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Oxford Dictionaries has declared "post-truth" as its 2016 international word of the year, reflecting what it called a "highly-charged" political 12 months. It is defined as an adjective relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals. Its selection follows June's Brexit vote [in the UK], and the US presidential election. Post-truth, which has become associated with the phrase "post-truth politics", was chosen ahead of other political terms, including "Brexiteer" and "alt-right".
[...] Oxford Dictionaries says post-truth is thought to have been first used in 1992. However, it says the frequency of its usage increased by 2,000% in 2016 compared with last year.
Mr Grathwohl said: "Fuelled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time," he said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37995600
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016
Would you have chosen something different?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 18 2016, @05:04AM
Jesus H Christ. Do you hear yourself? The point is that quality journalism means accountability. Those people got busted and they were held accountable.
So what? They shouldn't have even gotten to that point! For example, Dan Rather might still be somewhat gainfully employed, if he had a real editor. Accountability isn't much good, if your media business makes such rookie mistakes. Second, none of the three examples you gave are relevant to my original post which spoke of a definition of a word. They're all behavior and mistakes that have been going on since the beginning of journalism which again implies the uselessness of the "post-truth" label in describing centuries old behavior and mistakes.
As to Vox Day, I pointed him out because you're matching the template to a "T". If he's a nutcase, what does that make you? Let's note that: 1) you implied that your three examples were somehow relevant to my post (Vox Day seems to conflate ignorant falsehood telling with deliberate falsehood telling, calling it all lies. I don't think you were intending to lie by the proper definition of the word, but you did characterize my comment in a way that was blatantly false and introduce an argument that was blatantly irrelevant.), 2) you doubled down by ignoring my reply and of course, just restated your original post and warbled about "accountability" and Vox Day, and 3) complained that I was be a simpleton and needed to put on my "big boy pants" (strangely enough, those problems seem mysteriously missing from my post) while simultaneously presenting those very traits of simplistic and immature argument in your own post.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @08:28AM
> So what? They shouldn't have even gotten to that point!
What: No one is perfect all of the time. What matters more than accuracy is how you handle fuck-ups.
> As to Vox Day, I pointed him out because you're matching the template to a "T". If he's a nutcase, what does that make you?
Sane.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 18 2016, @03:33PM
What: No one is perfect all of the time.
Maybe you ought to consider just how far from perfect this was. In the Dan Rather case, the documents were clearly forged and there was no chain of custody to connect them to the real world (even if somehow they couldn't actually figure out the documents were forged). Similarly, Rolling Stone just took the word of the rape accuser at face value with no effort to follow up on the claim and see if it actually happened. Both showed a reckless disregard for truth and exposed their employers to potential and real libel lawsuits by publishing stuff that they hadn't taken even basic steps to vet.
That takes us to the Breitbart story. Even if it happened exactly like you claim, it's a standard conflict between journalist and employer that has been around for centuries. There's no "post-truth" to it. "Yellow journalism" has been around forever. Journalists being treated unfairly by their employers has been around just as long. Just because Breitbart allegedly does it now, doesn't make such treatment novel or unusual. Oh, and why aren't you merely observing that Breitbart isn't "perfect"?
And that brings me to the obvious point of my original post. "Post-truth" implies that there was a truer period some point in the past. There wasn't. Your examples have done nothing to change this. Your peculiar insistence that journalism isn't "perfect" for selected acts of gross malpractice doesn't either. All along, your posts have been entirely irrelevant to my original post.