Brill Says Truth is Dead, For Now
A debate that might have agreement from what seems like a polarized country
Steven Brill believes there is a concerted effort to distort reality and get the country to believe that there aren’t really any facts, that we can argue anything as truth. He talked about it at length recently with Michael Calderone in a Vanity Fair interview.
Brill, the co-chief executive officer NewsGuard, thinks back to when he co-founded the organization in 2018, “We thought we were right in the middle of this total sh*tstorm of misinformation,” he says.
But, as Calderone writes, that was before the 2020 election, the COVID pandemic, January 6, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war and another presidential race playing out in deeply-polarized America.
Retrospectively, the culture, for its problems, was not as bad off as many observers and analysts perceived, believed and communicated.
“We were really in the calm before the storm, even though we thought it was the storm,” Brill told Calderone. “And with generative AI, it’s only going to get much worse before it gets better.”
Brill is the author of a new book, The Death of Truth, where he, according to Calderone, “diagnoses the ‘info-demic’ of our age, while also offering solutions…”
The emergency, he asserts, is to clearly recognize and effectively respond to what he says bad actors are pushing, which “is to destroy the notion that there actually is truth in the world, that there actually are facts,” Brill said. “What the Death of the Truth is really about is the notion that everything has become a matter of opinion.”
In his mind, for powers of content creation must show leadership in moving the nation back towards facts and truth, they and the public need to start at the beginning.
“If we can understand how truth has been so eviscerated,” Brill wrote in his book, “we can see how to restore it.”
He explains what he sees as a big part of the problem.
“You go online, and if you’re an average person, you just don’t know what to believe,” Brill told Calderone. “I wanted to sort of dissect how that happened, explain the ramifications of it, but also explain what we can do about it.”
His conclusion is not intended to be alarming and isn’t really a secret to many.
“I’ve come to realize that it’s an even more serious problem than I thought, and that there are some actors like the Russians, who are much more serious about this and much more advanced about this, and much more on the way to using this as a way to really upend the global order than even I realized,” Brill declared.
He does offer a warning as to how to communicate. It may be a recommendation that will not be well received and be immediately rejected and dismissed by most people.
“One of the things I don’t think you should do,” Brill begins, adding, “I prefer the term ‘mis-state’ or ‘falsehood,’ not ‘lie.’ I think when you say someone’s lying, you’re really claiming to understand their state of mind.”
That will be an argument. Whether there is wisdom in his conclusion and preferences of words as being more helpful or what he is stating is enabling bad thinking and dangerous thinking as a catalyst for undesirable or frightening actions, is up for conversation, probably a heated one.
Brill hammers away at the obvious and what can be done about it.
“…we’re living in a world where we’re really unmoored from reality,” he told Calderone, “and it’s up to journalists to help people get those moorings back by really trying to stick to what is fact and what is a matter of opinion.”
The public will almost unanimously agree on that point. What people will also do is argue what is fact and what is a matter of opinion. Bias, for many reasons, some understandable, some disappointing, is a hard condition to break.
Objectivity, especially when it doesn’t align with our worldview, can be difficult.
Is Brill overstating the state of communication and belief in the United States and that truth is in fact dead or is his claim partially or fully true and an emergency condition that needs full, immediate and sustained attention, for our survival and well-being?
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What a great topic to discuss, Michael! As a professor I work with my students regularly to help them learn the difference between opinion and "fact" and they, honestly, have a hard time getting it. I plan to take a detailed look at this topic on my Substack soon. The engineer in me likes to fall back on nature for a fact touchstone. If I drop my pen, it will fall to the ground, whether I agree with it or not. It is a "fact" because it happens every time I drop something.
Was the election lost by the other guy? Over 60 courts have ruled that the election was fair and accurate. (I did some digging to verify to my satisfaction that this claim has merit.) That is a lot of lost cases, sort of like dropping the pen 60 times. In addition, an election consultant hired by the former president to prove there was election fraud found that the election fair and found no evidence of fraud. No doubt this finding cost him a client. The evidence shows that the election was fair, that the former president lost, and that Biden won. Fact.
Here is the problem. Look at all the level of investigation I had to do to come to this conclusion. Most people want simple answers and are not willing to take the time to look beyond the headline. This is where trust in the media becomes sooooooo important! When the general public sees "opinion" which requires no evidence, represented as "fact" which requires evidence, we get where we are.
Facts really do matter if we are ever going to find common ground and make progress. Once we agree that gravity pulls things down we can work together to design buildings and bridges.