WASHINGTON – Amid the slithering mess of problems that emerged in 2017, the one that bothers me most is that people don’t seem to know what’s true anymore. “Facts” this year got put in quotation marks.
All the other political difficulties of the Donald Trump era are subsumed in this one. If we aren’t sure what’s true, how can we act to make things better? If we don’t know where we are on the map, how do we know which way to move? Democracy assumes a well-informed citizenry that argues about solutions – not about facts.
We can all choose our favorite examples of America’s increasing difficulty in agreeing about evidence: the disdain for science among climate-change skeptics; the refusal to believe allegations about people we like, and the overeagerness to denounce those we don’t like; the way in which political polarization has spread into every area of our common life – including sports.
What should thoughtful people do about this overarching problem? Part of the answer lies with my profession, the news business. We need to work harder to make sure that we’re unbiased truth-tellers, not a series of echo chambers. When every story in a newspaper or on a website or cable channel seems to be going in the same direction, that’s a sign that something’s wrong.
But journalists need new tools. We can’t always vet every fact. We rely on certain trusted sources, news services such as the Associated Press or Reuters. But even those superbly professional fact-gatherers sometimes have trouble verifying information. Social media can help – people can upload video from their cellphones of events as they happen. But we’re learning that social media can be tools of deception as well as truth.