Help lying go out of style

Denn is Founder & CEO of PolicyKeys™ Where Can We Agree?

The Fulcrum recently asked its readers to share their thoughts on the following question: What is your take on how we restore honor when lying has become fashionable? Below is a reader response.

There needs to be a recognized standard of journalistic fairness. If you trust the people who are watching the media, allsides.org, mediabiasfactcheck.com, and thefactual.com, pretty much every media outlet is spinning stories from their own point of view with a non-neutral tone.

There’s this thing called measuring, it’s used in science, baking, farming, cooking, home building, pumping gasoline, or metering electricity, you get the point. It’s 2023, and for some reason we have decided not to measure what “folk” who essentially are long on virtue, or so says Aristotle, have to say what they’re hearing—and their opinions in some sort of believable way, outside of polling Democrats and Republicans and their party lines—and trying to force independents into one of those molds. Well played, duopoly.

Instead of listening to your favorite echo chambers, who are telling you what you want to hear, why not strive to understand the subject first, and stop supporting outlets that don’t help you do that? The thing about finding out what it is we can actually agree on, after personally filtering out all the lies (thanks for wasting our time—media outlets) is that the solutions don’t look like anything you’ve heard before. Why? Because, no one covers that beat.

Public policy is really, really complicated. There are thousands of variables, it’s impossible for anyone to be expected to scan through all that and look for patterns, throw out the lies, reconcile conflicting facts, sort the arguments fairly with a minimum of spin consider short-term and long-term goals, honor emotions, plan for unexpected outcomes, apply and measure probability to the various solutions, oh, and then repeat for the next subject. Everyone is conflicted with their points of view, but somehow we reflect on the mess, and try to make up our own minds. Kudos to those who really try, you are far and few between, and it’s almost an impossible task.

There’s this thing called the Wisdom of the Crowd, if that were ever harnessed, maybe with the help of a little AI, we might get commentary on public policy we can trust. Until then, same old same old.