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https://theconversation.com/truth-and-lies-trust-and-doubt-how-should-we-be-navigating-the-misinformation-crisis-254711>
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Review: Age of Doubt: Building Trust in a World of Misinformation – edited
by Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang (Monash University Publishing)
“Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason than reality,
since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience
wishes or expects to hear.”
This statement might have been written last year – or last week – as a comment
on the current state of political reporting. It is actually from
Lying in
Politics, an article by Hannah Arendt published in
The New York Review of
Books in November 1971. Her reflections were prompted by the release of the
Pentagon Papers, which provided devastating evidence of the discrepancy
between US government narrative about its role in the Vietnam War and the
actual policies of engagement.
Somehow, the sense that we can no longer trust public institutions and the
information they feed us always seems immediate: a pathology of recent
development.
Age of Doubt: Building Trust in a World of Misinformation, a
collection of essays edited by
ABC journalists Tracey Kirkland and Gavin
Fang, addresses the misinformation crisis as “one of the central issues of our
time”.
Arendt wrote in response to a particular moment of crisis in public trust.
There is no question that we are currently facing another. But if the problem
isn’t new, what is “new” about the present crisis? What gives the issue an
escalated priority now?
The 25 short articles in the book offer a range of diagnoses. Journalists and
news editors feature prominently, but there are also contributions from heads
of major public institutions. Their brief was to consider how and why trust has
been replaced by doubt: the title of the book is printed on the cover so that
the first word is overlaid by the second.
The implication that trust is the opposite of doubt is problematic. Mistrust or
suspicion are surely the antitheses. And if trust is replaced by doubt, is that
necessarily a bad thing? An environment riddled with propaganda and
disinformation tends to generate fierce certainties about false beliefs. It
promotes excessive levels of trust in influencers and highly manipulative
public figures. This is not something the anthology sets out to address."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
