Originally published November 4, 2016.
Recently, President Obama said he wanted a truthiness test for information. (To hear it, click the link and go to chronomark 1:00:00 and listen for about four and a half minutes.) I believe he was focusing on scientific information (climate change in particular, of course), but he made an interesting analogy with the news media.
We are going to have to rebuild, within this wild, wild west of information flow, some sort of curating function…
It used to be there were three television stations, and Walter Cronkite was there…generally people trusted a basic body of information…
There has to be some sort of way we can sort through information that passes some sort of truthiness test.
This wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds out of context (almost!), but I recalled his words while reading the newspaper today and it made me think Obama was revealing a broader mindset that is about to be rolled out.
The first article I read was about a recent appearance by Melania Trump during which she, no doubt sweetly and innocently (I mean that, I’m not being sarcastic),
lamented an increasingly coarse culture in which users of social media, especially children, belittle each other.
“Our culture has gotten too mean and too tough, especially to children and teenagers,” Mrs. Trump said. “We have to find a better way to talk to each other, to disagree with each other, to respect each other.”
I didn’t think too much about Melania’s comments and didn’t put them together with Obama’s until later, when in that same section of the paper I read a piece contributed by Vernon Jordan (remember him? he was a big Bill Clinton advisor & long-time Bilderberger), which paralleled the recent words of both President Obama and Mrs. Trump:
The great new[s](sic) institutions of the 20th century, print newspapers, the evening broadcast news, the trusted anchorman, are fading relics. In their place we have unlimited information, unfiltered, all the time….
Yesterday’s news institutions were far from perfect. But they served an important civic role. They served as filters of information, sorting out facts from lies, and truth from innuendo. They gleaned the significant from the frivolous….
[P]eople in the technology, media and telecom industry…must ensure that we are protected….
We need to use technology’s capacity to clearly, and quickly, delineate facts from lies—regardless of their source, and to develop media that require civility and respect when people exchange opinions.”
To reiterate Jordan’s entreaty: we need the media (formerly known as “the free press”) to filter information and to separate “facts from lies,” “truth from innuendo” and “the significant from the frivolous.” That is, we need our information censored and prioritized by corporate media. He also urges that we “require civility and respect when people exchange opinions”–that is, the tone and content of discourse must be controlled.
Not to nitpick on ol’ Vern, but I might also point out that the “important civic role” of the free press was not “to serve as filters of information,” as he argues, but as disseminators of it. The last thing civil society (to borrow a globalist phrase) needs is to be “protected” from unfiltered information by Big Tech, which seems quickly to be entering the top tier of the corpo-governmental continuum also known as the Military Industrial Complex.
Total Information Awareness is a two-way street. The motto of that now-underground government program was “Information Is Power.” That means they want to have all the information they can while we have as little as we will accept. To gather all possible information, the powers-that-be are instituting the Surveillance State. (I pegged Obama “the Surveillance President” while he was still in his first term.) On the flipside, to control our information, they need censorship.
Given what Obama, Melania & Jordan are hinting at right now, looks like Hillary is being positioned as the Censorship President. I guess it’s time for Big Government to take on the Big Daddy of Constitutional rights: First for a reason! The soon-to-be-late, great First Amendment.