sonora2sonoma

Facebook reminded me this morning that one year ago today, I wrote

“There might have been a time in the past
when a man’s lies
were more likely to catch up with him
but not anymore.
Today
politicians routinely make the most outrageous claims imaginable
yet go unchallenged.
What has become of accountability?”

Upon reading this today, one year later, I recalled a news show I  watched on tv last night that featured several people being interviewed about a topic in the news. Among the interviewees was a former Republican congresswoman from somewhere on the east coast. Shortly into the conversation, this former congresswoman, or congressperson, made a remark I knew to be factually incorrect, falsely blaming the Obama administration with responsibility for something the President had inherited from the previous administration. The moderator, as usual, allowed the interviewee’s fiction to go unchallenged.

This has become a commonplace experience–allowing what boils down to political propaganda an equal footing with consensus reality–the act of which, in effect, grants fake news, or fake facts the same credibility accorded to evidence-based phenomena.

When fictions are accorded equal status with facts, when liars and the lies they tell are accorded equal footing with truth-tellers armed with empirical facts, and the liars aren’t called out for their lying, people are denied the information necessary to make accurate judgments or informed decisions.

Institutions–be they news organizations or governmental bodies–that allow this condition to stand fail their constituencies in the most fundamental of ways, imperiling everyone involved as they do so.

Tim Konrad

Petaluma

January 6, 2018