Gatekeeping

How Do We Know What’s True?

We now live in a world that doesn’t distinguish between experts, morons and conspiracy theorists.

The destruction of the building that housed my former newspaper for more than 100 years. It’s now a graveled lot.

In a country with freedom of speech as well as millions of morons, there needs to be some kind of system that sorts through the voices.

We have brilliant thinkers, ordinary citizens who just want to have their say occasionally, people who are so stupid they can barely look after their own affairs and conspiracists who seek to spread objectively false and incendiary shit.

Every single one of those people has equal access to the public’s attention now, and the attention paid to them depends more on whether they are especially attractive or charismatic than whether they have any idea what they’re talking about.

We used to have a better system, and I was a part of it. And though it was messy and imperfect, it worked well enough. I was a journalist with a 30-year newspaper career that ended in a wave of layoffs in 2015.

Take letters to the editor.

My policy, as a small-town newspaper editor, was to run every letter possible and clean it up to meet normal publication standards. Even the ones that started off, “You are a moran!”