Fast Culture, Slow Culture
Ah the good ol' days when news took weeks or months or even years to cross the Alps and the oceans and continents. Geography (and time) had a way of testing information.
Fast news is fast food, junk food. Most news, not all but most, is biased news. That is, it isn't really news. Journalists and media organizations, eager to sell the news, have let down the rest of society by forcing the news through an apparatus that typically grinds away nuance. A simple online search of journalistic malfeasance yields too many examples to list here.
Once upon a time, journalists were their own keepers. The advent of fact checking sites confirms that there is a need to keep an eye on the legacy media. Journalistic integrity has suffered in recent decades. Reporters have become newsmakers; editorials and opinion pieces masquerade as news.
Once upon a time it was expected that citizens would be presented facts and allowed to interpret those facts for themselves. Reporters and editors did not underestimate their readers. There was an expectation that readers possessed the ability to reason. Which is to say, journalists respected their readers. Today, it seems self evident that media organizations, universities, Hollywood and politicians do not believe the average citizen is capable of critical thinking. The simplest way to subdue a population is the methodical theft of standards which uphold an expectation of excellence in critical thinking. The loss of a societal standard in reading and comprehension sets the stage for a population to fall prey to any and all stupid ideas.
Guilds of one kind or another once maintained watch over the integrity of reporters and reporting, and the facts were preserved. Journalistic societies or associations were trusted stewards. Shabby journalism was condemned. However, there's stewardship, i.e., quality control, and then there's information control, i.e., censorship. The government of the United States has decided to form a watchdog agency that some are dubbing the Ministry of Truth, ala Orwell's 1984.
The Ministry of Truth symbolizes the Party's belief that power is the most important commodity that they have access to. And the power over what people believe (which includes power over the past) is part of that equation.
The Wall Street Journal, Roger Koppl and Abigail Devereaux, on the Ministry of Truth.
Biden Establishes a Ministry of Truth: The Disinformation Governance Board already looks like a partisan instrument.
The Department of Homeland Security has announced the formation of the Disinformation Governance Board—charged, according to Politico, with “countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.” In a twist too implausible for fiction, the abbreviation is DGB, one letter off from KGB.
The stated goal of combating mis- and disinformation is framed to seem unobjectionable. Who objects to truth and pines for falsehood? DGB experts will guide the way, separating the informational wheat from the disinformational chaff. But there’s one small problem with empowering “truth experts”: Experts are people.
[...]The dangers of the DGB will be amplified if it becomes the tool of partisan political actors. And it already has. Executive director Nina Jankowicz, who once described Hunter Biden’s laptop as “a Trump campaign product,” has written that America’s “information landscape” includes “declining trust in the media, fed by the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on the fourth estate.” She has said: “Unless we mitigate our own political polarization, our own internal issues, we will continue to be an easy target for any malign actor—Russian or Iranian, foreign or domestic—to manipulate.”
Yes, you read that right. We must all fall in line because of the many grave threats—domestic as well as foreign—out there. Incorrect political opinions become a national-security threat. The DGB already looks frighteningly similar to the KGB.
Free people are entitled to governmental protection of free speech. Inalienable rights, it should be remembered, do not originate with the state. The state's duty is to protect inalienable rights which come from God. Protecting citizens from speech, i.e., restricting information, is unacceptable in a free society. The solution to unreliable (or coarse or crass) speech is not censorship. The solution is, as it has been said, more speech.
A "ministry of truth" inevitably becomes an agency to conduct witch-hunts, finding threats and transgressions where none exist. HRTs, human rights tribunals, have too frequently become the tools of radicals used to impugn the characters of targeted businesses and individuals, and to bankrupt opposition to radical leftwing agendas.
Will the legacy media join their trench-dwelling compatriots to expose attempts to undermine democracy and fundamental human rights?
The rush to judge, try, convict and execute, and bury.
One could argue that the speedy access to information, or perhaps the speedy means by which information can be disseminated, invites more trouble and outweighs any positive outcome. More than ever, people are prone to making hasty conclusions, and the damage done is often difficult to impossible to correct.
Many media outlets routinely publish slanted articles, going so far as to assassinate (i.e., cancel) the character of a convenient target. Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann and his classmates were attending the 2019 March For Life at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. After a viral video was published that misrepresented or obscured the facts, Sandmann faced considerable public harassment. A damaging and offensive Slate article by Ruth Graham is still viewable, as are many other articles that demonstrate shabby reporting about the incident involving Sandmann.
Once the fuller picture became known, media organizations began scurrying for cover. Follow up reports by the same organizations were at best weak attempts to set the record straight. It was only after Nicholas Sandmann prevailed in court that the truth gained its rightful appreciation and the numerous examples of egregious malfeasance by legacy media organizations and journalists were finally identified as such. CNN, NBC and The Washington Post have settled out of court. Suits were also filed against the New York Times, CBS News, ABC News, Rolling Stone and Gannett.
Who or what is responsible for creating the mess society is rapidly descending into? Leftwing ideologues, among them politicians, journalists, publishers, and activists, some bishops, and billionaire technocrats, who misuse technology to obscure the facts and to promote a culture of division. Why division? Because therein those circumstances one might fit any extreme ideology under the guise of a solution to all man's woes. It is a trick of the devil that willing accomplices line up for and sign up to promote. Catholics know that trick as relativism, and the system it produces is called the culture of death.
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