The Problem With 'Self-Investigation' in a Post-Truth Era

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: January 3, 2017 at 9:19:23 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Problem With 'Self-Investigation' in a Post-Truth Era
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> The Problem With ‘Self-Investigation’ in a Post-Truth Era
> By JONATHAN MAHLER
> Dec 27 2016
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/27/magazine/the-problem-with-self-investigation-in-a-post-truth-era.html>
>
> No one would argue that Edgar Welch, the 28-year-old North Carolina man who loaded his car with weapons in early 
> December and drove 350 miles to liberate the children he believed were being held in the basement of a Washington 
> pizzeria, was a model citizen or even necessarily sane. But after a tragedy had been averted and he was in police 
> custody, Welch transformed himself into something of an unlikely sage, stumbling on a surprisingly resonant 
> explanation for the misguided quest that sent him ricocheting from internet conspiracy theories to armed vigilantism: 
> He had decided, he said, to “self-investigate.”
>
> At first, it sounds like a useless neologism: Aren’t all investigations self-investigations? But in today’s morass of 
> disinformation — the “post-truth era” — the phrase reveals a radical new relationship between citizen and truth. 
> Millions of people like Welch are abandoning traditional sources of information, from the government to the 
> institutional media, in favor of a D.I.Y. approach to fact-finding. What they are doing is not quite investigating. 
> It is self-investigating.
>
> The phrase twins the American virtues of truth-seeking and individual resolve and suggests, at least superficially, 
> an appealing, bootstrapping approach to information gathering. But an investigator tries to get to the bottom of 
> things. For the self-investigator, there is no bottom, in large part because self-investigation — as I am defining it 
> here — is confined to the internet. Proceeding from the assumption that the so-called experts are not to be trusted, 
> self-investigators are pushed and pulled by the churn of memes and social media, an endless loop of echoes, 
> reflections and intentional lies. With only themselves and their appetites as a guide, they bypass any information 
> that doesn’t suit their predisposition and worldview. The self-investigator’s media diet is like an endless breakfast 
> buffet, only without the guilt: Take what you want, leave what you don’t.
>
> Our most famous self-investigator is, of course, our incoming president, Donald J. Trump; perhaps no one is more 
> committed to embracing and trumpeting unproven claims from the internet. Six years ago, as he flirted with the idea 
> of running for president, he became especially preoccupied with a theory being advanced by a right-wing extremist 
> named Joseph Farah. A self-described ex-Communist, Farah presided over a nonprofit organization, the Western Center 
> for Journalism, which was dedicated to promoting “philosophical diversity” in the news media, and now runs a popular 
> website, WorldNetDaily, which bills itself as “America’s Independent News Network.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, 
> an organization that monitors U.S. hate groups, has a different point of view, calling Farah “the internet king of 
> the antigovernment ‘Patriot’ movement.”
>
> Farah had floated plenty of specious arguments in the past, among them the claim that gay men orchestrated the 
> Holocaust and that Muslims have a 20-point plan for conquering the United States by 2020. But the Farah campaign that 
> captured Trump’s imagination held that America’s first black president, Barack Obama, might have been born outside 
> the United States. Trump talked about this notion almost nonstop; he even said he was considering sending private 
> investigators to Hawaii to prove that the president’s birth certificate was a forgery.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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