfortunately for me, that’s just not my style.
So, maybe this site will just remain a silly little vanity project that is devoted to fact-based journalism, evidence based journalism, thoughtful writing, and other stupid things almost no one really cares about. At least I’ll be able to sleep at night – even if few people wind up really reading this.
