‘Truth decay’ and the diminishing role of facts
Watching the House impeachment inquiry on TV a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, I was mesmerized by the baldfaced, endless, transparent, and utterly effective lying playing out during five days of hearings.
Time and again, (Republican) members of Congress repeated debunked conspiracy theories, insisted on isolating incidents and statements to shape a fundamentally false picture, and asserted clear falsehoods. The tireless fact-checker Daniel Dale wrote on CNN’s website that “President Donald Trump is dishonest about a whole lot of things. But he is rarely as comprehensively dishonest as he has been about his dealings with Ukraine and the impeachment inquiry they have triggered.” Perhaps no testimony was as clarion as Fiona Hill’s warning that certain representatives believe “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian Security Services themselves.”
As a journalist, untangling a lie is a professional preoccupation. Speaking truth to power is touted as the whole point of waking up in the morning.
But the quest for truth is no longer journalism’s raison d'être. In the last two decades, we have experienced the death of objectivity, what the non-partisan think tank RAND Corporation is studying in a research program it calls “Truth Decay.” RAND has identified the year 2000 as the inflection point, when objectivity gave way to cognitive biases, the rise of social media and other changes to the information environment, demands on the educational system that limit its ability to keep up with changes in the information ecosystem, and drastic political and social polarization.