Where is the quest for truth?

Why can’t Americans seek the truth, demand the truth?

CARLA NORRLÖF

Writing for Project Syndicate since 2020

In America today, journalism still exists, but the chain that once ran from reporting to shared reality to institutional response has begun to break apart. The consequence is a democracy where truth no longer matters, because facts can be published, verified, and still fail to trigger a response.

TORONTO – “Democracy Dies in Darkness” became the motto of the Washington Post in 2017, four years after Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and one of the world’s richest men, purchased the newspaper. Today, however, Bezos, who has throttled the Post’sopinion page and now slashed the newspaper’s staff, seems determined to demonstrate that a free press, an essential component of democracy, can be killed off in broad daylight. 

Democracy is dying in America because those in positions of power – starting with President Donald Trump but including media and tech owners like Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who is doing to CBS News what Bezos has been doing to the Post – have learned how to make facts harmless. What began as a disinformation campaign has matured into a systematic project aimed not at controlling what people think, but at dismantling the structures that turn facts into consequences. 

For years, the crisis in journalism was described largely in terms of partiality, polarization, and declining trust. Those problems are real, and they have provided cover for treating the mainstream media’s supposed “liberal bias” as a justification for weakening professional standards. But there is now a deeper crisis: those who were previously pursuing this institutional weakening no longer need to bother winning an argument with the press. Instead, they have diminished the press’s ability to impose accountability at all. 

After Trump’s first election in 2016, many commentators argued that universities, newsrooms, and cultural institutions had lost touch with the public, and that this mattered politically. But building credible alternatives to such institutions takes years and requires money, talent, distribution channels, and trust. 

So, rather than trying to outcompete the established players in the marketplace of ideas, why not reduce their ability to set agendas, validate facts, and trigger consequences? Why not decrease journalistic institutions’ capacity to pursue deep investigations, and discredit their authority when they do? Original reporting can still circulate, but it simply won’t matter. 

This strategy does not require banning or censoring, because silence is not the goal. The objective is not to monopolize media on paper, but to monopolize its effects. Whereas Joseph Goebbels needed censorship and terror to enforce the Nazis’ single official reality, this is not classical fascism. The strategy unfolding in the US relies on different means: stripping disfavored stories of reach, credibility, and consequence until one narrative dominates without the state having to outlaw the rest. The mechanism at work is not control of speech, but immunity to facts.