Philosophy
On The Media: The Convenient Untruths
WNYC’s On The Media has a short interview with Farhad Manjoo, author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. Manjoo asserts that “truthiness has run amok in the modern media age” and examines how false facts percolate through the partisan echo chambers on both the left and the right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How do we have an informed society if you can disbelieve anything you aren’t likely to approve of?
FARHAD MANJOO: Well, in a number of areas I argue that we don’t have an informed society; that one of the problems of this age is that we have people disagreeing over things that in the past I don’t think they would have disagreed about – over the basic science behind global warming, for example, where you have huge numbers of Americans who simply dismiss the science.
And one of the difficulties about this situation is that the whole system sort of operates unconsciously. You can’t really tell people that your truth is not true. They’re not going to believe you.
It’s possible with the Internet to go out and search for the well-researched documented truth of the situation. It’s more possible now than it was ever before. I suppose I can suggest that people try to do that, but I don’t know how well that’s going to work.
Read the transcript (and listen online) or download the MP3.
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