The Free Press: How a War on Truth Threatens Democracy | Wesley Lowery
- 6 years ago
“We love, as a culture, to attack messengers when the message is something that makes us feel uncomfortable,” says journalist Wesley Lowery. Lowery's book is "They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement" (https://goo.gl/0ezeTq).
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Transcript - I think that we’ve seen an unprecedented assault on our media. We’ve seen a deep villainization of our free press. And, in fact, a war on objectively true information that when something is reported that someone does not like you can just say it’s not true whether it is or not. You can try to undercut the messenger and talk about how these are just biased reporters, don’t listen to them. When, in fact, often these are fair reporters who’ve worked very hard to get things right. That has real ramifications. I mean we’re facing the prospect of living in a world that is post truth where there are no objective truths. Where you can tell me the sky is purple, the sky is green when in fact we’re looking at it and we see that it’s blue. That becomes very dangerous potentially for democracy, right. Because in a world in which the truth is unknowable how do we make governing decisions and then also how do we hold people accountable? How do we demand better of our elected officials if our elected official do not have to acknowledge reality at any point in time, right. They can just tell us that no, they did not say the thing they said. No this policy would not do the things we know it would do. I think that’s particularly dangerous and I think that it’s difficult. Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/4TaUNs.
Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/wesley-lowery-on-the-importance-of-the-free-press
Follow Big Think here:
YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BigThinkdotcom
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Transcript - I think that we’ve seen an unprecedented assault on our media. We’ve seen a deep villainization of our free press. And, in fact, a war on objectively true information that when something is reported that someone does not like you can just say it’s not true whether it is or not. You can try to undercut the messenger and talk about how these are just biased reporters, don’t listen to them. When, in fact, often these are fair reporters who’ve worked very hard to get things right. That has real ramifications. I mean we’re facing the prospect of living in a world that is post truth where there are no objective truths. Where you can tell me the sky is purple, the sky is green when in fact we’re looking at it and we see that it’s blue. That becomes very dangerous potentially for democracy, right. Because in a world in which the truth is unknowable how do we make governing decisions and then also how do we hold people accountable? How do we demand better of our elected officials if our elected official do not have to acknowledge reality at any point in time, right. They can just tell us that no, they did not say the thing they said. No this policy would not do the things we know it would do. I think that’s particularly dangerous and I think that it’s difficult. Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/4TaUNs.