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Truth decay revisited

Rupert Murdoch (via Wikipedia).

Freedom has seen better days. The term is not what it was. It has been repurposed. David Dwan cautioned readers of The Guardian in 2018:

Orwell insisted it was a sentimental illusion to assume that “truth will prevail”. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) gives a boot in the face to this kind of optimism. So does 2018. Nonetheless, in these dark times, it’s worth recalling Winston Smith’s famous line: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

The key thing here, some argue, is that we should be free to say our sums, not that they should be correct. But this seems to miss Orwell’s point. Free speech is important but it is not enough; as the trolls and the cyber-thugs reveal each day, freedom of expression is a dangerous licence when it is severed from any commitment to truth. Such freedom erodes freedom itself, undermining our ability to account for ourselves and to hold others to account.

Making freedom a worship word allows people like Rupert Murdoch to dissolve external reality to serve their purposes.

The term “truth decay” dates back to the 1980s, at least. Christians invoked it to describe the secularization of society, I think. (Internet searches go back only so far.) Since then, they have abandoned capital-T truth for a personalized one and embraced trafficking in propaganda.

Abandon facts for a personal reality (as New Agers did, too) and all else follows.

Former US director of national intelligence James Clapper joined former Australian prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull in calling for an investigation into Murdoch media as a principle vector of truth decay Down Under:

In an interview with Guardian Australia, Clapper, a retired lieutenant general in the US air force and the top intelligence official for seven years under former US president Barack Obama, said Fox News was a “megaphone for conspiracies and falsehoods” in America. He said the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January had demonstrated a clear connection between truth decay and the risk of civil disobedience and unrest.

“I have spoken a lot about a phenomenon that is not just in the United States but in other places as well of what the Rand Corporation has very aptly and cleverly called truth decay,” Clapper, who is a CNN analyst, said. “This is the whole business of disregarding facts and objective analysis and empirical data.

“Unfortunately, in this country we’ve fallen into two separate reality bubbles, one of which is fomented and amplified by Fox News.

“Rupert Murdoch and Fox is part of a larger issue we have in this country. To the extent that anyone feeds, amplifies, expands, embellishes truth decay – that is insidious and dangerous to democracy.”

That is, two former Australian prime ministers and a former U.S. DNI recognize Murdoch’s media empire as a national security threat and Murdoch as a villain right out of the Marvel cinematic universe.

Clapper said, having watched the storming of the Capitol by enraged supporters of the former Republican president Donald Trump, he was struck by “the fanaticism of the people, the ferocity of their fanaticism – they believed the big lie [that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by the Democratic party] and that’s why what I’m calling truth decay is so dangerous to the fabric of a democracy”.

He said Fox News was “the principal media component of this general trend towards truth decay” in the US, and the trend was “quite threatening to the basis of our country and society”.

No kidding.

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