You Will Anyway

President Barack Obama on Thursday decried America's "wild, wild west" media environment for allowing conspiracy theorists a broad platform and destroying a common basis for debate.

  Yahoo

The problem is not conspiracy theories - after all, didn't we just see in Wikileaks' release of Hillary's and John Podesta's emails that the Clinton campaign conspired to thwart Bernie Sanders' campaign? People conspire all the time. If we call it collusion, does that make it better?

The problem is not that the media promotes conspiracies; the problem is that the media offers everything in sound bytes from talking heads, and the most salacious, shock-inducing material they can find, in the service of making money for the media moguls and advertisers. An uninformed, consumer public is the problem, and it's not that way because of conspiracy theories.

Recalling past days when three television channels delivered fact-based news that most people trusted, Obama said democracy require citizens to be able to sift through lies and distortions.

"Fact-based." Whatever. When there were three channels offering the news, they were offering in depth reports, and less propaganda for state actions. Less, not none. Maybe that's not what he said, because those two things are in opposition.  We need news casters we can trust; democracy requires us to be able to sift through distortions.  (What citizenry anywhere ever has not had to sift through lies and distortions? That's why we have brains.)

"We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to," Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh.

We're going to have to rebulid the human brain. Start now. It will be a long process.

People are going to agree? On the truth?  Pipe me up another dream.

 ("Curate" is the word du jour, btw.)

"There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don't have any basis in anything that's actually happening in the world," Obama added.

[...]

"The answer is obviously not censorship, but it's creating places where people can say 'this is reliable' and I'm still able to argue safely about facts and what we should do about it."

Oh, great. Let's have a government Bureau of Truthiness.

We really are a third world country, aren't we?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.