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It’s really quite the shame from my perspective. It’s actually important to know whether what public figures say is true or not. Except when these “fact checks” became mere political propaganda, it makes it that much harder to get people to believe in actual facts and actually look into whether or not a given statement is true. And it can be dangerous especially in situations where the general public has no ability to actually fact check on its own. If we have a natural disaster and need to get good information out quickly, having people actually trust that their news sources are trustworthy and accurate and do what needs to be done becomes impossible when people are used to understanding “facts” as “those things that we want you to believe whether or not they are actually true.”
The press doing this is creating something like a medieval world in which there was no way to study and learn the truth so you were left with terms like Orthodoxy and Heresy. Figuring out whether or not the earth went around the sun might well be difficult. But you absolutely knew whether or not the concept was Heresy.
The mainstream media is burning its credibility right at the point where it's becoming trivial to create completely believable fake images and videos of literally anything you want to depict.
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