Believing in Truth

-- By Tom Phillips 

Rudy Giuliani: "Truth isn't truth"

It’s happening more and more these days – people say things that just a few years ago would have been considered insane.  At a recent party, a young female stranger – a graduate student – asked me, “What do you think about the post-truth moment?”  My flustered answer: “I’m against it.” 

On the street and even in church, on hearing that I used to write for CBS News, people have cheerfully piped up: “Oh, fake news!”  Absolutely not, I tell them.  I never knowingly wrote a word of fake news.  Oh, they reply, but you’re retired.  How about the people writing now?   

I am a member of two establishments -- the press and the church -- that depend for their existence on the idea of truth.  Both are under siege by a new wave of old politics that values visions over facts, slogans over reason, personality over truthfulness.  The press is in danger of being discredited, the church of being co-opted.  And so far, the press is holding up better, more resistant and resilient.