Presenting Their View of Fiction

Update

It’s very disconcerting when journalists adopt the hard left position of “controlling the fiction”.

Confronted with this crisis of legitimacy, today’s corporate media increasingly advances ideas that would delight would-be power trippers of any party—like establishing novel forms of government control over what you can see, read, and hear and identifying people with a broad range of unpopular or unapproved views as domestic terrorists.

…

The new enemy is no longer “disinformation” but “misinformation,” or information that somebody, somewhere—perhaps a presidential commission, perhaps an FCC bureaucrat, perhaps a faceless content moderator, perhaps a college professor with a website—deems punishable by virtue of its allegedly being untrue, or not true enough.

January 28, 2021

I constantly pose this simple question to my family and cohorts: If you wake up in the morning and we have no television, newspaper, or internet, what do we know about the current state of the world? 

Well, I suppose that I can look outside my home and observe the weather.  That’s first-hand empirical evidence.  I can go talk to my neighbors and get a handle on some of the local gossip, but that’s about it.  It’s a very 19th century approach to staying abreast of current events.

All this points to the power that the news and social networks have over our sense of reality.   For good or for bad, the information that we consume from the internet establishes our sense of reality.  As I’ve highlighted in my continuing post about the big tech companies (“Do US Tech Companies have too much Influence?“), those organizations have an unprecedented impact on our lives.  The abuse of this power doesn’t really need something as complex as depicted in the movie “The Matrix”.

The cartoon below (thanks Joe) humorously illustrates the unfortunate situation that has evolved. Namely, all these news organizations have discovered that their fiction can easily become reality for many in the audience, and they are no longer bashful in abusing that power.