The Insidious notion that there is no such thing as truth.

[Beet]

As the mainstream media has been collapsing, the Rupert Murdoch worshippers on the right now claim that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as bias, that all journalists are hacks, that any assertion that they may have aspired to ethics or professional standards is a naive religion, and the media consists of nothing but a cacophony of text with no particular meaning.

Very well then, if there is no such thing as truth, why do people even dialogue with one another? They have no chance of arriving any closer to the truth. Why talk politics at all? What is the point? Why even believe in things like 'freedom' and 'democracy', in fact, why even care at all about one's country, in our case the United States and its Constitution? What's to prevent us from dissolving into civil war and secession? Nothing! After all, there is no truth, right? If that's the direction the right wants to head down, then so be it; but then they will get a fight on those terms, and it will be a damned good one.

[Beet]

I don't want this to be a glib dismissal. There are serious questions here. When I raised the idea of unbiased news, I was challenged into a pretty ugly and ad hoc definition of unbiased. And the critics may be right that news was never anything more than pure hackery.

I just wonder though-- are there any standards? The prominence of freedom of speech and freedom of press in democratic political theory has been high for centuries. Is this prominence meant to be a pure balance of powers play-- or is there supposed to be any meaning, any point, to the actual words that are used in this speech?

When two people debate a policy, are they actually supposed to enlighten each other and be able to influence one another on the basis of some shared understanding? If the idea of public dialogue is stripped of all notion of truth, standards, then how is it anything but lies? How does any political conversation people have become anything but lies?

As for "who said this", I recently heard the top paragraph here said by the founder of Newser.com, a news aggregator and Murdoch biographer (update- his name is Michael Wolff), on NPR. True to form, he rudely and repeatedly interrupted the other hosts and callers, practically shouting, and was only gently called on it.