[Zitat]
" .. But that’s the Republicans’ plight. The country has a larger
problem — “intellectual nihilism,” as the writer Noam Scheiber recently
labeled it. Since 9⁄11, often but not always under the right’s aegis, truth
has been destabilized in America. The Bush administration’s contempt for
what it dismissed as the “reality-based community” was vindicated when it
successfully ginned up a war by convincing Americans that the 9⁄11 hijackers
were Iraqis and that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Our
susceptibility to elaborate, beautifully wrought myths remains
intact — whether we’re being spun by politicians, captains of finance pumping
up a bubble, or sports heroes like Lance Armstrong and Joe Paterno. The news
business, which we once counted on to vet hoaxes and fictions, is now so
insecure about its existential future that it was cowed to some extent by
the Scarboroughs, Noonans, and Roves, with most of the networks, not just
Fox, ignoring the statistical data of Silver and others and instead
predicting a long, nail-biting Election Night. (In reality, the election was
called for Obama at 11:12 p.m. EST on NBC, just twelve minutes after it had
been in 2008.) Our remaining journalistic institutions have even outsourced what used to be the very core of their craft, fact-checking, to surrogates* relegated to gimmicky sidebars (awarding Pinocchios and “pants on fire”). The fact-checkers have predictably become partisan targets, only further destabilizing the whole notion of what is meant by “news.”
[Zitat Ende]
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* Der hervorgehobene Text trifft - nach meiner Überzeugung - auch hier bei uns zu. Die Medien werden ihrer Rolle als Kontrollinstanz nicht mehr gerecht, hier wie dort. Und keine Alternative in Sicht.