To many Right-wingers, including Trump himself, the edit was propaganda designed to portray him as a riot-inciting demagogue. To Trump haters, even if it’s not an accurate representation of what he said in that particular speech it’s a fair distillation of Trumpishness, and as such true in spirit. So who is right? It’s not even a debate about the facts, but about what the facts mean.

And this is precisely the larger issue at stake for the BBC, too: not so much whether, or in which direction, the BBC is “biased”, but whether we still have any faith in the possibility of neutral, authoritative arbiters of information as such. And if the answer is “no”, what does the future look like for our supposedly neutral and impartial national broadcaster?

The fallout from the leaked dossier which drew attention to the clip, along with evidence of other editorial bias at the BBC, has triggered the resignation of the Director-General, Tim Davie along with the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Furness. It has even drawn comment from the White House, with Trump threatening legal action against the corporation and his press secretary Karoline Leavitt calling it a “propaganda machine”.

Supporters of the BBC allege that the dossier is in fact a nefarious Right-wing plot to destroy the institution. Conversely, those same Right-wingers might retort that the fact these insinuations are mostly published by The Guardian supports the suspicion that the Beeb may only appear “neutral” to people whose idea of sensible centrism is Polly Toynbee. This aside, I think it’s fair to say there is an unmistakable progressive tilt to the issues listed in the dossier, and the imputation of Left-wing bias is not totally baseless. But the problem goes deeper than bias in one direction. It is structural.

If the BBC is struggling today, it’s because, for a growing number of political issues, there is no “neutral”. All three of the dossier’s flashpoints — Trump, Gaza and gender ideology — have this quality. Trump is an archetypal case, and nowhere more divisively than in how you interpret the events that occurred at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. For one camp, this was a peaceful turnout by patriots in defense of an election they believed stolen; to the other, it was an attempted insurrection. There’s no way both interpretations can be true.

The same goes for the conflict in Gaza, which – depending on your worldview – is either justified retaliation for an unprovoked act of mass terrorism, or genocide thinly legitimized by the actions of freedom fighters. Again, there’s no way both of these things can be true. The trans issue has the same Rorschach quality: either a person’s sex is determined by what they are, or it’s determined by what they say they are. They can’t both be true, and there’s no “both sides” compromise.

This isn’t happening because there’s something uniquely polarizing about contemporary politics. The decisive change is the internet. Avant-garde commentators such as Clay Shirky were predicting back in the 2000s that people could use the internet to do away with institutional gatekeepers, unleashing a new era of popular democracy and cultural dynamism. And this did sort of happen, but not quite in the way the utopians anticipated.

The BBC is (or was) a paradigmatic example of this kind of gatekeeper. It has always been both in the business of representing what’s out there, and also of seeking to shape it. From its foundation, its remit was always patrician: to “inform, educate, and entertain”, including through the provision of (aspirationally) impartial news. Karoline Leavitt was perhaps not wholly off-piste: a pithier term for a state-owned, taxpayer-funded media giant with this improving remit might well be “propaganda machine”, for all that (as for example during the Second World War) this duty has generally been discharged in cooperation with the British people. Especially after the war, the BBC came to occupy a role contiguous with the Church of England: as diffident but still mostly trustworthy repository and delivery-mechanism for such collective morals as post-imperial Britain was able still to agree on.

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Tony Blair’s Strava governance

By Mary Harrington

Even if the rise of commercial radio and TV dented the BBC’s crown, it still stayed more or less in place — until the internet. Now, though, everything is different. The internet poses an existential threat not just to the BBC as a body, but more fundamentally to the worldview within which having a national broadcaster makes sense at all.

For one thing, internet politics has stripped geography from political debate, which is now divided much more by language than geography. This means Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia, and other Anglophone communities worldwide all inhabit functionally the same public square. How, in this context, should a national broadcaster judge what counts as national news? But more important still, the internet has done as Shirky promised and “disintermediated” journalism. That is: it’s significantly reduced the power of institutional gatekeepers.

The result has been cultural dynamism, after a fashion. But it’s also revealed that the post-structuralists were actually right about “truth” being to some extent an effect of institutional power. That is: when you don’t have a powerful single arbiter of The Narrative, what you end up with may not necessarily be more truth. You might just get a Babel of competing narratives. And like market traders hawking their wares on a busy square, the incentive structures of such an information economy tend to reward the loudest voices and simplest, most vivid offers.

Lest anyone be tempted to comfort themselves with the idea that this is only a problem for “low-information voters”, think again: what the philosopher Dan Williams calls “elite misinformation” is just as rampant, and studies have shown education level to have no effect on how susceptible people are to misinformation. By way of illustration, we need only remember the bizarre assertions that came and went, week by week, during Covid-19, while at every stage the chattering classes enjoined us to “follow the science”.

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I miss the great philosophers

By Kathleen Stock

Indeed it was Covid-19 that provided the inflection point in this trajectory, for the simple reason that lockdowns forced everyone online. If it feels since then that the world has gone mad, it’s not that social isolation sent us crazy. It’s that the internet ate reality. In the resulting cacophony, everyone now assembles themselves a bespoke version of reality, from a near-infinite supply of media channels, podcasts, influencers, and the like.

And because humans are mimetic — that is, we decide what we want based on what those around us want — these realities have begun to agglomerate in affinity groups. In turn, these clusters have begun to define themselves in opposition to one another, and to mount information-war maneuvers against one another. One notable result of these skirmishes, for example, is the progressive capture of Wikipedia, which was founded as a neutral, crowdsourced online encyclopedia but has become bitterly politicized.

This dissolution of “truth” into tribal trench warfare is now the basic structure of what we used to call “the public conversation”. Huge amounts of money, status, and political influence are already at stake in this new environment; one the BBC, which was designed as a one-to-many vehicle for transmitting respectable establishment consensus, is hopelessly ill-equipped to navigate. For as in each of the flashpoint issues in the Prescott dossier, what’s at stake is often not the facts, so much as what the facts mean. And, for a national broadcaster tasked with impartial reporting, this presents an often impossible dilemma. There’s often no way to report on an issue this bitterly contested without effectively picking a “side”, which is to say an interpretation of those facts, even if only in choosing what to omit. For example (according to Prescott’s dossier) the BBC’s transgender reporting routinely centered trans experience, but omitted the voices of detransitioners.

But what is the BBC to do? The internet replaced one-to-many with many-to-many communication, and institutional gatekeepers with platform plutocrats. Now Auntie is just one voice in an increasingly noisy attention economy, and everyone just dismisses competing interpretations as lies and propaganda. The Panorama furor itself is already grist to the same disorienting mill: former Sky political editor Adam Boulton said of the edited clip that at worst the BBC was guilty of “sharp practice”, and in any case it was justified because the edit was morally accurate even if it was factually misleading. So much so, in fact, that it was “fake news to suggest Donald Trump did not egg on what happened on 6 January”. For his part, Trump’s press secretary has now declared the entire BBC to be “fake news”.

There is, in other words, nowhere to stand that isn’t someone else’s fake news. Pity the poor Beeb: when you can now search up 10 conspiratorial interpretations of every factual report, from every conceivable angle, in the time it takes to boil the kettle, how long is anyone going to go on believing in impartiality as such? You can be sure that any effort to “correct” the perceived existing Left-liberal BBC bias would simply elicit fresh accusations of “fake news” and “bias” from somewhere else. Under the circumstances, I don’t entirely blame the Director General, Tim Davie, for throwing in the towel.

More than one thing can be true simultaneously. It is surely true that many will be delighted by the opportunity these events have afforded, to put the boot into the BBC. It’s surely also true that the institution’s well-documented middle-class staffing skew exposes its employees to the blind spots and groupthink of that social milieu, and that this is often visible in editorial decisions. But it’s also true that comparatively speaking, the BBC is fighting a heroic last stand for neutrality, against perhaps insuperable has arguably already held out longer than any of its commercial counterparts, and indeed such utopian digital enterprises as Wikipedia.

As well as noting its lapses into bias, then, we might also acknowledge how very much worse this already is, almost everywhere else. But this is faint praise. “It’s not as woke as Wikipedia” may not be enough to save the BBC, as an institution, from the sucking void of Choose Your Own Reality. If it isn’t, then flawed and middle-class and sometimes irritatingly sanctimonious as it is, I suspect we will all come to regret its passing.

Other people’s beliefs are ideological in the sense of being rigid, doctrinaire, immune to argument and detached from the practical world, whereas one’s own convictions are flexible, pragmatic and eminently reasonable. Capping child allowance so that more families are plunged into poverty is pretty much common sense in an economic crisis, while heavily taxing the oil companies springs from socialist dogma. There’s nothing ideological about revering the monarchy — like scratching your nose or gambling for eight hours a day, it’s a natural human inclination — but claiming that it provides circuses for the people to distract them from a shortage of bread is simply the talk of disaffected intellectuals.

To be post-truth, then, is to be post-ideological. Long ago, when the middle class were revolutionaries storming the strongholds of the aristocracy, ideas like God, liberty, progress, patriotism and equality mattered to them a lot. They were vital weapons in the struggle for hearts and minds. Once they settled down to the humdrum task of accumulating capital, however, these grandiose notions weren’t so essential. Besides, by secularising and rationalising the world, capitalism created a climate in which such high-minded stuff sounded increasingly implausible. In doing so, it undercut some of its own rationales.

It’s mostly American politicians these days who talk about God, freedom, “this great country of ours” and “our brave men and women in uniform”, the United States being on account of its Puritan heritage one of the most metaphysical nations in the world, as well as one of the most materialistic. One can’t imagine Jeremy Hunt waxing eloquent about the country’s eternal debt to the Almighty, as opposed to its debt to its international creditors. As capitalist society evolves, its everyday practice comes loose from its rhetorical self-justification, which is to say that the gap between what it does, and what it says it does, looms incongruously large. This is what philosophers know as a performative contradiction. Better, then, to ditch as much of its metaphysical baggage as you decently can — in which case truth, at least with a large T, becomes increasingly redundant.

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Who are the strikers fooling?

By Terry Eagleton

Truth is what compels our belief, but belief isn’t what binds late capitalist societies together. According to the ruling ideology of liberalism, you can believe whatever you like as long as it doesn’t stymie other people’s freedom to do the same, or pose a serious threat to their wellbeing. The state doesn’t give a toss about what you believe, a situation which would have been unintelligible to John Calvin or Oliver Cromwell, and is still unintelligible to a host of contemporary autocrats. Besides, in a relativist world, the word “conviction” comes to have a dogmatic ring to it.

This is odd, given that having convictions of some sort is constitutive of being human. To be a person is to have a point of view on the world. The convictions in question don’t need to be obsessive. You can believe that childbirth should be abolished without standing with a megaphone outside maternity hospitals. The historian A.J.P. Taylor once told a committee interviewing him for an Oxford fellowship that he had extreme political opinions but held them moderately.

Rather as religious belief was privatised some centuries ago with the birth of Protestantism, as a transaction between you and God alone, so belief in general becomes a kind of private hobby, as harmlessly idiosyncratic as Morris dancing or pigeon-fancying. What holds such societies together — consumerism, material interests, the rule of law — doesn’t really have to pass through the human mind, as it most certainly does in Islamist set-ups. This is one way in which the West’s latest bogeyman — terrorism rather than Communism — puts it at a severe political disadvantage. Solidarity in such nations goes all the way down, whereas in Britain it is largely confined to football. The word “fan” is short for “fanatic”.

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How woke is Nietzsche?

By Giles Fraser

It was unfortunate for the West that just when Islamism began to blow up innocent civilians, its own culture was becoming increasingly sceptical and relativist. Conviction was falling in value at just the point when it was politically necessary. Truth became subservient to material interests. In the age of Plato, truth was thought to be independent of such mundane matters. It was an absolute affair, sublimely transcendent of the everyday world of ignorance and delusion. Later, however, thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche argued that what we held to be true was largely determined by our perspective on the world, which was merely one among many such standpoints, and which was shaped among other things by our struggle for material survival. This argument didn’t deny that truth existed, but it placed it within a social and historical framework.

In our own time, this case has been reduced to a cruder version of itself: truth is simply an instrument of power. You describe the world in whatever way best promotes your interests. And since there are many conflicting interests, there are many conflicting truths. Enter Donald Trump and the Big Lie, along with those postmodernists who maintain that truth is just what’s true for me. Truth had finally been either abolished or privatised. What matters is what works — and for that purpose a blatant falsehood may do just as well. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “to trump up” as “to invent a false accusation or excuse”.

All this suits a society which is continually in flux. Truth and facts seem to be static, and thus incapable of surviving in a world whose only permanent feature is changeability. In the world of postmodern capitalism, everything is fluid, unstable, groundless and provisional. Change is good, but staying the same isn’t. This may be true for the CEOs of Tesco and Google, but as a general proposition it’s clearly absurd: if permanence and consistency are uncool, why not abolish the ban on child labour and send children of five into workplaces? But there’s also something absolute about historical truth that sticks in the craw of the Trumps and Hannitys of this world. If it’s true that the emperor Tiberius died on the island of Capri in 37 CE, it was true in 37 CE, true today and will no doubt also be true in the year 3000. Of course, it may not be true at all. But that is another question.

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Is liberal society making us ill?

By Gurwinder Bhogal

There are other reasons why truth is being discredited. For Plato, truth was something deep, lurking beneath the surface appearances of everyday reality. Postmodernism is uneasy with this surface/depth model, for a number of reasons, one of them concerning what Lenin called the reality of appearances. In a culture of the image, star, brand, momentary sensation and instant gratification, everything seems on the surface; but if there are no depths, then there are no surfaces either, and the whole model collapses. The image is the reality, as in the term “Reality TV”. What you see is what you get. One is asked for one’s “take” on a topic, a verb borrowed from film and television. All this is convenient enough for the political Right, who also dislike the surface/depth model because it suggests that there are powerful but invisible forces which dominate our lives, not least those of the marketplace. “All the important processes,” Marx wrote, “go on behind the backs of individuals”. What we see and what we get aren’t at all the same thing. This belief lingers on in the post-truth era, but now it’s known as conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theorists have got at least two things right: that the truth can differ dramatically from what we’re officially told, and that it is usually unpleasant. There aren’t many conspiracy fantasists who claim that the world is run by a benevolent secret society which will one day deposit a fortune in all our bank accounts. There is, however, a more attractive aspect to the concept of truth. The word itself comes from the Old English “triewth”, which means faith or constancy. There’s a related word, “troth”, which means trust or loyalty. So truth is originally a moral concept. Speaking in a way which is true to the way things are is closely bound up with being faithful to others. In fact, we couldn’t do the latter without the former. Without mutual trust there couldn’t be any social existence. It’s not surprising, then, that Donald Trump’s cavalier way with the facts is linked with a foul-mouthed contempt for most of his fellow human beings.

One of them is individualism. In a society which lacks any strong bonds between its members, everyone is likely to have their own interpretation of the world, just as everyone is likely to have their own toothbrush. You wouldn’t want to borrow someone else’s version of the truth, any more than you would want to borrow their toothbrush. Truth becomes privatised. It’s a matter of my personal experience, and surely no one can challenge that. 

In fact, personal experience is as open to debate and dissent as the existence of God. There’s nothing absolute about it. One of the key insights of the late modern period, before the birth of postmodernism, is the recognition that human beings are constitutively opaque to themselves. “Constitutively”, because this lack of self-transparency is built into the kind of animals we are, not just some lamentable self-blindness which we could put right with a little more self-reflection.

When Oedipus in Sophocles’s drama finally comes to know who he is, he recognises that he is a stranger to himself. It has taken incest, parricide, pollution, self-blinding and self-exile to arrive at the conclusion that he has no certain grasp of his own identity, and that this is the condition of us all. There must be easier ways of learning this lesson. 

There was a time when we thought that we were transparent to ourselves and that it was others who were indecipherable to us. Nowadays, we tend to accept that we aren’t always in entire possession of our own experience, and that others can sometimes know us better than we know ourselves. Among other things, this is because other people are frequently well-placed to see what we do, and what we do is a surer guide to who we are than what we say or think we are. If someone insists that he’s a passionate lover of animals and spends his spare time dissecting live frogs, then he is self-deluded. It’s the beliefs implicit in our behaviour, not those recorded in our memoirs, that really count. If the truth is what we feel, there can be no place for self-deception in human affairs. It simply wouldn’t be possible for a prime minister to declare himself a pretty straight sort of guy, and probably believe it, yet seek to deceive the public about the invasion of Iraq. 

So I am no infallible guide to the meaning of my own experience. I thought at the time I was furious, but looking back I realise that I was afraid. It’s true that my experience is beyond doubt in the sense that I really am in agony, and no mistake; but to know that what I’m feeling is agony rather than ecstasy, I must have the concepts of agony and ecstasy, and this isn’t something I can achieve all by myself. I can know this only by belonging to a community whose language includes these notions.

In this sense, even the most private of experiences is public. Toddlers don’t spontaneously come up with the concept of unfairness. Rather, they take part in a form of social life in which the idea of unfairness has a function, they watch how their elders behave and listen to how words are used as forces in these contexts. If they have the misfortune to be brought up in Conservative Party headquarters, they will never get the hang of the idea.

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The death of historical truth

By Jonathan Sumption

Another insight of late modernity is that experience and reality are in some ways out of sync. It looks as though the sun circles the earth, but this is because the Earth revolves on its axis. (“The sun’s coming up — or as the new theory has it, the Earth’s going down,” as a 17th-century character remarks in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosenkrantz and Guildernstern are Dead). One purpose of science is to close the gap between reality and our experience of it, as well as explaining how the gap comes about. 

Like all concepts, truth is inherently social. There must be public criteria by which we can determine what counts as true or false, and these criteria are nobody’s private possession. The philosopher Wittgenstein imagines someone exclaiming “But I know how tall I am!” and placing his hand on top of his head. He hasn’t grasped the fact that tallness is a comparative notion, one that involves socially agreed modes of measurement. There must also be public criteria for conflicts over truth. Disagreement is only possible if you can agree on what you are disagreeing over. We aren’t conflicting over the value of the pound if you are thinking of sterling and I am thinking of the American poet of that name. 

A certain degree of consensus must underlie the most vehement of altercations. People who cry “Well, it’s true for me” (the #MeToo generation is also the “Me-Me-Me” generation) haven’t grasped this point, either. Rather than making the coldly impersonal idea of truth more warmly experiential, they end up abolishing it altogether. If truth is just what anyone happens to think is true, then the word drops out of use. It becomes impossible to distinguish between what I feel and the way the world actually is. There are people who insist that slavery is one of the most outrageous episodes in Western history, yet put the word “truth” in scare quotes. They tend to do the same with the word “fact”, while maintaining that it’s a fact that women are equal to men. 

Does all this mean that truth is beyond dispute? Certainly not for science. The fact that truth isn’t just subjective doesn’t mean that it must be absolute. The one is just the flipside of the other. Relativists and subjectivists fear that unless they are right, truth becomes dogmatic, infallible and authoritarian. But this is to be afraid of a bogeyman. To say that a proposition is scientific is to say among other things that it could be wrong. It’s the kind of thing that someone might always come along and falsify. It differs in this way from “Put that tiger down!” or “Sorry, make that two tuna sandwiches”.

Science is a never-ending argument, in which one’s conclusions are perpetually open to revision, and argument is fundamentally a political affair. You must make sure that everyone gets a chance to participate in the debate, that they do so on equal terms, that nobody is allowed to impose their own partisan interests on the discussion and so on. None of this guarantees the emergence of truth, but it’s an essential pre-condition of it. People who claim “It’s true for me” tend not to be interested in any of this. What is there to argue about? It is they who are the absolutists, since there would seem no way of disproving what they assert. Anyway, someone can always protest that the “it’s true for me” claim isn’t true for them.

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Prince Harry is a Freudian dream

By Giles Fraser

“It’s true for me” springs from a false egalitarianism. If everyone is to be included in political society, then everyone’s views must be respected as well. So what about the view that everyone isn’t to be included? Is that to be respected as well? And what of the so-called law of contradiction? If you think that reading Agatha Christie gives you prostate cancer and I disagree, then one of us has to be wrong. But postmodernists are reluctant to admit that anyone is wrong. It offends against the law of inclusivity, as well as making some people sound inferior to others. Anyway, from what Olympian vantage point can one make such a judgement? How can I possibly judge that there are some sexist police officers in Britain? Isn’t any such claim a sign of moral superiority or intellectual elitism on my part? 

Such is the addled thinking that passes for genuine argument in certain circles. A fear of sounding authoritarian, when all you’re trying to do is tell the truth, haunts contemporary culture. This is why it’s fashionable to qualify what one says with the word “necessarily” — as in “It’s not necessarily that people are passing themselves off as Tom Cruise, it’s just that there’s a crisis of identity”, where what you mean is that people aren’t passing themselves as Tom Cruise at all. But it sounds offensively dogmatic to say so. Similarly, to say “It’s nine o’clock” sounds unpleasantly absolute, so it’s advisable to throw in a “like”. “It’s like nine o’clock” sounds far more agreeably uncertain. A pervasive sense of uncertainty is one reason why truth has come into disrepute. But there are other reasons, which i’ll return to in my next essay.  

At the time a committed anti-capitalist, I experienced the ever more intrusive presence of advertising in the built environment as an unacceptable invasion. It felt like being tapped on the shoulder every three seconds by annoying canvassers while enjoying a quiet ciggie break.

So I set out to see if it was possible to ignore them. It was, it turned out, difficult: advertisers spend a great deal of money on being attention-grabbing, and it took a huge mental effort to tune out all that expensive effort to snag my awareness.

The “attention economy” was first theorised by the economist Herbert Simon in 1971: he called attention to the “bottleneck of human thought” and argued that in a world where this was a scarce resource, the smart money focused on grabbing a slice of it. After all, you can have the best product in the world but if no one has noticed you exist, you’ll still sink without trace. An immense amount of lucrative time and effort goes into the arms race for attention, and the results — not just on the Tube — are often eye-watering.

If it was difficult to swim against the commercial messaging tide two decades ago, it’s even harder now. When I did my Tube experiment, averting my eyes from the tsunami of paid-for messaging became exhausting after a few days. After a while, it was easier just to give in and swim on the tide of people trying to tell me what to buy. And today, the experiment would be harder still, with adverts covering every available surface and sometimes moving as well.

Over the same period, too, something equivalent has happened to the whole media universe. A vast commercial and political industry has developed with the aim of grabbing the punter’s attention and persuading us to buy, say or think something or other. The boundary between PR, journalism and propaganda is blurry to say the least, and flourishes atop an immense ecosystem of opinion-havers. And there’s no outside to it, short of moving to an uninhabited island with no internet access and never talking to anyone.

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We are all Teletubbies now

By Mary Harrington

As a result, we don’t just have an attention economy. We also have an attention politics: a byproduct of the explosion of content that came with the transition to digital culture. In that politics, what gets noticed isn’t just a bottleneck on the way to commercial success; it’s also the gateway to political power.

In the new attention politics, older information ideals curl up and die. For the liberal framework for thinking about communication dates back to a point before the internet, when information was relatively scarce, and could be suppressed. In that context, liberals wanted to resist such suppression, arguing that “free speech”, would enable a collective search for objective truth via a “marketplace of ideas”.

Along with this came the belief that free information and lively debate carries us all toward objectively agreed truths, while religious faith and moral principles should be as much as possible a private matter. Contemporary defenders of this gestalt gather at Quillette and other such “classical liberal” outlets, ever ready to mount a defence of free speech as a bulwark against bad ideas, or the importance of debate to the scientific method.

Now, though, we all have free speech. In a digital environment, you can’t really suppress it. Ban someone, and they’ll just pop up elsewhere (or in the case of Donald Trump, start their own social media platform). Not unrelatedly, what we have is no longer a scarcity of information but a superabundance.

The problem is, you can’t really have a functioning society where anyone can say anything — or at least it won’t function for long. So a great deal of soft social effort goes into constraining free speech, while still permitting speech to be (at least nominally) free. We can all say what we like; the battleground is now what gets noticed, and by whom.

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No woman is safe on Twitter

By Kate Clanchy

What does or doesn’t make the public eye is managed by a stifling social consensus that governs what gets liked, shared or referenced; what should be boosted by algorithms; and what should make it into the respectable press. Even the original Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill, has fallen foul of this, after committing the dastardly crime of publicly noticing a Tweet by JK Rowling.

At the same time, too, “facts” have also become visibly unstable. In some cases, they vary dramatically according to local political conditions: for example, according to US officials, “gender affirmation” for children is officially “suicide-prevention care”. Meanwhile, officials in the UK and Sweden are rowing swiftly in the opposite direction.

And even where the facts themselves are not disputed, they aren’t really the main event any more. Instead, they’re data points for curated narratives. “NJ woman who forced daughter she fathered into child porn sentenced to 25 years in prison” is, on its own, just a story; but added to a curated list of related stories such as this one, it looks like a pattern of criminality worthy of notice — or of being deliberately ignored.

This sort of attention politics, the manipulation of narratives, sounds a death knell for the liberal ideal of politically neutral individuals or institutions. For confronted with an excess of competing and contradictory messaging, most sensible people don’t want to spend all their time working out what’s real. And when attention is scarce, political power accrues to those who are trusted to curate.

Most visibly, legacy media outlets now play this role: filtering the chaos of possible stories for a selection that fits (or at least doesn’t jar too sharply with) the readership’s worldview. But the facts, or stories, or data points we curate add up, cumulatively, to moral choices. If I notice the vulnerability of males who identify as women within all-male prisons, while (deliberately or not) ignoring stories that point to the vulnerability of women to males who claim to identify as women within all-female prisons, this adds up to a statement about what (or who) I think is important.

This variation in what’s emphasised (or mentioned at all) is easy to see across the national press: try toggling between New York Times universe and that of the New York Post, or between the Guardian and the Telegraph. You don’t need a media studies degree to infer the differences in moral framework that drive this differential noticing. And in any case, this isn’t an abstract game for media studies nerds. Our moral choices have real-world consequences.

Which set of “facts” is accepted by officials as true, about the right way to care for gender dysphoric children, will have significant medical consequences for youth in different jurisdictions. Or consider recent news that the state of New York is proposing to legislate for prisoners to be “presumptively placed” in accordance with their “self-attested gender identity unless the person opts out of such placement”. Set that against the list of crime reports above, and the decision to notice or not notice the link between the male sex and sex-offending adds up to a political choice that — as others have noticed — places real women at risk.

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Why Libs of TikTok terrifies the media

By Kat Rosenfield

And this is where the politics of noticing grows more contentious. For the general public aren’t mere passive bystanders. Noticing subcultures have swiftly emerged, sometimes sharply at odds with the official ones, and in which an effective curator can have real-world political impact. For example, the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account is credited with having transformed US education debates — simply by collating video statements made by progressive teachers.

In turn, this has spawned a whole meta-industry of NGOs whose remit is to stop unofficial noticers getting out of hand. Recent years have seen a boom in “fact-checking” organisations, who aim to extend the governance of noticing out into the internet badlands, often funded by immensely wealthy philanthropists — many of whom have well-documented political agendas.

This looks variously like an attempt to defend truth from manipulation by bad actors, or else covert censorship riddled with obvious bias. But the internet abounds with people who have assembled truly outlandish narratives from their preferred data points, such as in the QAnon conspiracy. And “misinformation” isn’t just a self-serving elite story: bot farms are routinely used in information warfare, to give the appearance of mass support to overseas messaging operations.

It should come as no surprise, then, that even the US Government is now an overt player in the politics of noticing. Last week, Joe Biden launched a “Disinformation Governance Board” whose job it is to tell the rest of the English-speaking world what is or isn’t real on the internet. Predictably, though, the reaction to this body was cynical. And no wonder: for Biden’s intervention does no more to address the loss of facts, objectivity and truth-seeking driven by information superabundance, than obviously biased “fact-checking” bodies funded by progressive philanthropists.

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What fact checkers get wrong

By Gavin Haynes

But no amount of such “governance” will stop people noticing when narratives are uplifted, deprecated, or transformed from “disinformation” to accepted fact — or prevent them wondering about the context for such shifts.

Many Americans noticed, for example, when the insalubrious contents of a laptop belonging to then-Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter went from “Russian disinformation” to “authenticated by the Washington Post” in the time it took his father to beat Donald Trump at the polling booth. We’ll never know if burying that story swung the election. But it probably helped: an intuition that is, for many, just one more data point in the pattern of “neutrality” and “objectivity” serving as mere fig-leaves for partisan manoeuvring.

It’s common now to complain about the other side being guilty of “post-truth” politics, or to blame variously “woke tyranny” or “Right-wing authoritarianism” for the sense that truth has been replaced by something dismayingly slippery and chronically biased. But it’s a mistake to imagine that this is all the fault of whoever you consider your political enemies.

Free speech, objectivity, facts and the “marketplace of ideas” really are hopelessly compromised. But what killed them wasn’t Those Bad People Over There; it was the internet. It gave us too much information, and with it came attention politics. Now even the most die-hard defenders of political neutrality might as well lean into their own biases, because even if they don’t people will still notice them.

What we don’t know yet is how far it’s possible to go in forcing public assent to narratives that are flagrantly untrue. That’s ultimately a question of how completely a given elite is able to control the public sphere, in a hyper-mediated culture, if a critical mass of ordinary people doesn’t want to play ball. In any case, I suspect we’re on track to find out.

As in personal life, so too in business and civil society. Each year hundreds of thousands of businesses cease trading. In 2019, even before the pandemic, there were 336,000 business “deaths” — 11% of all British businesses. Factories and workshops close, while industries decline and sometimes vanish completely. Once-vibrant clubs and churches gradually dwindle.

Even at the level of states and governments, nothing lasts forever. Countries and languages and whole peoples disappear with tragic regularity. Over lockdown, I read Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms, a series of elegies for various European states, or statelets, that are no more. Some are widely known, like the Soviet Union or the Byzantine Empire. Others are much less celebrated, even among history buffs. Davies includes a chapter dealing with the Visigothic state that existed in eastern France in the century after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. It lasted less than a century before being subsumed into the Kingdom of the Franks. But perhaps his most obscure case study is the Republic of Rusyn, a short-lived attempt by Carpatho-Ukrainians to carve out an independent nation from the ruins of Czechoslovakia, as it was being dismembered by Nazi Germany, Hungary and Poland in March 1939.

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Lessons in lockdown from a psychiatric ward

By Frances Wilson

As I read about these statelets struggling to survive, Covid-19 was causing human suffering and misery on a massive scale — not simply deaths, but strain on medical staff, family separations and ongoing disruption to normal life and health system operation. The Government and the health service were making serious and repeated mistakes. Vital organs of the state were hesitant and sclerotic, highly susceptible to groupthink. It was easy to think: this is how a nation collapses.

Indeed, there has been a widespread sense that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining event, that the world has changed irrevocably, that we must re-examine our assumptions about numerous aspects of modern life. The giant consulting firm McKinsey produced a report called “The future of work after Covid-19”, while its rival EY issued one focusing on the changes to globalised supply chains. The Economics Observatory asked “What is the future of commuting?” The Centre For Cities think tank investigated whether cities themselves have a future anymore.

But Vanished Kingdoms — I hesitate to use the dread phrase “putting in perspective”, because that sounds glib — made me reflect on what it takes, really, to destroy a way of life. Not to trivialise people’s grim experiences, but when you read about, say, the Russian invasion of East Prussia in the last year of the Second World War — invasion is almost too antiseptic a word; destruction would meet the case — it does inevitably offer a new baseline for the consideration of terrible events.

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The great artist of Deep England

By Niall Gooch

Obviously, its’s little or no comfort to someone who has lost a family member to Covid — or a job or a home — that it could be worse: they could be living in a chaotic post-Roman kingdom menaced by enemies on all sides. But when we come to reflect on the specific political-historical-civilisational questions raised by the pandemic — the future of work, of the health service, of global trade — it’s important to have some kind of benchmark. Particularly because, in the modern West, there is a prevailing sense that we have little to learn from history, because we are so advanced. My generation grew up during the 1990s “holiday from history”, when the power of liberal democracy was unchallenged and its future seemingly secure. No wonder Covid-19 feels like the end of the world.

But one very obvious lesson of history is that we are fortunate, even during a plague, to live in Europe in the early twenty-first century. We are lucky to have strong nation-states, able and willing to look after their people, and well-established norms of diplomacy and international co-operation. However badly her Majesty’s Government has failed in its responsibilities, the nation has not yet been annexed by neighbouring powers, as happened to the venerable Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the late eighteenth century, weakened by infighting and loss of trust in government.

That said, it is worth noting that Davies, writing in 2011, does argue that the United Kingdom in its current form is not long for this world — mainly because of the loss of confidence in the shared beliefs and institutions that held its four nations together: Crown, Empire, and Protestant Christianity.

Covid, by itself, is not going to bring an end to the largely orderly and peaceable Europe of 2021, in the way that — for example — the World Wars were catastrophic for so many of the peoples of central and eastern Europe featured in Vanished Kingdoms. The disease remains a serious problem, but most continental nations have now reached high levels of double vaccination — and cut their death rates accordingly. Seven European nations were added to the British government green list over the weekend, meaning that travellers from them do not need to quarantine. The suggestion by UnHerd’s Ed West, at the very start of the pandemic, that the long-term consequences might not be very severe, now seems very prescient.

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Will coronavirus change the world?

By Ed West

Possibly, of course, I am too optimistic. One of Davies’ subjects is the Byzantine Empire, which endured for more than a thousand years, but whose long-term fortunes were seriously affected by recurring outbreaks of plague from the sixth to the eighth centuries. Those plagues, of course, were much deadlier than Covid-19, and spread through populations without access to modern medicine; but perhaps the pessimists are right that we can expect more globalised outbreaks of serious disease. It is entirely possible that not all such diseases will be as treatable and relatively non-deadly as our current foe.

And optimism can be dangerous if it tips into arrogance. Vanished Kingdoms carries a dedication to i’r anghofiedig, a Welsh phrase which Davies translates loosely as “those whom historians tend to forget”. He explicitly frames the book as dealing with our collective tendency to absent-mindedness, our complacency in looking back on our ancestors.

It has been argued that some of the misjudgements made by the British public health establishment in the early weeks and months of the pandemic stemmed from a kind of instinctive resistance among highly educated, high-status people to solutions that were redolent of historical responses to disease outbreaks. Why did it take so long to impose any kind of meaningful border restrictions? Why did it take the best part of a year for masking and good ventilation, rather than mostly pointless hand-washing and surface cleaning, to be strongly prioritised in advice to the public and to hospitals, schools and shops?

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Britain's absurd quarantine failures

By Stuart Ritchie

The answer to these questions, perhaps, is that closing the borders and emphasising the importance of fresh, clean air sounded too simple to be true. It’s what people did in the age of the plague — when our allegedly simple-minded forebears still believed in dirty foreigners, miasma theory and bodily humours — so it must be rejected by sophisticated moderns. As the great Theodore Dalrymple has noted, intellectuals are incentivised to avoid obvious conclusions, because their status depends on the elucidation of non-obvious truths. And liberal modernity encourages us to throw out the baby with the bathwater: to reject the wisdom of past ages, as well as the unscientific mistakes and prejudices.

Davies would, I fancy, dislike such disdain, even if held unconsciously or instinctively. He is a humane writer, concerned not with ideology, but with truth and historical drama — and with helping us know what the past was really like. At a time when the public square is full of rancour and misinformation, inflamed by people’s understandable fears and concerns about the spread of disease and the undoubted, if unavoidable, downsides of our chosen anti-Covid strategies, his proposal is tempting. We must focus on the lessons of history, and so prioritise truth and fact — and proportion.

The Tory svengali Dominic Cummings may think the Today programme is no longer required listening for the political class, and others may deride Humphrys as a dinosaur, politically incorrect and overly hectoring of guests. But I have always found him charming and fair — even when I was on the receiving end of one of his kickings.

We debated religion a lot, both on the radio and around his kitchen table. He even wrote a book about it: In God We Doubt: Confessions of a Failed Atheist – the subtitle, as he acknowledges, he lifted from me.

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The truth about car-crash interviews

By Robin Aitken

But it was his interview with Rowan Williams that I will remember the most. It followed the Beslan massacre in 2004. Chechen militants had taken over a school and massacred a great many of its children. Humphrys’ opening question to the Archbishop was a classic: “Where was God in that schoolroom?” Deceptively simple, direct, short, devastating. It was also the question of a man who was the first reporter on the scene after a mountain of coal debris had collapsed upon a primary school in south Wales in 1966, killing 116 children and 28 adults. And you could hear that in his voice.

The archbishop didn’t answer straight away. He paused for what seemed like an eternity, some might say unable to answer. I would say: he was giving that impossible question, and the deaths of so many children, the respect it deserved. It wasn’t a cheap question and it didn’t receive a cheap reply. In one moment of electrifying radio, the so-called problem of evil – something debated by philosophers since time immemorial – came alive. “That interview led to … the biggest reaction by far to any programme I have done for the BBC in more than 40 years of broadcasting,” Humphrys later wrote.

It may not be this for which he is remembered. He skewered Tony Blair, in 1997, on the political TV show On the Record for accepting a donation to the Labour party of £1m from Bernie Ecclestone. Labour, which had just come to power, soon after exempted Formula One racing from a tobacco advertising ban. “I think most people who have dealt with me think I am a pretty straight sort of guy, and I am,” said Blair in the interview. A quote that hung over the rest of his political career.

Humphrys’ destruction of his then boss, George Entwistle, for his failure to stop a Newsnight programme that mistakenly implicated a Tory peer in allegations of sexual abuse – the so-called “dead man walking interview” — was an example of speaking truth to power of the highest order. Entwistle resigned as director-general of the BBC 12 hours later.

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Why should Boris trust Channel 4?

By Douglas Murray

Humphrys’ passing feels like the end of an era. Paxman, with his similarly pugnacious approach, went fishing years ago. Perhaps it points to what Cummings said, about how these set pieces and titanic clashes of male egos on the mainstream media no longer have any effect on voters. Interviews only matter when they can be culled for 20 second ‘gotcha’ moments perfect for social media. But such clips don’t change people’s minds about anything by way of reasoned argument – they are little more than digital hand grenades bounced around on Twitter.

So is the political interview past its sell by date, now no more than old fashioned gladiatorial combat for a handful of political anoraks? I hope not.

I have, with Confessions, begun to appreciate much more what is involved in making an interview work. I know, for instance, that I have a fatal weakness as an interviewer: a desire for conviviality. This makes me hesitate to ask a question that may introduce a little too much tension in the exchange. What Humphrys manages to do – and others who have become masters of their art – is robustly to challenge their guests without boorishness, yet also recognising that s/he is an agent of the listener to whom politicians are accountable and who don’t tune in for a party broadcast.

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Why I like my politicians to be hypocrites

By Giles Fraser

Politicians have become adept at not answering questions. Their strategy is commonly: acknowledge, bridge, comment. Responding to a line of inquiry they do not like, they first nod to the question being asked, as if this was to answer the question, then bridge to the thing they really want to talk about – something like, “but the most important thing here is…” – then comment on that, with long sentences and few full stops, thus not allowing the interviewer the opportunity to return to the question. The best interviewer is able to disrupt the way interviewees have come to ‘manage’ conversations.

And at this, Humphrys is the master. He doesn’t care too much about being liked. And so he often isn’t. But he is right when he once said that the key quality for a good interviewer is curiosity. And that’s precisely the problem with the social media use of interview clips – they have substituted curiosity for the gotcha moment and a re-enforcement of our own prejudices. And with this, the world becomes a smaller and a far less interesting place.

Which is why the Humphryses of this world are now more necessary than ever. And why we should be grateful that Andrew Neil has been given a new show. In a political climate saturated with bullshit – or post-truth, as some like to call it – old school professional sceptics help us all to stay connected with the truth in a world of constant and increasingly sophisticated deception.

There is something singleminded, uncomplicated even, about the determination not to be side-tracked by fancy explanations or charming presentations. Not “why is this lying bastard lying to me” – that is too cynical and disrespectful. But stay focused, come prepared, be persistent, listen hard, remain curious, and keep things simple – there is often evasiveness in complexity. These were the threads Humphrys followed to great effect.

Who will miss John Humphrys?

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Rather than unleashing an era of liberal democratic orthodoxy, as many predicted, the end of the Cold War produced a world where grand narratives ceased to exist. The disappearance of these narratives has led to an erosion in the value of truth and objectivity.

This is one of the arguments put forward in This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, a new book by the journalist and author Peter Pomerantsev. As Pomerantsev writes:

“If the need for facts is predicated on a vision of a concrete future that you are trying to achieve, then when that future disappears, what is the point of facts?”

Many articles have been written about how the internet has encouraged us to create our own ‘filter bubbles’. However Pomerantsev’s book delves much deeper than similar accounts. It is not merely ‘information abundance’ that is screwing with our politics. The root of the current crisis also rests in our loss of faith in the future and, with it, the Enlightenment notion of objective truth.

One hundred and thirty-seven years ago Nietzsche declared God to be dead. Yet while the Enlightenment ‘killed’ the possibility of belief in a deity, religious faith persisted under avowedly secular guises. During the 20th century communism partially filled the void left by the retreat of religion. The materialist conception of history held out an answer to every question just as the Gospels once had.

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Don’t believe what those idiots are telling you about echo chambers

By Peter Franklin

In time the communist God failed, and the future was viewed as one of liberal progress, an ‘end of history’ as Francis Fukuyama termed it. Yet the global financial crash – and arguably the Iraq war with it – destroyed faith in this narrative too.

If the 20th century was the age of ideology, it has been replaced by an era of subjectivity and competing truths. A few on the extreme fringes still cling to grand narratives – the Islamic State for example – but most big ideas have slipped away. Today we each shape our own narrative. We choose what is true based on our own solipsistic inclinations. The result is a hyper-individualised political climate where concepts such as objectivity and impartiality have passed out of fashion.

The proliferation of information produced by the internet has made it easier to blur the distinction between truth and falsehood. Conspiracy theories increasingly fill the void where ideology – and certainty about the future – used to be. When there are so many competing truths that few individuals have the time to adequately parse, we are inclined to accept the narrative (however far-fetched) that chimes with our emotional predispositions.

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Why I welcome our post-Truth era

By Giles Fraser

The triumph of contemporary identity politics has helped to turbocharge this notion that feelings are more important than facts. The ethos of the Sixties trumpeted “feelings as an antidote to corporate and bureaucratic rationality”, as Pomerantsev puts it. Objectivity is merely subjectivity in disguise, according to the purveyors of this identitarian creed.

Of course, this great transformation in our politics would not be possible without the highly specific model of laissez-faire capitalism that triumphed 40 years ago. It is within this framework that identity has become a marketable commodity. We each choose our own ‘truth’ – our sacred cause to rally behind – just as we choose from ten different brands of soda in the supermarket.

This “future-less present” arrived first in Russia in the 1990s. During this chaotic decade, people behaved according to rules they made up for themselves. “The image of a common mankind is impossible, and no alternative has emerged,” writes Gleb Pavlovsky, one of Vladimir Putin’s early spin-doctors. “Everyone invents their own ‘normal’ humanity, their own ‘right’ history.”

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Don't trust third parties or courts or fact-checkers to give voters the 'truth'. They're all puppet masters.

By Graeme Archer

It isn’t hard to see how this personalised, identity-specific (and highly subjective) notion of reality has ignited increasing political polarisation across the developed world. Individuals are no longer the vehicles through which political ideas are transmitted. Instead, ideas are interwoven with identity. To disagree is increasingly a personal affront – a ‘microaggression’ – rather than a mere argument over competing visions of the future.

Social media amplifies this trend by encouraging individuals to stake out extreme positions in order to stay relevant and boost their personal brand. As Pomerantsev writes, “Social media is a sort of major-narcissism engine that can never quite be satisfied, leading us to take up more radical positions to get more attention”.

A highly subjective version of reality has been adopted by states too. In the contemporary era states make up their own rules and “murder people and indeed whole peoples according to their own ‘sovereign’ logic,” Pomerantsev writes, drawing on the work of the Russian historian of the Holocaust Mikhail Gefter. We can see this logic play out everywhere from Syria to China to Myanmar.

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Antifa's attack on the truth

By Douglas Murray

The success of political leaders such as Trump, Erdoğan and Orbán rests on the “anarchic liberation” from constraint they provide to their followers. That crude rejection of civility is comparable to the “suicidal escape from reality” Hannah Arendt wrote about in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Yet unlike the tyrannical regimes of the 20th century, authoritarian governments no longer strive for omnipotence. Instead they pretend there is no objective reality, only competing visions.

In depicting one man’s struggle against a totalitarian state, George Orwell wrote that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. Unlike Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith, the danger we face is not centralisation. We are slipping into a world not of a single truth set down by an infallible one-party state, but of an infinite number of truths that are impossible for the ordinary citizen to navigate.

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When did victimhood culture trump truth?

By Justin Webb

To counter this, we must become better as individuals at distinguishing between information that is accurate and information that merely confirms our biases.

But ‘the West’ – for want of a better term – must also rediscover a sense of purpose if it is to combat the threat of disinformation. Liberal democracies are more amenable places to live than societies that have come before and are likely to come after. We live longer, are freer, and however mediocre the current political crop of political leaders are, we do at least have a realistic chance of removing them.

This is not mere propaganda, to paraphrase the title of Pomerantsev’s brilliant and unsettling book. The threat to democracy may have changed since Orwell’s time but it is nevertheless real. Freedom is still the freedom to point out that objective reality exists – regardless of how you or I or Vladimir Putin may feel about it.

But it is not fair to single out journalists for criticism or opprobrium without mentioning that there is another guilty party in this breakdown of trust between the media and the public. And that party is, of course, the public.

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Broadcaster bias is destroying public trust

By Douglas Murray

Recent weeks have provided a number of examples of how badly the public are starting to misunderstand the media, but perhaps the most high-profile example is the storm that erupted this week over a headline in the New York Times.

The grey lady found itself in trouble over a single front-page headline relating to the aftermath of the latest terrible mass shooting in the United States, this one in Texas. The gunman in the El Paso attack appears to have been some variety of white supremacist and much of the public, naturally opposed to Donald Trump, would like to link the atrocity to the incumbent in the Oval Office. But unless there is an explicit connection then such a claim is a matter of interpretation or opinion. And the job of the media has traditionally been to report the facts, not the guesses or wishes of a proportion (however large) of its readers.

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Are mass shootings the price of liberty?

By Mary Dejevsky

In the aftermath of the shooting President Trump did what any President should do in such a situation: he issued a statement to the nation in which he urged them to unite, not least to unite against racism.

In any reasonable age, people from all political sides would be relieved, consoled and encouraged by such a message of unity. They would agree that what Trump said was essentially impossible to oppose. They would recognise that even if they did not much like the President, there was nothing to object to – indeed much to support – in the sentiments he expressed after the Texas shooting.

Just as importantly, they would expect the media to report the news. They would expect the Times – and other papers – to report what the President had said. Perhaps in the body of the articles about the horror they would read some scepticism around the edges. Perhaps in there they would find questions raised about whether some of the President’s own rhetoric over the years might not have fed into some pool of hate out of which the gunman may have sprung. All of this – and much more – may be possible. But the news – what has actually happened – does still need to be reported as a priority in any organ dedicated to reporting the news.

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Does Trump have a point about video games?

By Giles Fraser

Well, this age would appear not to be a reasonable one.

In its Tuesday print edition, the New York Times covered President Trump’s statement under the headline “Trump urges unity vs racism”. Which is true and accurate. The President did not call for the nation to unite around racism and against unity. The situation was exactly as the Times had reported.

But the reaction to the NYT headline was loud and immediate. Nate Silver, among others, attacked the Times for framing the story in the ‘wrong’ way. Silver wrote sarcastically that he was not sure that “Trump urges unity vs racism” would be how he would have “framed the story”.

Tomorrow's NYT print edition.

Not sure "TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM" is how I would have framed the story. pic.twitter.com/quOibXsp32

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 6, 2019

Other Twitter users agreed. The public piled on, and NYT readers promised to boycott the publication or otherwise express their displeasure. And so, swiftly – indeed before the paper’s second edition, and in the online version of the story – the headline was changed. Soon the Times was running its story on the President’s response to El Paso under the header: “Assailing hate but not guns”.

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By Joel Pett

The turnaround was covered across other media around the world, and any of the NYT’s rivals seemed to enjoy the apparent slip-up by the paper (“Ha – they got caught reporting on Trump fairly”). But they should not, firstly because if the internet can decide what headline a publication ought to run then everyone in the media is going to be in trouble.

Perhaps more importantly, at stake is one of the only remaining ideals in an age where ideals are in short supply: that there remain some media outlets willing to report what is actually happening rather than what the most highly-partisan observers expect to happen. In an age in which events are consistently sieved through every imaginable ideological prism, it remains at the very least an aspiration that there are some people and places that do not represent ‘comment’ but instead constitute ‘reporting’.

At the same time that the Times was going through its firestorm, Sky’s political correspondent Kate McCann was enduring one of her own. On Twitter, McCann reported a statement made by cabinet minister Michael Gove, in which he said that the European Union appeared not to want to negotiate with Britain and that this was, in his view, a shame.

Michael Gove: "At the moment it’s the EU that seems to be saying they’re not interested [in negotiating] – they’re simply saying ‘no we don’t want to talk’. I think that’s wrong and sad.
It’s not in Europe’s interests."

— Kate McCann (@KateEMcCann) August 6, 2019

Now of course this story – like that to do with the aftermath of the El Paso shooting – treads on one of the two most divisive issues of our time, Brexit and Trump. But it should still be the case that people who use the media are aware that there is a difference between opinion and news reporting.

Though plenty of reporters have (as I wrote here before) begun to blur that line, it should be possible to understand that when Sky’s political correspondent relates what Michael Gove has just said, she is not saying “Here is the latest thing Michael Gove has said: I’m Kate McCann and I approve this message”. She is doing her job. A minister has said something. She is reporting it. It is then up to viewers or readers to decide what they make of the statement.

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By Robin Aitken

But McCann, too, was immediately assailed on social media by furious readers. Did she not realise – they asked – that her job was to ‘interrogate’ Michael Gove’s claims, not simply to regurgitate them? A clearly – and rightly – irritated McCann explained on Twitter that actually that wasn’t her job, or at least not her only job. As a political correspondent her job is to report on things that are happening rather than to simply filter them through the lens of what any particular band of obsessives want to see or hear. As she said, “I am getting SO fed up of people telling me what my job is. I’m a reporter. Watch the live/read the article and stop being so incredibly patronising.”

I don't retweet this stuff (because why would you) but I am getting SO fed up of people telling me what my job is. I'm a reporter. Watch the live/read the article and stop being so incredibly patronising. https://t.co/hXF2OlsbSf

— Kate McCann (@KateEMcCann) August 6, 2019

It is certainly the case that the media, in Britain as in the US and other countries, has let itself down and assailed the stated aim of impartiality. But in certain places, and among certain reporters in particular, it certainly does still remain an aspiration – or at least the orbit around which they seek to move. Yet even if the media does improve and reverse its current rush away from impartiality it cannot do so unless the public make a reversal of their own. It is no good having a virtuous media without a virtuous public; or at least an aspiration towards such a goal.

If the public berates the media when they are actually doing the job of reporting then the public should not be surprised if the media continue to drift further and further away from reportage and more and more into the realms not just of comment, but of whatever comment they think their readers might want to hear. The momentary thrill of a headline or Tweet that once again panders to your political world view comes with an enormously high price for the public as a whole to pay.

That discussion has been rattling around in my head over the past few weeks. And, in particular, the idea that there exists such a thing as truth that is so entirely self-evident that it ‘speaks for itself’. This idea about truth, it seems to me, is connected with the political maelstrom in which we now find ourselves. There’s a reason ‘Post-truth’ was chosen, in 2016, by the Oxford Dictionaries as their ‘Word of the year’ – the year of the Brexit referendum, the year of Trump’s victory in America.

Why I welcome our post-Truth era

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The idea of truth has always had a powerful political valence. The promise it holds out is a little like the promise of monotheism – that the truth is singular and, therefore, is something that all human beings should rally around. Just as Du Sautoy’s mathematics is without agro, so too the truth itself promises a kind of peace between people, something around which we can all unite. It suggests a common and indisputable reference point, everyone singing from the same hymn sheet.

For a secular society, the self-evident truth of mathematics comes to be seen as a bit like the idea of the one holy Catholic church, only better (because true!). And those who are persuaded by this dream of truth-based politics are driven by a sort of utopianism, that we might negotiate our place in the world – do politics – without agro. Like the teenage du Sautoy.

However, the coming together of those who claim some unique access to truth and political power has a long and not especially distinguished history. Plato imagined the existence of philosopher-kings. That philosophers (like him), with their special attention to truth, are best suited to captain the ‘ship of state’.

Likewise, the Catholic church, in the person of the Pope, aligned religious truth and temporal power, claiming to base the latter on the former. And in our present age, it is the high priests of STEM who are credited with particular access to truth, and thus the best people to steer the political ship. Hence evidence-based policy, technocratic politics and the way scientists increasing feed into our decision making process. This is society as ‘rationally ordered’.

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The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

One of the most disturbing features of all of these different ways of linking truth and politics is the way they conceive of dissent. For what happens when truth and political power marry up is that those who dissent are – by definition – either stupid (because they don’t understand the truth) or liars (because they wilfully oppose it). There is no room for intelligent opposition – you can have your own opinions but you can’t have your own facts, as they often say. In other words, when truth and politics line up, any opposition is morally objectionable.

One way of thinking about post-truth is that, with Trump and Brexit, a new breed of political liars has emerged. This strikes me as unlikely. It is surely the case that politicians have always lied, stretched the truth, spun things to their advantage. “Everybody lies”, says Dr Gregory House. And in 2017, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz published a fascinating book of the same name, using internet data to reveal how much of a gap there exists between what we say about ourselves and what we do online when we think no one is looking.

Of course, it goes without saying that liars are to be condemned. And both Trump and the advocates of Brexit have lied about all sorts of things. As, have their opponents. Everybody lies. But post-truth, as I understand it, is not so much a crisis of political liars, so much as a collapse of faith in the (most recent version of the) alignment of truth and the political. And so, the way I see it, post-truth is to be celebrated not condemned.

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By Henry Olsen

To be clear, I am not against truth. Not at all. How could one be? But I am highly suspicious of the claim to know something we might call the Truth, with a capital T. Big ‘T’ truth is universal truth, like God or maths (Du Sautoy thinks God and maths almost amount to the same thing). Big ‘T’ truth is the language that the universe speaks, as it were. Little ‘t’ truth, is everyday truth, “Paris is the capital of France”, “I am 53 years old”, “Barak Obama was born in the USA”. Little ‘t’ truth is tremendously important. Big ‘T’ truth is dangerous – and especially when Truth and politics are claimed to form some sort of harmonious combination.

For me, that is a recipe for fascism. Popper in his Open Society and its Enemies, charges Plato with totalitarianism and a hatred of democracy; being a philosopher, Plato knows the truth and the plebs do not. A similar change could be rightly made against the church. But the latest inheritors of the politics-as-truth tradition still do not recognise this as a picture of themselves.

Post-truth is a good thing because what has collapsed (again) is not a belief in truth, but a belief in Truth. What has disappeared is the claim that philosophers or priests or experts have some sort of unique access to it along with the idea that us plebs should just bow before them and shut up.

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If you don't 'get' statistics it's just as bad as not 'getting' Shakespeare

By Graeme Archer

This essay began with du Sautoy and his belief that the truth of mathematics promised a way of bypassing the confusing complexity of being a teenager. Those who bemoan post-truth politics are dealing with the realisation that there is no way of Truth bypassing the confusing complexity of the political. The political – the contest of competing and clashing human aspirations – is ineradicable. And it always means agro.

That is not to say that there isn’t still an issue with liars. The reformation was made possible because of a new communication technology: the printing press. And Guttenburg’s new invention spewed out all sorts of exaggerated claims and wild conspiracy theories. But it also challenged those who claimed a monopoly of power on the basis of their special access to Truth.

This new reformation is also powered by a similar invention in information technology: the internet. And it too makes possible the dissemination of lies and bullshit. But to see only this misses the bigger picture. The new reformation also brings down those who have become too comfortable with their unique access to Truth. It challenges the priesthood and the priesthood don’t like it. It is not just post-truth (which remains a problem) – but also post-Truth. And hurrah for that.

On the 13^th day of the month for the next six months, the Virgin appeared again to the children, who had begun to tell their story more widely, attracting visitors. Apparently, 70,000 people gathered for the sixth apparition. First it rained, heavily. Then the sun danced in the sky and, for ten minutes, fell upon them as if a ball of fire. People were running around, terrified, confessing their sins. This sixth apparition became known as “the miracle of the sun”.

Today, the village of Fátima is transformed into a vast Catholic Disneyland, a sort of stadium of religion to which more than five million people make pilgrimage every year. Some make the last part of the journey crawling on their knees, the path smeared with the blood of those who decide not to use knee-pads. I was blown away by the place. The intensity was highly infectious. One man pushes the buggy of his child down the hill, on his knees. One women crawls on all fours, clearly distressed. Many are assisted by family members, holding their hands.

At one end of the complex, the Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity is a twenty-first century modernist-style circular building, seating 8,633. In the huge open-air space between the basilica and the main chapel where the shepherds are buried, hundreds of thousands of people can gather for Mass. And everywhere on the site, people are praying, lighting candles, sitting quietly, and milling around. Mass is broadcast on the radio to all of Portugal every day – Fátima has its own newspaper and television studio.

This is the sort of religion that so-called ‘thinking people’ tend to dismiss scornfully as popular superstition – “the religion of feeble minds” – as Edmund Burke once called it. But I have something of a soft spot for this sort of superstition, and regret that I have been distanced from it by a ploddingly empirical, secular education that means I find it all but impossible to suspend my disbelief.

Why is it that we are able to understand dreams as forms of leakage from our unconscious inner life, revealing important truths about ourselves, but refuse to do something similar about places like Fátima – understanding them as if they were forms of cultural leakage from the collective unconscious, revealing important truths about our collective condition, truths that are not easily otherwise articulated? My dreams are no less mad than the apparitions at Fátima, often (like religion) a peculiar blend of sex and violence. But whereas Freud made it respectable for thinking people to take their dreams seriously, it is still far from intellectually respectable for people to take superstition seriously – the work of Carl Jung notwithstanding.

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The key to understanding the massive popular appeal of Fátima is surely to be found in the date, 1917: the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and, a few months later – probably most impactful of all in rural Portugal – the Spanish flu epidemic that resulted in the deaths of between 50 and 100 million people, between 3% and 5% of the world’s population. Within two years of their vision of the Virgin, two of the children had themselves died from this flu. In such a world, where does all the fear and grief and anger go to get processed?

The First Portuguese Republic, which had overthrown the monarchy in 1910, was actively hostile to the Church. Church schools and monasteries were closed. Religious orders and the ringing of church bells were banned. The wearing of clerical clothes in public was banned. Fátima was religious populism springing up as a groundswell of resistance against the totalising ideology of state atheism. And there is something of a class aspect to all of this. The Fátima pilgrims were, and continue to be, generally working class. Their cultural despisers are generally middle class

Thinking people, as I am calling them disparagingly, tend to insist that the first question to ask of superstitious religion is whether it is true. This, they presume, is the ultimate question on which everything turns. But I suspect it is not such an important question after all – imagine thinking the first thing to ask about your dream is whether it was true or not. Surely the most significant thing to ask is what it means and where it comes from. Only when you have established this – and that’s not easy – will the question of its truth become askable at all.

Post-truth was chosen by the Oxford Dictionaries as their “word of the year” in 2016, following Brexit and Trump’s election win. Post-truth politics is when something important is carried for people in a form that is not necessarily literally true. Fiction is an obvious example. I can believe Dostoyevsky’s novels contain great and important truth without having to believe they are true. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the philosopher Kierkegaard makes a distinction between subjective truth and objective truth, believing the former to be far more important when it comes to Christianity. Indeed, for Kierkegaard, something can be subjectively true even when objectively false. Post-truth is the name recently given to the emergence of this sort of attitude within politics, and it has more than a passing resemblance to superstition.

Thinking people hate it, rail against it, spit blood to the wind and Twitter. But it has long been with us. And it won’t ever go away. “Superstition is a part of the very being of humanity” wrote Goethe, as the Enlightenment sought to do away with it, “and when we fancy that we are banishing it altogether, it takes refuge in the strangest nooks and crannies, and then comes forth again as soon as it believes itself to be safe.”

I loved Fátima. And was overwhelmed by the emotional power of the populism it channelled. Those pilgrims scraping their bloody knees on the concrete are the beating heart of the Church. Our Lady has inspired them to an act of great devotion. And they have inspired me. I won’t ever forget the place.

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