Why can’t we agree on what’s true any more? By William Davies

By Dilip -
We live in a time of political fury and hardening cultural divides. But if there is one thing on which virtually everyone is agreed, it is that the news and information we receive is biased. Every second of every day, someone is complaining about bias, in everything from the latest movie reviews to sports commentary to the BBC’s coverage of Brexit. These complaints and controversies take up a growing share of public discussion.

Much of the outrage that floods social media, occasionally leaking into opinion columns and broadcast interviews, is not simply a reaction to events themselves, but to the way in which they are reported and framed. The “mainstream media” is the principal focal point for this anger. Journalists and broadcasters who purport to be neutral are a constant object of scrutiny and derision, whenever they appear to let their personal views slip. The work of journalists involves an increasing amount of unscripted, real-time discussion, which provides an occasionally troubling window into their thinking.

But this is not simply an anti-journalist sentiment. A similar fury can just as easily descend on a civil servant or independent expert whenever their veneer of neutrality seems to crack, apparently revealing prejudices underneath. Sometimes a report or claim is dismissed as biased or inaccurate for the simple reason that it is unwelcome: to a Brexiter, every bad economic forecast is just another case of the so-called project fear. A sense that the game is rigged now fuels public debate.

This mentality now spans the entire political spectrum and pervades societies around the world. A recent survey found that the majority of people globally believe their society is broken and their economy is rigged. Both the left and the right feel misrepresented and misunderstood by political institutions and the media, but the anger is shared by many in the liberal centre, who believe that populists have gamed the system to harvest more attention than they deserve. Outrage with “mainstream” institutions has become a mass sentiment.... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/sep/19/why-cant-we-agree-on-whats-true-anymore
see also
Michiko Kakutani - The death of truth: how we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump
A pre-history of post-truth, East and West. By MARCI SHORE
Friedrich Nietzsche: godfather of postmodernist relativism or warrior of enlightenment ? 
Helen Pluckrose: Postmodernism and its impact, explained
Andrew Calcutt: The surprising origins of ‘post-truth’ – and how it was spawned by the liberal left
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Farewell to reality
HITLER'S WORLD
Post-modernism and the Academic Left
S Irfan Habib: Perversion of Islam
Nikolai Berdyaev: The Paradox of the Lie
SUBMARINE STATE
Alexandre Koyré The Political Function of the Modern Lie
Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Communism and Revolutions
Noam Chomsky, The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1966) // Apoorvanand - This false dawn: Modi regime’s obsession with the ‘new’ and ‘historic’
Stanley Rosen (1929-2014). A great philosopher passes
Articles on ideology in East Europe



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