I often hear people express nostalgia for the days when we trusted the media to tell us the truth. They contrast the apparent simplicity and clarity of those days with the messiness of a social media world of fake news.
But those days never existed. Simplicity never existed. Clarity never existed. We were just protected from the messiness of real life and spared the effort of working things out.
“It is impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes, which can never be fully described, too many flavours in the air or on the tongue, half colours, too many.” – Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
The past is a fiction – even the recent past.
The Obvious? 