Many Americans are starting to awaken to the fact that we've been manipulated by "magicians" into believing altered reality as if it is the truth. I don't know that it all started with the coup d e'tat in Dallas on November 22, 1963, but the official US government story about the murder of John Kennedy our 35th president, has played a big part in our being duped.....and our distrust of the press which was set up to be the guardian.
Mr Pitts says in his article ..."the news is filled with conspiracy theories and it has become distressingly clear that many of us simply don't care, blithely rejecting all facts that collide with preferred fictions."
I'm sure that LNers would reject the idea that the Warren Report is a "preferred fiction" which has the official US Govt, stamp of approval. But the fact is The Warren Report is a fiction......
By Leonard Pitts Jr.
'If reality is altered, what can we believe in?'
By Leonard Pitts Jr., Tribune Content Agency on May 9, 2018
"If Reality Is Altered, What Can We Believe In?"
In 1994, that was the headline of the first column I ever wrote about the manipulation of images and words -- digital lies that made it difficult to know what was really real. Small wonder, I said, we were a nation "paralyzed by cynicism."
Twenty-four years later, the technology has improved while social media have made the lies ubiquitous. And "cynicism" would be a feeble word for the state of the union today, when the very idea of knowable truth is in controversy, an adviser to a lying president speaks airily of "alternative facts," the news is filled with conspiracy theories and it has become distressingly clear that many of us simply don't care, blithely rejecting all facts that collide with preferred fictions.
The scary thing is, it's about to get worse.
That's according to "After the Fact," a troubling and essential new book by USA Today reporter Nathan Bomey, which traces the course of this intellectual unraveling. He writes that new technology will soon open the door to an era of audio manipulation, the implications of which are staggering.
Consider that it is already possible, with a little tech savvy, to produce an image or video of you doing something you never did. Well, now it will be possible to pair that with audio of you saying -- in your own voice -- something you never said. As if it were not already hard enough to know the truth when you hear it.
So how did we reach this point? "Journalists," said Bomey in a telephone interview, "used to be gatekeepers in the sense that we took responsibility for authenticating information. And people trusted us to try to sort fact from fiction. Now social media has put individual people in charge of authenticating information on their own, and most people aren't trained to do that." Complicating matters, he said, is "the natural human tendency to ignore the truth."
Though the retreat from facts has been most noticeable among conservatives, thanks to their megaphone of cable news, talk radio and internet conspiracy sites, Bomey said it is not unique to them. While the right denies the fact of climate change, for instance, "Liberals are more likely to deny the facts about genetically modified food, which is a big issue when it comes to poverty in Africa."
