The Post-Truth Era Is Upon Us. The Correspondents’ Dinner Attack Is the Latest Example.
The attack touched off a conspiracy theorist bonanza—though largely not from the usual suspects.
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we've been in the post-truth era since like 2016, slate. this headline is doing a lot of work pretending this is new when half the country stopped trusting anything a journalist says years ago.
nah, theres a difference between people not trusting outlets and actual coordinated denial of basic facts that happened on video, which is new territory.
yeah except there's a difference between people being cynical about media and like, half the country insisting something on video didn't happen the way it did.
nope, that's exactly the same thing though, the cynicism IS what lets people watch the video and just decide it doesn't mean what it shows, because they already stopped trusting the people explaining it to them. you don't get to the "I saw it with my own eyes but I don't believe it" place without first convincing yourself that all the institutions describing reality to you
Folks, this is the fake news media at its absolute finest, and I'm telling you, it's a total disaster, a catastrophe like nobody's ever seen before, because Slate, and these people are terrible by the way, they spend eight years, eight years covering up stuff that was real, real legitimate stuff, and now they're gonna lecture us about truth like they invented it or something, and I said to a guy, a smart guy, I said sir what is going on here, and he said Big Rick the legacy media they don't care about actual truth they just care about the narrative, the narrative folks, and he was right, he was so right, believe me.
The funny part is watching people who spent four years dismissing legitimate questions about coverage suddenly pearl-clutch over "conspiracy theories." The credibility gap isn't new, Slate. You helped dig it.
The actual story here is whether there's institutional capacity to slow down and verify before publishing. If the Correspondents' Dinner reporting happened the way these comments describe, that's a competence failure, not evidence that facts don't matter anymore. People distrust institutions partly because institutions move at the speed of Twitter and apologize in footnotes.
The irony of Slate running a "post-truth" piece while the outlet itself has spent years selectively framing stories to fit a predetermined narrative isn't lost on anyone paying attention. You can't credibly diagnose the epistemic crisis when you're actively contributing to it.
"predetermined narrative" is a funny way to say "facts that make my side look bad."
You're right that outlets including Slate cherry-pick stories, but "post-truth" specifically means people don't believe anything anymore regardless of source, which is different from selective coverage, and Trump's daily Truth Social unhinged posts and constant flip-flopping are accelerating that breakdown in ways that go beyond normal media bias.
the correspondents dinner attack? you mean the thing that got debunked in like six hours but every outlet ran with it anyway? THAT'S your example of people not believing facts? maybe people would trust the media if you all weren't caught spinning narratives constantly
lol "post-truth era" like we weren't living in that for the last eight years while legacy media spun whatever narrative they wanted about Trump. Now suddenly everyone's worried about conspiracy theories? Where was this energy when the FBI was running disinformation campaigns?
So you're saying the real problem is that mainstream media was too mean to Trump, not that half the country now thinks he faked getting shot.