There is nothing at all comical about the implosion of the American media.
How
quaint this admonition from Dr. Johnson seems today: “Accustom your
children constantly to this,” Johnson told Boswell; “if a thing happened
at one window, and they, when relating it, say that it happened at
another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know
where deviation from truth will end.”
Where is Dr. Johnson when we need
him? How well could we profit from his scruples when it comes to the
question of truth. For we live at a time when truth is everywhere under
attack. I am not talking about anything arcane or polysyllabic: just
plain, factual truth, as in “The battle of Agincourt took place in
October 1415” or (more generally) “the documents support my claim and do
not support his” or “the police station has been torched; this is not a
peaceful protest but a riot.
It is perhaps easy enough to discount
some of the more florid examples of the assault on truth. I daresay
that few sensible people take seriously the claims of Holocaust deniers.
What is significant, however, is the way in which such extreme
doctrines tend to be dismissed. Increasingly, they are repudiated not as
pernicious falsehoods—the response that Dr. Johnson would have insisted
upon—but as more or less unfortunate “perspectives” or “points of
view,” the gospel being that everyone is “entitled” to his own such
hobbyhorse, no matter how flagrantly at odds with the truth it might be.
Never mind that such an attitude not only disparages truth but also
erodes the legitimacy of serious opinion..............To Read More.....
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