Op-Ed: Scared of facts? Insanity vs reality 8 years later

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are caught in one of the tightest US elections in memory – Copyright AFP/File KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI, Rebecca NOBLE

The last 8 useless monotonous years of utter drivel have made the world a very much uglier place.

Fact checking has now become a virtual industry. The demand simply didn’t exist previously. Whether or not it’s effective is another ballgame. Many would say it isn’t, but at least it exists. The idea is supposedly to hold people to a given standard of accuracy and accountability.

It also ironically shows how much the power of media has declined that facts are now considered intrusive. The information sector has appropriately made itself redundant in the process. Media no longer scares politicians or anyone else much. It’s anyone’s guess how these guys take themselves seriously.

The news used to be able to enforce standards of conduct on the political and corporate sectors. Bad publicity was fatal. Now, it’s just grandstanding to an audience.

Why bother with real news or any other kind of information if you can just make it up like a good little sycophantic PR slag? This unmitigated slop then becomes the basis of political “debate”. AI could produce vast amounts of similar trashy coverage and probably do it better.

Every noun is a war zone. Even the super-soft so-called progressive media have accepted the word “left” as anyone or anything that isn’t right-wing. Terminology is now dictated by pre-loaded interpretations. This has allowed bias to dictate. Hasn’t that been fun?

In chickens, it’s called imprinting. The first thing you see must be your mother. Try finding any news on any side that doesn’t follow this script to some extent.

Any number of babbling nonentities have had their 3 seconds of fame and been rightly forgotten while wasting that much of everyone’s time on non-existent crud. It’s like a sewer that just won’t shut up.

All of which mysteriously raises the subject of fact-checking itself. There’s evidently not a lot of soul-searching going on here. Introspection isn’t a thing because there’s not much to see.  

Those news outlets who’ve had the genitalia to stand up for facts are still trying. Those who’ve made a living out of opposing facts are still doing quite well in well-paid pseudo-news roles, thanks for asking.

Nice and stagnant, would you say? Obsessively stale? Well, yes.

Check out for example this New York Times fact-checking article on Trump and Harris. I consider the Times to have been disgracefully soft on this issue and slack at best in its critiques of egregious conduct. That’s laziness, not news.

Anyway, that’s what proper analysis is supposed to look like, I was quite surprised to see it because it’s been so long since anyone hit back at the garbage. if you’ve never seen it before. This article does what all news media should have been doing for 8 years – Rebuttals point by point, line by line. “these unemployable jerks are lying to you” is the real message.

Not one of these festering gems of fossilized dung should ever have gone unchallenged for a second, let alone nearly a decade. Making heroes out of lunatics and their babble hasn’t exactly helped make the world a better place, has it?

Nice of the Times to finally condescend to do its job, and to be fair, not many are doing that. The usual fodder for politics is an equivocal sports commentary rather than any sort of deep incision into the inherent failure of politics to achieve anything at all about serious issues for all these years. Accept social dysfunction, and you’re accepting the disasters. If you want your country to collapse, that’s how you do it.   

They should be scared to death of facts. Lies should have consequences. When?

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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.