Moment of truth | 18 May 2017

Two extremes of the listening experience were available on Monday on Radio 4. The day began conventionally enough with Start the Week, chaired by the deceptively genial Amol Rajan (now in charge of The Media Show), whose warm, inviting voice fronts a keen, intense intelligence. He guided his guests through a conversation about our post-truth world which, apart from the subject-matter, could have graced the airwaves in the 1950s. This was a masterclass in elevated discussion, so graceful were the exchanges, so theoretical the ideas, yet so clear the meaning. Chief among Rajan’s guests was our former editor Matthew d’Ancona, who has just published a book about post-truth and why it’s crucial that we should immediately, without hesitation, rise up and fight against its proliferation, so dangerous does he perceive its potential damage to our political and social make-up to be.

Who is judging the truth, d’Ancona queried, in a world where our faith in institutions has been seriously compromised and replaced by a free-for-all of technological companies driven by profit and algorithmic calculation. By being constantly fed what we like or feel already, through our obsession with social media (even those of us who barely know about trending), we are living in an echo chamber where we already know what we want to hear and hear what we want to know. By turning to people we know for news and information, via Facebook and similar channels, rather than more traditional means of communication, we think we can trust what we read and never stop to verify the source. Instead of cold, hard facts, which can be boring, too rational for current tastes, hard to digest, we are turning instead to the spicier fast-food alternatives of Instagram and Twitter.

At one point Rajan referred to the American president as ‘Donald Truth’ in a weird Freudian slip of the tongue, which at the same time made Trump sound even more like a cartoon character than usual.