Searching for Truth in a Post-Fact World

It's been such a wacky year.  I've never encountered such a volume of false news stories, or Fake News, as in 2016. I'm not referring to inaccurate news stories; rather, it's the deliberately fallacious articles/clips/tweets that serve to appall, agitate and promote political action. Part of this, of course, derives from the intensely partisan nature of our election year-and-a-half. It's natural that talking points/lies are disseminated by political parties to coat their opponents with whatever mud is available, justifiable or not. Same as ever.

But there's much more this time. We have a president-elect who thrives by asserting that traditional news media are liars and deceitful "scum". At his campaign and now post-election rallies, he revs his base by giving them a news media-directed 2 Minute Hate, a la Orwell's 1984. This isn't Nixonian paranoia or Spiro Agnew's ridiculous "nattering nabobs of negativism." This is a calculated effort to de-legitimize The Fourth Estate. Such disruption has immense value for political propaganda and the framing of societal perception of policies and events.

Some citizens may feel that Mainstream News is an institution suffering from integral rot. Others may need news sources that provide constant affirmation of their belief systems. Still others may not  understand the difference between vetted journalism and slick click bait.  And some have decided that any news/info source that presents any evidence rebutting their candidate/party/position/belief is partisan and cannot be trusted.

It's been downhill since the avuncular Walter Cronkite signed off with his final "And that's the way it is." Most people believed him. They believed his news organization, and others like it. Since then, there has arisen such a multiplicity of cable and internet news media that a Point-Of-View Balkanization has occurred. Advocacy journalism has flourished. And so has Partisan Journalism. And in between the fractures and odd angles of this Cubist-like rendering has emerged Profit Journalism, which is not journalism at all. And it's what constitutes Fake News.

I came across this swell chart on aplus.com that reads like a contemporary News User Reference Guide. It makes complete sense:

It should be simple. Read more than one news source. Make occasional forays into opposing ideological news sites. There is truth in more than one set of political or cultural perspectives. If you come across something that makes you think, "this can't really be true, can it?" go to a fact-checking site like snopes.com or politifact.com or factcheck.org. It's great to question authority. It's also good to question possible political or profit motivations.

Now to help us all along with our pursuit of The Truth, here's our old friend, Grace Slick. "When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies -" Click on this bait: