Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

A lot of fake things happened this year. A girl twerked upside down, wiped out, and caught on fire. This was not real. A reality TV show producer and a woman were insufferable to one another...

... But as journalists, should we really be going after “Truth” in the vague, poetic Keatsian sense of the word? Or should we be going after “facts”? This is the trap Mike Daisey fell into when it was revealed that his “Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” monologue, which was packaged as journalism by This American Life, was full of fabrications. Daisey wanted to capture the Truth. Facts were beside the point.What about the hard right-winger whose idea of Truth is that God controls the weather so we should do nothing to combat climate change? What about literal Truthers on the left who, despite having no facts to back it up, can weave a pseudo-compelling narrative that 9/11 was an inside job?...