Brian’s Reviews > True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society > Status Update

Experts come at us from all directions, in every medium, through every niche. But their quality – their education, their experience, the reputation, their ideological and financial allegiances – is growing ever more difficult to ascertain.

Expertise presents another mechanism for reality to shatter: we choose our personal versions of truth by subscribing to the clutch of specialists we find agreeable and trustworthy.

In the late 1980s a study found that a single commentary by a news anchor can prompt as much as a 4 percentage-point change in public opinion. “Experts” are also extremely powerful…They found experts can push public opinion more than 3 percentage points toward the position they’re calling for.

Kennedy’s article made no mention of experts who questioned the amateurs’ work. In the year and a half since the vote, many academics had looked into Ohio’s 2004 race. Although several had found that the vote had been far from perfect, not a single study conducted by any professional had determined that Kerry had won Ohio. Kennedy ignored these findings and highlighted the amateurs’ interpretation instead.

The muckrakers claimed that Republicans in Ohio had deliberately rigged voting results in counties all over the state, either by manually, stuffing the ballot or by tampering with voting machines.

To many on the left, Kennedy’s article represented the ultimate endorsement of long-bubbling concerns over the integrity of the American electoral process.

In June 2006, Robert F Kennedy Jr, published an article in Rolling Stone magazine with a teasing, blockbuster headline: “Was The Election Stolen?“ Kennedy answered his provocative question within the first few paragraphs. “After carefully examining the evidence, I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004.”

The real danger of living in the age of Photoshop isn’t the proliferation of fake photos. Rather, it’s that true photos will be ignored as phonies. When every picture is suspect, all pictures are dismissible, and photography’s unique power to criticize will decline.

Jayhan described an extensive theory of satanic cultism that he said actually fuels many of the shifts of power we see in society. His idea, inspired by the book The Franklin Cover-Up, a book by former Nebraska state senator John Decamp, is that Satanists routinely kidnap children and provide them to politicians for sexual trusts; the cult then keeps the politicians in line through blackmail.

Selective perception says that even when two people of opposing ideologies, overcome their tendency towards selective exposure and choose to watch the same thing, they may still end up being pushed apart from each other.