Book Review: True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society

This is definitely a new era. Whoever would have thought you would hear people diss “fact-based journalism” — or that we’d even see that phrase? But the dissing, and existence of that phrase do exist: 21st century America is moving into a new age where many people will often only go to websites with which they totally agree, listen or watch left and right wing talk shows that already share their views, read news stories they agree with, and tout factoids that fit their biases and ignore those that don’t.

Salon’s Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society is required reading for those who’ve pondered, bemoaned, celebrated or nurtured this new trend. Not everyone will agree with his take on specifics, but he brings this issue into focus with lots of examples.

But it’s his broad theme that is most compelling — because if society, journalism, and political debate are trending this way, if you project further into the 21st century precisely where are we heading? He notes that LBJ once said that when he lost Walter Cronkite — the quintessential symbol of the mainstream media — on the war in Vietnam, he lost America. And now?

But the MSM is now an institution in winter, with the largest media outlets serving ever-narrower slices of the public. The mainstream is drying up. In some ways, we are returning to the freewheeling days before radio and television launched the very idea of mass media — the era of partisan newspapers and pamphleteers. But our niches, now, are more niche than ever before. We are entering what you might call the trillion-channel universe: over the last two decades, advances in technology — the digital recording and distribution of text, images, and sound information over networks, aka, the modern world — have helped to turn each of us into producers, distributors and editors of our own media diet. Now we collect the news firsthand through digital cameras, and we send our accounts and opinions to the world over blogs, and we use Google, TiVO, the iPod, and a raft of other tools to carefully screen what we consume.

As we’ve noted often here on this site, the era of broadcasting and “mass” media is being supplanted by narrowcasting and mroe and more people intent on narrowing what they read, listen and watch. He writes:

While new technology eases connections between people, it also, paradoxically, facilitates a closeted view of the world, keeping us coiled tightly with those who share our ideas. In a world that lacks real gatekeepers and authority figures, and in which digital manipulation is so effortless, spin, conspiracy theories, myths, and outright lies may get the better of many of us. All these factors contributed to the success of the Swift Boat campaignl. New media, patchworks of niches, were at the scene of that crime.

Manjoo looks at the Swift Boat saga — the Republican campaign that helped to undercut 2004 Presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry — in some detail and precisely how conservative talk radio and the Internet aided this campaign in sandbagging Kerry. But he isn’t limiting his criticism to one side of the screaming partisan aisle: he also takes aim at claims that George Bush stole the 2004 presidential election from Democrat Al Gore. Meanwhile, he examines how 911 bred and fed a slew of conspiracy theories (easy to find on websites and plentiful on You Tube).

He cites numerous studies to weave a solid argument — that many of us have made for a long time but didn’t have the actual documentation — that people increasingly see truth as what they already believe and in this increasingly fragmented media age with many “mass media” outlets in trouble people consciously and unconsciously choose media sources according to their existing beliefs. But it isn’t just that: he underscores how these perceptions involve very different perceptions of reality.

How do these ideas grow, and snowball, and gain strength? He makes the case that it’s due to this splintering of the media and the new tools that can enable truths that in the end aren’t. Truth is re-arranged, manipulated, and cheery picked so it goes out to the faithful (on each side) who accept it and aggressively promote it as part of their reality. Selective exposure, fragmented media, cognitive biases and other factors all shape this new perceived reality. Manjoo supports his argument with concrete examples and detailed research, all written in highly readable I-can’t-put-this-down style. One chapter deals with advertising and propaganda masked as fact.

The basic question becomes: are facts and is fact based journalism out of style? AND: Are they considered virtues or pesky things that get in the way of a world view?

As newspapers wither and downsize, as once-dominant news magazines redesign and trim reporting and investigative reporting for analysis and opinion, as blogs (such as this) essentially offer op-ed analyses with occasional original reporting, what happens to the idea that there can be a “truth” in a story or a “fact” that is truth or fact and that nothing that talk show hosts of the left or right, political groups, or blogger say can change that?

On a TMV scale of one to five stars, we give True Enough FIVE STARS.

And that’s truth and a fact…