Post-Truth Politics

Josh Landy
Why is politics today so full of lies?

Ken Taylor
And who’s to blame for all the lies? The politicians, the media? Are we the consumers?

Josh Landy
Can we philosophers are all people helped to find a way out of this mess?

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re here at the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ken teaches philosophy.

Josh Landy
And I teach comp lit as well as co-irecting the literature and philosophy initiative.

Ken Taylor
So Josh, I’d like to officially welcome you to the co-host chair.

Josh Landy
Thanks a lot, Ken. really delighted to join the team.

Ken Taylor
And for all your John fans out there. John has graduated to host emeritus but he’ll be joining us again from time to time in many different ways.

Josh Landy
Today we’re thinking about post truth politics.

Ken Taylor
Man, this is a timely topic, Josh.

Josh Landy
No kidding. When it comes to the status of truth in public discourse. These really are the worst of times.

Ken Taylor
Wow. I don’t know about that. I mean, that’s a little too strong. It’s always been terrible.

Josh Landy
What are you talking about? You’ve got a President repeated conspiracy theories. Huge percentages of the population think Obama is a Muslim spokespeople are talking about alternative facts or are telling us straight up facts don’t exist anymore. I mean, things have never been worse.

Ken Taylor
That’s all bad, really bad. But please, let’s not be prisoners of the present moment. Go back to ancient avons the, you know, the Greek flourishing of democracy aspiring power mongers back then. Well, he would go study with a Sophists. sophists were professional liars, they would teach people a bunch of clever, argumentative strategies to make the weaker argument the stronger is, as Plato put it, they would just good for bamboozling people, though, politicians have never ever Josh giving a hoot about the true look, I

Josh Landy
like to think that things got a little better in the intervening 2500 years,

Ken Taylor
really. So when is this paradise this that you’re selling the Celtic for?

Josh Landy
How about the enlightenment? Oh, come

Ken Taylor
on. What about the enlightenment? Like,

Josh Landy
you’re a fan of Kant. I am, too. I mean, it didn’t that guide you some pretty powerful championing of truth, autonomy and free and independent thought,

Ken Taylor
Look, he’s one of my favorites. And he but Joshy was just a philosopher, a mere philosopher. We’re talking about politics and politicians.

Josh Landy
Sure, but some of the Enlightenment thinking percolated out I mean, I mean, think of the First Amendment. And what about the rise of democracy? I mean, that changed things completely. Oh,

Ken Taylor
just you bought into all this million stuff that democracy creates a marketplace of ideas free from top down control where truth can flourish? You bought into all that? Right?

Josh Landy
Well, I mean, look, you know, the ideas that get believed in democracy, they’re the ones that are backed by the best arguments, not, not the ones that have the most powerful authorities buying them.

Ken Taylor
Josh, where have you been? How did you get to be such an idealist? Haven’t you heard of like, manufactured consent?

Josh Landy
I see here with Chomsky, your think the mass media work as a kind of propaganda tool for the big corporations.

Ken Taylor
That’s exactly what I think and you’re supposedly free marketplace of ideas get bought and sold by massive corporate interests, and boom, there goes your free independent thinking there goes your concern for truth right down the drain.

Josh Landy
Look, I totally agree that manufacture consent is a bad thing. But come on, things are even worse now. Right.

Ken Taylor
How could they be? What are you talking about? Well, manufactured

Josh Landy
consent was at least hidden now. People are lying brazenly and out in the open, I mean, think about Donald Trump, claiming he had the largest inauguration crowd of all time.

Ken Taylor
should play the trump card. Oh, gosh. Okay, you’re right about that. And, you know, it’s not just politicians. It’s the news outlets to

Josh Landy
Yeah, right. Now you’re getting it again. And the reason those news outlets can get away with that nonsense is because we abandoned the Fairness Doctrine, that rule that require news channels, to be honest, equitable and balanced. And

Ken Taylor
don’t forget about the profit motive just you can’t forget about that one. No, no,

Josh Landy
I agree. I mean, when the media plays profit margins above honesty, we’ve got a big problem.

Ken Taylor
Well, look, okay, one saving grace. This Philosophy Talk, philosophers were still holdouts for the truth. Ah, are

Unknown Speaker
you sure about that?

Ken Taylor
What do you mean Josh?

Josh Landy
Well, how about our former colleague Richard Rorty? Didn’t he say that science is no truer than Scientology just more useful? Didn’t he say the very idea of a fact of the matter is when we’d be better off without

Ken Taylor
Gosh, Josh Fraser play the Trump garden now you’re playing the Rorty could you keep fighting dirty? But surely you can’t believe that philosophers single handedly created this man.

Josh Landy
No, no, no, of course they did. Not people like really didn’t dig the hole. I’m just saying they are not the ones who are going to pull us out of it.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, okay. Brody’s not and his brethren but other philosophers gathering people like you and me. I don’t mean to brag or anything or toot my own horn, but I can educate people to tell the difference between truth lies and what Harry Frankford called BS. I can make students allergic to bad arguments. I can I can get them to see through a piece of nonsense in like two seconds. Flat

Josh Landy
can, everyone should take your classes. In the meantime, we should probably try to figure out how we ended up in this post truth era. We sent a roving philosophical reporter Holly J. McDade to explore some of the legends and conspiracy theories that have shaped our country’s political landscape. She files this report.

Beautiful Anonymous
You ever seen a Bigfoot? Or maybe even a skunk ape as it’s known? You have you’ve seen a Bigfoot? I have? Yes, I have. I’ve had a personal experience with one. Yes.

Holly McDede
This is an excerpt of the podcast, beautiful anonymous.

Beautiful Anonymous
What’s the craziest thing or governments hiding from us that you believe to be real?

Holly McDede
random strangers call in and comedian Chris Gethard talks to whoever’s on the other end for an hour?

Beautiful Anonymous
You know, I don’t. I’m not an alien believer. But I am a conspiracy theorist. In what sense? Well, I mean, I, I’m a believer that we were the ones who flew the planes into the Trade Center towers that we set up the Boston bombing, that we set up different shootings in schools, and things like that.

I will say, when you bring up 911, the Boston bombings and school shootings, I think that is probably the line in the sand that many of our listeners just went nah, not into this. No longer into this guy,

Holly McDede
for at least about half might not be into it. American listeners at least the other half, they do believe the government is hiding something about 911. That’s according to the Chapman University survey of American fears. Almost as many think that the JFK assassination was rigged. So maybe it’s not surprising that the Oxford English Dictionary declared the 2016 word of the year was post truth. George W. Bush’s senior adviser Karl Rove paved the way for this when he criticized what he called the reality based community in 2005. But our perception of truthiness dates back much farther than Bush Jr.

Jesse Walker
Yeah, the idea of a post truth era implies there was a truth era. And that’s just not true.

Holly McDede
Jesse Walker is the author of the United States of paranoia, a conspiracy theory. He says we’ve always been a nation of conspiracy lovers. Take for example, the Puritans who arrived in this country in the 1600s, eager to build a new world from scratch aren’t some hardcore, and some might say creative beliefs like that the wilderness itself was involved in a conspiracy to destroy them. American paranoia was still around in the late 1850s, when Republican writer John Smith di suggested southern agents had poisoned lump sugar in an attempt to assassinate President Elect James Buchanan. And it’s

Jesse Walker
very similar to the sorts of stories that you would hear about, you know, the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the attempted assassination and George Wallace. They’re not just something that only appeared at that recent moment that we remember, they come up again and again and again.

Holly McDede
Kurt Anderson took a look at the more recent history of so called Truth and his new book Fantasyland, how America went haywire, a 500 year history. Jumping ahead to the 1960s Christian evangelists, hippies and intellectuals began embracing the Puritan notion of creating one’s own truth. And psychiatrist even suggested mental illness was just another way to see reality that it was all relative,

Kurt Anderson
which is to say that no one way of defining what is real and what is not real and what is true and what is not true is superior to any other so science is not superior to magic. By the

Holly McDede
same token untethered, Americans became free to believe in UFOs, that the moon landing was an elaborate hoax and by the 1990s, that pro wrestling can be both real and make believe

Kurt Anderson
people were willing to accept simultaneously that it wasn’t real, but that they could be crazily passionate about it, and it didn’t matter anymore if it was fake or real, or some or both.

Holly McDede
So it made sense to Anderson, the same celebrity who would make guest appearances on semi real semi fake pro wrestling matches later became the face of today’s post truth era.

Kurt Anderson
I can’t mention the WWE without noting that Donald Trump himself was a WWE performer, as well as impresario and has been enshrined in the WWE Hall of Fame. It is time for the takeover.

Holly McDede
Now alternative facts are real, the media is the enemy. Anderson is worried that we may be stuck forever in fantasy land, that the dreams that practically build America may also destroy us.

Kurt Anderson
I think the best we can hope for is that we will not become untethered from reality anymore than we are right now.

Holly McDede
Look at it from this perspective. The Declaration of Independence consisted mostly of a conspiracy theory that a king was out to enslave American subjects and without that comes Keirsey theory our country’s democracy might not exist. And it does exist right? Asking for a friend. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly Chadwick

Ken Taylor
Do you mean the moon learning wasn’t an elaborate hoax? Thanks for that Holly. I’m Ken Taylor with me as my Stanford colleague Josh Landy. And today we’re talking about post truth politics.

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by Christopher Meyers. He is Professor Emeritus of philosophy at California State University Bakersfield, where he’s also Director Emeritus of the Keighley Institute of Ethics. And he’s the editor of a philosophical approach to journalism ethics. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Christopher.

Christopher Meyers
Thank you guys. It’s a joy to be here.

Ken Taylor
So Christopher, this is no doubt a fascinating topic. But I gotta admit, it’s kind of a depressing one. I don’t like to think about depressing topics. So tell me what got you interested in thinking so much about this depressing topic?

Christopher Meyers
It is a depressing topic, especially if you really care about journalism, and you really care about democracy. I’ve been doing journalism ethics for over 30 years. And once upon a time, I spent most of my time criticizing journalism. Now I find myself having to defend it, given the horror show that we’ve been seeing for the last two to three years.

Josh Landy
So it sounds like you agree with me that thinks we really are in the worst of times, at least at least in recent memory.

Christopher Meyers
It certainly within recent memory, things are more ideological, more profit driven, and there’s more access to information than there’s ever been before. But if you go back far enough, certainly journalism has had its problems. Since its very beginning,

Ken Taylor
I think I was reading a piece of I think it was in a piece of yours. I was reading about the treatment of poor Abe Lincoln, by the journalist. I mean, they were savage and one sided, brutal to the man. So journalism. Come on. I mean, go back. There’s recent memory. And then there’s not that long ago.

Christopher Meyers
Yeah. What was really interesting about that research is much of the criticism came from the northern papers, and even the Emancipation Proclamation, they declared it to be usurpation of power, we were all going to be under the hand of a dictator tomorrow, very similar to the kinds of things that President Obama faced.

Josh Landy
So is it different today? Or is it basically just a continuation?

Christopher Meyers
It’s different today than it was 4050 years ago. And I think it’s different in that there’s so much more widespread information. And so much of that, particularly internet base doesn’t seem to have the commitment to the standards of journalism. It’s driven by ideology. It’s driven by politics, rather than driven by, let’s get accurate information. And you do it for a public service.

Ken Taylor
So it is sounds that you say you make a distinction. I want you to just elaborate a little bit, you say it’s different than it was 40 or 50 years ago. But that seems to imply that before that it was different still as if we go through some kind of cycle as if there’s a complicated history of this. Am I reading it? Right?

Christopher Meyers
There’s certainly a complicated history. I don’t know whether there’s cycles here. But go back to yellow journalism of the 20s and 30s and early 40s. Arguably, Hearst started the Spanish American War, so that he could sell newspapers, he was at a huge circulation fight in New York. Now, hopefully, Mr. Trump is not going to be using propaganda fake news to send us off to North Korea. So things certainly have been bad for a long time. But journalism has always been the check against that kind of craziness, at least in the last 50 years has been the check against that craziness from the politicians.

Ken Taylor
But what I’m wondering is, is there a time when in the history of America, or the developed, industrialized, so called democratic world in which journalism is more like propaganda and then less like it more like it? I mean,

Christopher Meyers
absolutely. The original notion of journalism was propaganda. It was, all of the papers were partisan, they were ideological. They were driven by trying to promote the political agenda of their party. It’s only been since arguably the early 40s that journalism has thought of itself as providing a kind of objective neutral standard.

Ken Taylor
So we need to dig into this. It sounds like really fascinating and complicated stuff. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about post truth politics, with Christopher Myers from CSU Bakersfield.

Josh Landy
In our next segment, we’ll ask how we got into this mess we’re in who’s to blame for post truth politics, politicians, the media are we the people,

Ken Taylor
the Holy Trinity, lying politicians, fake news and very gullible people, plus your calls and emails. When Philosophy Talk continues.

Holly McDede
egocentric paranoid prima donnas all want to

Ken Taylor
just give me some So we’ve been living in a post truth era at least since John Lennon became a post Beto. But what can we do about it? Now? I’m Ken Taylor. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything except

Josh Landy
your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy and we’re thinking about post truth politics. Our guest is Christopher Myers, from CSU Bakersfield, editor of a philosophical approach to journalism ethics.

Ken Taylor
So because it seems that we all agree that we’re kind of in a trough of post truthiness. I mean, it may come and go, but we’re in a pretty low state right now. Much worse than when John Lennon wrote that song. Yes. However long ago, that was, how did we get here? How do we get to this point?

Christopher Meyers
Yeah. So it at least a couple of primary causes. The first, I think is, is Josh noted, reduction to canceling of the fairness doctrine that allowed particularly talk radio, to start to dominate the right wing conversation. And that changed the very way that journalists started thinking about what our issues

Ken Taylor
are, but I don’t really recall, I think I was too young to care or do unreflective to care. I was 87. I know, but drove people in politics. I mean, that’s an FCC regulation, what drove the FCC to abandon that what was going on that people said, well, we don’t need that anymore.

Christopher Meyers
Well, it was Reagan, Reagan’s FCC that dropped it. And they the folks on the right strongly believed obviously, they still do, that so called mainstream media was far too left leaning, and they needed to open up create freedom of airwaves in a style different than the corporate media. So to

Ken Taylor
put a positive spin on that. They were thinking, I’m going to put it maybe in their voices, they were thinking that the FCC was interfering with the free marketplace of ideas they that Josh and mill I so fond of, and that this gives us a place for the free market of ideas to work. So right wing ideas should be allowed to flourish and allowed to speak in their voice. And you’re preventing that right,

Christopher Meyers
except that the government owns the airwaves. So it’s not like I can pick up a radio station somewhere and just start broadcasting and override this particular station, for example, on the air. They get to control who’s going to own those channels, and who’s going to talk on them, which was the whole point of the fairness talk. Yeah,

Ken Taylor
but I’m not see I’m still not seeing the point for the Fairness Doctrine yet. Because I’m going back to the free marketplace of ideas. That’s like a kind of the government insisting that the discourse that takes place in my airways has to be structured thusly. Well, it has to be two sided

Josh Landy
news, right? I mean, so you, I mean, you can broadcast your opinion. But if you want to present something as news, doesn’t it make sense to have a requirement that it actually resemble the fact

Ken Taylor
that’s like a premise presupposing that we know the facts are? The who’s the arbiter of the facts isn’t discourse, the arbiter of the fact and if I’m the right wing guy, I want, you get to have your left wing station, you get to have your central station, and people get to listen to us both. And maybe there’s some station that brings us together to argue together. But I still don’t see why the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, I could see an argument that it creates a marketplace of ideas that’s unrestrained and unrestricted. And that’s when truth is supposed to flourish. Obviously, truth hasn’t flourished. But what’s the what’s the flaw in that thinking?

Christopher Meyers
Yeah, so again, the access to that structure, the airwaves is a key piece of this, but even mill argued that it’s not unlimited discourse, there does have to be some structure. If you recall, at the beginning of chapter three, after long conversations about the importance of free speech and free expression and character, he immediately says, of course, we’re not talking about a mob out in front of a car dealers house, right. So even the most avid proponents of free speech think there has to be a mechanism that keeps people from yelling, falsely yelling fire theater.

Ken Taylor
Okay. So I want to go back to this, Josh, because I don’t want to put the words in Josh’s mouth. But I think he thinks that intellectuals especially sort of Pomo like New Left intellectuals, and they’re unconcerned for truth, played, at least as important a role in the rise of post truth politics as as a regulatory regime, like the abandonment of the fairness, I have to I have you,

Josh Landy
I wouldn’t I wouldn’t go that far. But so I I think that the Fairness Doctrine battement the Fairness Doctrine did much bigger damage, but it is an interesting question. I’d like to ask you, Christopher. I mean, you know, Daniel Dennett has claimed that right that the post modernists actually helped to create this environment of cynicism. about truth and facts. And Kurt Anderson, who was quoted in the report, the rubbing philosophical report said that postmodern intellectuals were useful idiots for the, the the American right? Do you think that’s right?

Christopher Meyers
I certainly think post modernism contributed to it, I actually think currently a bigger problem is the identity politics and identity teaching that’s so dominant in the university. The idea that we really cannot access understand the point of view, the importance, the values of folks who come from different backgrounds, different perspectives, that there’s no way to bridge the conversational gap or the epistemological gaps. That strikes me as again, fully feeding into. Well, from my point of view, the inauguration was the biggest ever, you know, you guys just don’t see it the way I

Ken Taylor
Well, right. So this thing that you’re referring to, I think goes under the name in some circles of standpoint, epistemology, right, which is a major movement in, in philosophical circles when I’m not a complete fan up, but I’m gonna speak a little bit on behalf of it. Because with the idea of standpoint, epistemology is not an anti truth thing, not in its core, is that there are certain truths that are only accessible to people situated a certain way so that an elite, wealthy white guy cannot understand the true nature of the oppression of a marginalized, impoverished black guy. And that I have as an marginalize impoverished black guy, let us say, I have a kind of epistemic privilege as privileged epistemic access to certain facts that you lack. And so I should get this speak. And you should listen. I mean, there’s some there’s some plausibility to that,

Christopher Meyers
yeah, that you have privileged access doesn’t mean you have unique access. And that if you really do understand what this particular point is, and if you’re good at what you do, and you obviously are, you should be able to explain it to me, I’m not, you know, an idiot, and I don’t have such strict barriers in front of my eyes, that if you do your job, well, if you teach, then you should be able to help me to understand it, at least at a sufficiently deep level.

Josh Landy
I agree with that. And I can see why a standpoint epistemology be might be looked like a problem in this context, but you know, the counter argument when usually hears is, but look, you know, are we talking mostly here about right wing news stations, whereas the the post modernists and the people who push for Sandpoint, epistemology, they tend to be people on the left. So why should we think that there’s a carryover from what’s happening in the intellectual left to what’s happening on the political right?

Christopher Meyers
You’re evidently not reading in a Facebook, the take the protests in Berkeley a couple of weeks ago, the left wing Facebook analysis of that protest was so different than the mainstream media’s and let alone the right wing version of it. That the left the discourse on the left is very dominant among social media, and there are plenty of internet sites that promulgate that same ideology and that same approach to these problems. And they’re not talking to the folks on the right. So wait

Ken Taylor
a minute, though, okay. I want to get a color here. But well, maybe we should get the color. And then I’ll key up another question. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’d love to have you join this conversation. And we’ve got Lisa from San Francisco on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Lisa.

Speaker 1
Thank you so very much. It is a really interesting conversation. I just want to point out that media has been participating in collusion with the government for quite some time, including the during the Bush the lead up to the Iraq war, they basically had no doubt that somehow another, you know, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which it didn’t. And also this issue of so called fairness. I mean, I agree that the Fairness Doctrine is, was it was a shame that it was gotten rid of that immediate turned it on its head when it tried to provide equal, equal importance to the climate change debate, as if there really was a debate with 99% of the scientists believe that there was definitely a human generated effect on climate change, which we are seeing right now. And with respect to the protests in Berkeley, I’m going to tell you something. I’m part of that same Facebook left that your your guest mentioned. Because to tell you the truth, the KKK did Lynch people. The Nazis did kill people. So in essence, defense of our communities and, and a defense, basically of reality is really warranted because the media seems to be putting as if it was equal Just as if people that were defending themselves were equal to the ones who are actually propagating violence against the whole entire group of people based on our belief, Lisa,

Ken Taylor
Lisa, you raise a lot of really good points and then try and give a guest to respond. Thanks a lot for the call. So, Christopher, there’s a lot in what Lisa said, I’ll pick out whatever you want to respond to,

Christopher Meyers
quickly a couple of things. There’s no question that some of the core media outlets, New York Times being the most infamous, helped lead us into the Iraq War. But at the same time, there was plenty of criticism from many mainstream outlets about the arguments leading up to the war.

Ken Taylor
But wait, wait a minute, but slow down. I mean, but I do think, I do think I know there’s a lot more than leases. But I want to pause on this. I do think the media during that time, abandon it station, to be a clarion as a collectivity. I mean, there were differences among them, but taken in aggregate, they kind of abandon their station of being a skeptical clarion call to say what is true and what is fact and what. And it’s like they kind of serve the rallying the nation function way, way too much.

Christopher Meyers
I don’t think they wouldn’t give you that they rally too much. But journalists are humans too. And this is, shortly after 911. The nation is still in grief and mourning, trying to rally around some common themes. I remember being in a newsroom. When the US accidentally shut down the Iraq jetliner back in the mid 80s, late 80s. And the journalists were so horrified that this could happen. They weren’t willing to consider that it could have been the US who get it. They they have the same sense of patriotism of commitment to country. And of course, from their epistemological standpoint, that’s going to feed into how they understand that

Ken Taylor
that’s when they owe us. That’s when they owe it to not abandon their station to not give in to the ordinary human temptation, because they’re in a different role

Christopher Meyers
and give them a little bit of time, and they will eventually get there as happened with the Iraq War. Didn’t media certainly turned against the Iraq War pretty quickly.

Josh Landy
I agree with that. Maybe Maybe we can turn to another part of Lisa’s question about false equivalences. Yeah, I mean, so there’s a there’s a big question here about what the responsibility is of news stations and journalists. I mean, what does it mean to be fair?

Christopher Meyers
Yeah, so part of the old objectivity standard was, we’re going to some notion of a mirror on the world, we are going to accurately capture what’s happening out there and simply reflect it to our viewers and listeners, and readers. They realized journalists realized pretty quickly that that’s an impossible standard. So they went to balance instead, so long as we’re presenting both sides of the story in a fair way. Of course, there are a gazillion sides to any complex story. And so merely calling it the two sides already.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, that’s the thing. I know the thing that bothers me about journalism. And that is not, it’s not that per se, but that they’re really bad at it. Because presenting two sides is one thing, that’s easy. That’s lazy, I can present two sides. But interrogating two sides. That hard, that takes work. And that’s what they’re very many of them, especially broadcast journalists are very bad at doing is interrogating these two sides, because they’re unprepared, their knowledge is shallow, is 24 hour news. So you would think they have time to dig deep, but they don’t.

Christopher Meyers
Oh, yeah, of course, they don’t have time to dig deep. And they’re not trained to do that. And these days, there are fewer and fewer and fewer of them doing more and more and more work. They don’t have time to go out and research all of this. The climate change example, I think is the perfect one, where journalists really did start to come to recognize, you can’t present a story as if the deniers are equivalent to the scientists, right? And the equivalency of the Nazis and an Tifa or any other group protesting them. That of course is also a crazy fall. So

Ken Taylor
we haven’t dug deep all of into all of Lisa’s issues. There was one more but I didn’t want to get another caller in here. Joe from Petaluma, welcome to Philosophy Talk, Joe. Thanks.

Speaker 2
I feel like oh, no, as we all know, words and information can convey. You know, different things they can convey, obviously facts and statistics. But there’s also emotional truths. There’s moral truths, and certainly many others. And I think what I see at least when I watch news programs, whether it’s NPR or Fox News is they’re very concerned with the very surface facts, statistics. But they lose that sense of emotional truth of moral truth. And so I think, easy to watch those programs And you see one person, the talking points and their PR manager waiting in the wings talking to another person. And they may be giving some facts, some statistics, some truth. But I think on a more visceral level, you get the impression that they’re just morally and emotionally, maybe disingenuous. And somebody like Donald Trump, even though he is a compulsive liar when he stands up in front of the Republican debate platform, and he says, oh, it’s all rare, and that is very true.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, Joe. Yeah, Joe, I get where you’re going that I get where you’re going? It’s excellent question, Christopher. What do you think real quick, we’re gonna be into a break. But

Christopher Meyers
you’re asking for way too much from journalism, if you want them to convey facts, emotional truth, moral truth. Trump, no doubt, is very successfully tied into our guts very early on. And that’s why those of us who rely more on our brains just didn’t see it coming. Journalists can’t do it all.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, I see what you’re saying to Joe, but I feel his pain. I really do feel a journalist can’t do it up. But the media collectively can do it all can can interrogate the real cost and benefits the upside and downside, the real losers can display the consequences. I mean, the media collectively, this little anchor can’t do that all. But

Josh Landy
what you do, don’t forget the journalism, obviously, his house with many rooms, and you have fact checkers, you have op ed writers. I mean, I feel like some value some of these come in through the Op Ed page.

Christopher Meyers
Certainly you can get values for the Op Ed page through good news analysis that’s increasingly showing up on the front page. And you can get it from multiple sources when we get to ways to counteract this. Part of my argument is going to be that we the consumers have to be seeking information from various sources.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re thinking about post truth politics, with Christopher Myers from CSU Bakersfield,

Josh Landy
is there anything we can do to resist post truth politics? How do we stop the spread of fake news? And how can we make sure we’re not taken in by it

Ken Taylor
resisting post truth politics, when Philosophy Talk continues?

For some politicians lying is like an automatic habit. But what can we do when their supporters won’t see through them? I’m Ken Taylor. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Josh Landy
except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy, our guest is Christopher Myers from CSU Bakersfield. And we’re thinking about post truth politics.

Ken Taylor
So Christopher, we’re gonna do something that we do in on philosophy talk from time to time, we’re gonna make use czar of the world awesome. And you get to you get to help us find out find our way out of this epistemic nihilism. What do you do? Yes. What’s the first thing you do?

Christopher Meyers
The first thing I do is to recommend some patients, the marketplace of ideas, I still I’m in Josh’s camp, I still believe it works. But it doesn’t work tomorrow, it takes time for these ideas to filter for the crud to slough off and for the better ideas to rise. One of the ways two of the ways that can happen, journalism has to recommit to being a public service. In the 80s and 90s, when they were making money hand over fist, they bought each other out, they got into huge debt, then the recessions hit. And they just couldn’t sustain that economic model anymore. They have to recommit to public service, not just to making a profit. And then we have to go to different sources. I forced myself to listen to am talk radio on a regular basis. So I know what the folks who are ideologically opposed to me are thinking about and talking about this stuff. And every now and then I learned something important. And we should talk with our neighbors. I work with a lot of very conservative folks in the Bakersfield community. And one of the things that’s most telling to me is we do share the same values. And the more we connect over, as Joe put it, the emotional and the moral component of our lives together, the easier it is for us to ignore just how big the inauguration was.

Ken Taylor
I take your point, and I take it. And just to really sum up this seems like you’ve got okay. There’s structural reforms that we can make legal reforms that we can make, but mostly structural reforms, and then there’s changes in us that thing you said, patients, right Patience is is grand, but politics is mostly impatient politics is about the fierce urgency of now. Right. And I feel this fierce urgency from my side. So I don’t know how you get. I don’t know how you preach patience to people who, our political, who feel marginalized, and this and that, and they want their story out, and they want change now, and they don’t want to listen to the person who says, Wait,

Christopher Meyers
yeah, so patience doesn’t imply it’s going to be easy. Marketplace gets messy, you know, a whole bunch of ways. And unfortunately, that marketplace also sometimes motivates violence, as we’re seeing now. And I don’t think that’s going to get better anytime soon. But we will cycle out of it. You know, it that’s not meant to dis value those who will face harms over these four years, hopefully, maybe a year and a

Ken Taylor
half, let me throw something else out. This is both to you. And Josh, because I know you both are a fan of mill. I’m a fan of mill too. I tell students to read mill, understand mill, I’m a fan of mill, but there’s something I think he missed. And I think it’s relevant to not as journalism, but it’s partly relevant to journalism, but also political discourse in general. One of the things that I think mill did not appreciate enough is though, is the role of power in controlling what speech gets heard, what speech gets certified, as, you know, worthy of attention needing an argument, and, and power when you marry power, and you give certain people kind of primary or exclusive access to the means of public representation. It all gets distorted. And the free marketplace of ideas is a is a sham.

Christopher Meyers
Yeah, so that’s part of the reason why the Fairness Doctrine is so troubling, because the power that goes behind who owns those airwaves, who has access to your am radio station, that structural condition, allows for some voices to be heard and not others. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked once, if you could change anything about the Constitution, what would you do? And she’d say, she said, I would add more positive rights, particularly with respect to the First Amendment, we have to provide mechanisms for people’s voices to be heard, and give that constitutional protection argument similar to Catherine MacKinnon made and any number of folks currently making from the identity politics perspective.

Ken Taylor
So there is this issue about objectivity. And what some people think journalists have abandoned objectivity. What do you think is? Is objectivity a good thing? And impossible thing with journalists, right? Have they abandoned objectivity? Let’s talk about objectivity.

Christopher Meyers
Well, so I’m going to do the classic philosopher move and throw it back at you. What do you mean by objectivity? Oh, no.

Ken Taylor
I mean, something like this, I mean, something like this, we have our beliefs, right. And here’s the thing, believing, believing itself doesn’t make itself, right. And when I believe something, I have an obligation to try and check my belief against the world, right to push it as hard as possible from all angles, against all evidence. And so you just your your authority doesn’t generate truth. Just, you gotta like, push your beliefs against the world, you’re not entitled, you’re entitled to any opinion, but you’re not entitled to any belief, something like that is what I mean. Yeah. So

Christopher Meyers
I certainly agree with that I actually have a bumper sticker on my car that says, Don’t believe everything you think, right? We do have with Clifford on this, we do have a moral obligation, because most of our beliefs lead to action. And our actions have consequences for others. So we do have an obligation to try to get it as right as possible. I also firmly believe that we approach our interactions with the world and in particular interactions with other people through our own value lens. And journalists, of course, are doing that as well. But I’m enough of a pragmatist to know that if I’m coming up with something crazy, the world’s going to push back, right, either, right, you know, some kind of physical realism is going to push back, or all the people around me are going to recognize I’m in that job, and they’re no longer going to pay attention to me, they’re no longer going to give me credibility.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, Lippmann wrote about this, he talked about the ideas in our head, the pictures in our head, we kind of live in these pictures in our head, but we act in the world, and we go on with our little life pictures in our head, but the world has a way. It’s hard. A world has a way of embarrassing us bringing it but our pictures in our head can cause all kinds of damage. They can cause wars, they can cause misguided wars based on thought rather than fact. Okay, making the pictures of your on your in your head match reality living is really, really hard. How can journalism be constructed, structured so that we don’t just run wild with the pictures in our head but you know, They bubble up in journalism help us do that.

Christopher Meyers
Yeah. So journalism is necessarily going to be approaching particularly human events, the most complex of these kinds of stories from their point of view. And I know that the New York Times is going to approach it in one way, I know K L, W is going to approach it in a different way. And it’s part of my responsibility to get outside my bubble, and make sure that I’m seeing different takes on that same event.

Josh Landy
Right. So but it’s not, it seems to me, we can go beyond just well, we’re getting different takes. That’s one way to think about it. So you read a variety of news sources. But even within one news source, surely there’s a difference between news and fake news? I mean, surely the world but bumps up against this, as you’re saying that? Yeah, okay, we can’t have mathematical standards of proof. But you know, we can have preponderance of the evidence we can, we can give go to the best sources, we can gather as much evidence as possible and interview a number of people. And we can make good arguments, sound arguments. So it seems to count we even within one news source insist on certain standards, even if those standards don’t rise to the level of sort of 100% certainty.

Christopher Meyers
Yeah, so those are the traditional standards of journalism, right, that you go to experts that are genuine experts. And there’s a pretty strong movement in academic journalism these days for what’s called a scientific approach to journalism looking for those standards of evidence. The the huge problem that journalism is facing is the monetary pushes that just papers are losing money, that there was a brief uptick after the election. And they were starting to hire again, we’re starting to see that turn back down. If we move into another recession soon, they’re going to lose their advertising dollars. So there’s just not enough reporters out there. Yeah. Do having enough time to do that kind of work that you’re describing. That’s why it’s up to us to go to multiples. Yeah,

Ken Taylor
one last really quick thought. griot disagree. It’s the financial thing is one, but we’ve also lost confidence in the standards.

Christopher Meyers
The just trust of journalism has been dominant for the last 15 years. Happily, it kicked back up again about nine months ago, 10 months ago, and it’s certainly at a better place than it was 10 years ago.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. Well, on that optimistic note, Christopher, I mean, thank you for joining us. It’s been a great conversation. I’ve

Christopher Meyers
really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Christopher Myers. He’s a professor of philosophy at Cal State Bakersfield I editor of a philosophical approach to journalism ethics. So Josh, you got a closing last thought,

Josh Landy
Wow, man, I guess we’ve all got work to do, right? I mean, journalists need to recommit to public to to performing public service, consumers have to support them financially, consumers, also, regular folk like us, we have to go talk to our neighbors read multiple sources of news. Politicians need to restore the Fairness Doctrine. I mean, that’s maybe a longshot, and maybe intellectuals also need to do their work right? Down on truth resist the BS. You’re

Ken Taylor
really big on the I join you you’re really big on the responsibility of intellectual sell thinkers out there. Take up the Banner of Truth. This conversation continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers where our motto is Coda toe Ergo Blago, I think, therefore, I blog. And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed on today’s show, we’d love to hear from you still send your question to us at comments at philosophy talked at or IG and we might just feature it on our blog.

Josh Landy
You can become a partner in the community by visiting our website Philosophy Talk dot o RG. Now let’s hear from the voice of truth past, present and future. It’s Ian Scholes, The 62nd philosopher. In short,

Ian Shoales
what is fake news? Let’s put it in perspective. Fake news is real news in Metropolis. If you read the Daily Planet, you would believe Lois Lane and Clark Kent, especially when it came to the comings and goings of Superman about him the daily plant seemed to have an inside track. Of course, we in the real world know that the Daily Planet had an unfair advantage over its competitors. That Metropolis even have a rival newspaper. Well, yes, in the days of the Superman mythos, Lex Luthor owned all the media in Metropolis accepted any planet. He used the media to control his images the wealthy benefactor kinda like Bruce Wayne, I guess opened Gotham City. So when Clark Kent would work for the failing as our president might put it, Daily Planet, it certainly got scoops exclusives about Superman increasing circulation leading to resentment from Lex Luthor against the media that continues to this day kinda like Donald Trump. Anyway, it became moot the Daily Planet newspaper as in real life became less and less important. And eventually in the comics, Clark Kent was given a new job as a news anchor which seems a waste of his unique reporting skills, you know, super hearing ability to fly X ray vision etc. I did not see the Zack Snyder directed Batman vs Superman movie because life is too short. But interesting, Clark was back at the newspaper being a hard hitting reporter in that one trying to dig up dirt on Batman for some stupid reason. Why didn’t he just take his extra vision over to Gotham City look for himself at the very least take a look at Wayne Plaza. towers when one stadium Come on, there’s some kind of corruption going on over there. I don’t know journalism even works in genre pictures anymore. I’ve seen more than one movie where intrepid journalist was a blogger. Oh yeah, those blogs really strike fear into the hearts of evildoers. The real problem in the real world. Fake News wise is that nobody believes anything on the internet or everybody believes everything, no middle ground at all. Thinking back one of the early examples of fake news is the Orson Welles radio production of War of the Worlds which was presented as a kind of phone newscast and supposedly caused panic all across the US. Well, it turns out that wasn’t true. There was no mass hysteria. Not that many people were even listening to it because it was up against the negra Bergen program, the inexplicably popular radio ventriloquist instead of a panic were made up by newspapers who are experiencing a big loss of leadership because people are getting news from the radio. Also, there’s a lot of concern like now over the rising popularity of racist rabble rousers like father column, and a fake panic over radio shogi fodder to those who wanted to put a muzzle on me you expression like the production code and movies, and the Comics Code and comics. When it came along and took over television was even scarier. I can’t even watch television news. You get self important anchors started by blinking banners and scrolling text, Bing breaking news and upcoming segments. You get tables full of men and blue suits and some women finding ways to not have cautious opinions about momentous events. This used to be called spin notice called framing the narrative. It just makes me nervous. I prefer the soothing voices to Public Radio and say warning about Martian invaders. As far as fake news goes and those that can tell that actually means news. Donald Trump doesn’t like oh, maybe he can’t but I can certainly live with it. I gotta go.

John Perry
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Ken Taylor
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John Perry
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Ken Taylor
Thanks also to Laurel Kessler, Audrey dilling and Collin Peterson. Support for

John Perry
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Ken Taylor
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John Perry
The conversation continues on our website, Philosophy Talk dot o RG where you too, can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m John Perry. And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening and thank you for thinking

Seinfeld
What about the breathing the panting the moaning the screaming?