It seems like there are plenty of people in the world who manage to act productively on the information they have, but maybe it's all just a big conspiracy - nobody has ever known a single fact.

    if every major source is untrustworthy, if it's all a chain of lies all the 
    way down, how does anyone know anything?

It worries me immensely that we're seeing this pattern in the United States.

Skepticism is not the same thing s cynicism. And skepticism is not the same thing as holding all literature to the same exacting evidentiary standards, and requiring all consumers to have the requisite skill and motivation to scrutinize those standards.

The so-called mainstream media _is_ biased. That much can't be in dispute. The issue is the character of that bias. The bias of the New York Times is not the same as the bias of Russia Today or the People's Daily. And equivocating bias is it's own form of bias, perhaps the most pernicious kind.

"Even the big names get it wrong" isn't the same thing as "trust no one [but me]"

This cynicism has infected not just conservatives but most other factions. It turns out that if you repeat a narrative often enough even your opponents as well as the "mainstream media" will pick it up and run with it.

The organic parts would be the dissolution and fragmentation of the mid-century media empires--broadcast news, regional newspapers, etc--into all the various cable and Internet outlets we have today. That fragmentation means readerships are more self-selected, creating market pressures for outlets to cater to their particular readerships' preferences and biases.

This is in some sense a regression to a 250-year mean of political culture, but that's a mean of slow and highly volatile social, economic, and scientific progress.

And there's no excuse for the slash-and-burn, nihilistic tactics adopted by conservative strategists. You simply cannot have a functioning democracy unless society retains the _myth_ of an objective, shared truth. It's one thing to nurture skepticism, it's another to nurture cynicism.

Not that there's no fault on the part of the left or other political factions. But I'm not going to equivocate factions which, say, pursue ill-considered policy objectives with a faction that undermines the fundamental prerequisites for a functioning body politic.

The Donald Trump phenomenon and the age of alternative facts is principally a result of a _particular_ concerted partisan political effort. And it's not new--it goes back to before Reagan, although really got going with Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution, which finally solidified a unified GOP narrative on all policy matters. The only difference is that we're now much more focused on some of the starker consequences of that shift in strategy.

Sure, it didn't live up to certain capitalistic ideals, but maybe it turns out that not every domain of human life benefits from existing in a bare knuckle free market.

It seems almost every day now I hear politicians saying things that I'd edit out from the script if I were writing a dystopian movie because they were too cheesy and crude to be good characterizations.

The majority of us have been conditioned to worry, actually worry, about stuff that we have absolutely no control nor expert knowledge. The majority of our time should be spent on worrying about ourselves, our immediate circle of people, our neighborhood, city, country, planet. In that order. Turn on the TV or open your facebook and you'll that the hierarchy is completely reversed.

    The majority of our time should be spent on worrying about ourselves, our 
    immediate circle of people, our neighborhood, city, country, planet. In that 
    order.

    First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a Socialist.

    Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— 
    Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— 
    Because I was not a Jew.

    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

But it's a tremendously cynical and harmful to believe that "everyone is for themselves." It's just not true: there are millions if not billions of people who live much more for others than themselves. The supremacy of self-interest is not some foundational truth of social reality - it's an economic theory of human behavior which corporations and power hungry individuals want us to believe in because it props up the system of predatory capitalism that enriches them at the cost of the public good.

Note that of course, like everything on Wikipedia this is probably neither complete nor necessarily accurate.

It's also a pretty short list.

One particularly embarrassing example on the list involved a real person being falsely accused of taking part in a major points shaving scandal in college despite not even being on the team at the time, with multiple major publications repeating the claim. It was only discovered after 6 years or so because a film reviewer got an email claiming he was omitted from a film about the scandal because he wasn't even on the team, and believed that person enough to start digging despite all the coverage insisting otherwise: http://awfulannouncing.com/2014/guilt-wikipedia-joe-streater...

> I've looked at large articles I contributed to a few years ago and they are now disasters.

Examples would be welcome.

In any case, they didn't make the claim about disaster articles.

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/legacy-encoding-has-no-definition.html