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There is no greater enemy of the truth than the use of the phrase “the truth”. This is a basic problem in logic and philosophy, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

Where adding an operator that can determine the logical truth of a statement breaks the system. At a bellyfeel level consider “9/11 truther”. There is no truth, only seduction

https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction....

There is no “little boy” about it but I don’t think your question is really a productive question to ask. In that there are no journalists, nobody pounding the pavement to get facts, interview people, etc, HN is not “the press”. Particularly there is no editor-in-chief. A counter to that is that you will find people writing on HN (like Mailer) about their experiences vibe coding or developing photographs or what went down at the third last startup they worked at. That is mostly ‘true’ in the Norman Mailer sense or the lucid bits of that Hunter S. Thompson bit and might be all the more ‘true’ if it goes off the rails once in a while the way Hunter did even if it departs from conventionally defined factually. Hunter and Mailer both emphasize the gap between the personal account which is more ‘real’ in a certain sense than ‘objective’ journalism. That Bagdikian book has one of the most damning critiques of the media I’ve ever seen —- the editor of a small town newspaper he just 6 seconds to look at an AP newswire study and decide if it is ‘fit to print’ which is an act of violence against the very fabric of reality.

Baudrillard’s next book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

is an attempt to shit on the word ‘real’ the way that wolves shit on a trap in that the words ‘true’ and ‘real’ (not to mention ‘trustworthy’) are frequently used in attempts to deceive.

From that perspective we have been in a post-apocalyptic environment for quite some time, at least 1970 if not 1945 or 1870. However problematic you think the media is, the reality is so much worse and it is not a function of who owns it or works it or bias on a left/right access it is a structural property of the system itself.



I want whatever you've been smoking.

Godel's Incompleteness theorem is for mathematical stuff. We're talking about press, not mathematics. Just because you saw someone using this argument once and you were speechless doesn't mean it's an argument-ending thing you can use whenever you want.

I understand you want to pretend that you don't want to talk about it, but in fact you do, don't you?




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