The problem is that we've gone beyond voicing criticism to constructing parallel, unconnected realities. It's not like there's one side praising the Vietnam War and another side criticizing it, it's like there's one side saying "hey, there's a war going on in Vietnam" and another side saying "no there isn't." And the "no there isn't" side can burrow comfortably into a huge mass of media telling them that their reality is the true one and everyone else is delusional, which makes it impossible to bring them around no matter how much evidence you marshal. "Here's a photo of a Vietnamese villager we burned with napalm." "Pffft. Photoshop." "Here's some footage of Vietnamese fighters in battle with American soldiers." "Pffft. Crisis actors."
Democracy needs to provide room for criticism, absolutely. But it also requires everybody to be operating from some kind of baseline consensus as to what's real and what isn't, or at least some openness to having your mind changed by evidence.
>The problem is that we've gone beyond voicing criticism to constructing parallel, unconnected realities. It's not like there's one side praising the Vietnam War and another side criticizing it, it's like there's one side saying "hey, there's a war going on in Vietnam" and another side saying "no there isn't."
We always had that too. Not for "a war going on" or not, but e.g. about atrocities "our side" did during the war (which establishment media would downplay), or private interests served by such and such law (which establishment media would hide).
Those were alternate realities (e.g. are X foreign group "freedom fighters" or "CIA sponsored death squads"), not just simple disagreements on technical points.
>Democracy needs to provide room for criticism, absolutely. But it also requires everybody to be operating from some kind of baseline consensus as to what's real and what isn't, or at least some openness to having your mind changed by evidence.
Let's suppose, hypothetically, that I find my way to an "alternative", non-mainstream site. This fictional site specifically claims that they found the student records of the brother of a prominent (fictional) Congressional representative, and also found the divorce certificate of that representative and her former husband. This fictional site claims to have found embarrassing information about the representative from cross-referencing those two legal documents. The Congressperson and the mainstream media immediately dismisses this as a crazy conspiracy theory[0].
My question, then, is:
1) If this fictional site is lying, how would I verify that if no other media organization will verify or disprove this information?
2) If this fictional site is telling the truth, what grounds would I have to believe this if all the mainstream sites are calling it a conspiracy theory?
3) If someone were to go on an major investigative journey to uncover something that goes against all major media biases, how would he be able to present his case without being immediately dismissed as a conspiracy theorist?
4) If someone- mainstream or alternative- were to go on the internet and simply tell lies, how would we be able to fact-check them if they were the only news organization covering that particular story?
Really people living in parallel realities were always with us unfortunately. From moral panics to the "paranoid style" of politics which involves a vast conspiracy of their favored scapegoat which is impervious to evidence as counter evidence is more evidence of "their" control. Where "their" has been variously the Jews, the Catholics, Illuminati, and Marxists, cultural and otherwise, and more.
Democracy needs to provide room for criticism, absolutely. But it also requires everybody to be operating from some kind of baseline consensus as to what's real and what isn't, or at least some openness to having your mind changed by evidence.