In the Atlantic, Michael Hirschorn laments that Both Sides Lie in American Politics, and that they can get away with it due to the Digital Media. That Right and that Left -- they sure are awful, the both of them, with their blogs and their Twitters and Facebooks. Yep...
In a time when mainstream news organizations have already ceded a substantial chunk of their opinion-shaping influence to Web-based partisans on the left and right, does each side now feel entitled to its own facts as well? And thanks to the emergence of social media as the increasingly dominant mode of information dissemination, are we nearing a time when truth itself will become just another commodity to be bought and sold on the social-media markets? Or, to cast it in Twitter-speak: @glennbeck fact = or > @nytimes fact?
Which one can imagine as a "clever" line, as it uses that hip new Twitter speak -- but at the same time, it's completely ridiculous.
In FACT, to use the word as Hirschorn seems to want us to but here does not, the dividing line between "right" and "left" is not remotely between Glenn Beck on the one hand and the New York Times on the other. In FACT, to draw the line there is to lazily accept right-wing ontology, since the concept of the Times as a left-wing propaganda outlet is right-wing dogma and not at all, well, FACT. (The NYT has in FACT caused considerable damage when it has allowed itself to be an uncritical outlet for right-wing propaganda, as in regards to Whitewater and even worse, Judith Miller.)
Yes, yes, Hirschorn meant the line as a bit of a joke, but it's a revealing one, as he sticks it right there in his thesis statement.
Hirschorn frets portentously about the ability of society to "function (as it has since the Enlightenment gave primacy to the link between reason and provable fact) when there is no commonly accepted set of facts and assumptions to drive discourse."
Well, me too. But it's not the "social-media markets" that are the problem. It is the right-wing media that is the problem, as well as the fretful pundits like Hirschorn who are so invested in an abstract idea of "fair play" -- because the right wing has been yelling along these lines for decades now -- that they fairly astonishingly refuse to call bullshit on "conservatism" even as they catalogue conservative bullshit. Beck/the NYT? Breitbart/Julian Assange of Wikileaks? Really?
"Social media" is not the issue, and is certainly not to blame for phony impeachment scandals, inaction on climate change, wars based on lies, and economic disaster. You can pin all those though on an American right that has for far too long now been permitted to own its own set of opinions dressed up as FACTS, a simple and fairly obvious FACT that in FACT you're not allowed to mention in the Atlantic.
Which is of course the proud employer of Megan McArdle.