At a time when liars and deniers run our country, “Jeopardy!” legend Ken Jennings writes about how the game show is one of the few places left in our culture where facts matter:
Facts may seem faintly old-timey in the 21st century, remnants of the rote learning style that went out of fashion in classrooms (and that the internet search made obsolete) decades ago. But societies are built on facts, as we can see more clearly when institutions built on knowledge teeter. Inaccurate facts make for less informed decisions. Less informed decisions make for bad policy. Garbage in, garbage out….
It’s been more than eight years since Kellyanne Conway’s coinage of the phrase “alternative facts” on “Meet the Press,” an Orwellian way to soft-pedal the outright falsehoods being told by powerful institutions. You don’t hear much about alternative facts anymore, but only because so many of them are no longer the alternative to anything. They have moved to the mainstream.
Scientific consensus in fields like climate change and vaccine efficacy is no longer the official position of American government. Ditto for legal facts (birthright citizenship), political facts (the winner of the 2020 election) and historical facts (too many examples to list). Inconvenient experts who push back can be removed by executive order; inconvenient books that disagree can be removed from libraries.