Friday, March 3, 2017

The Media's Moment of Truth

A must-read from Maggie Gallagher writing for the Catholic Herald:
A culture war is a struggle over who has the power to name what is real. For generations in America there was a central source of information in the body politic for naming what was real, at least at the level of simple fact. Over time it became clearer and clearer that the Left could use its influence over these elite information streams to deprive the conservative movement of the capacity to make changes. Republicans lived in fear of being branded a bigot, a hater or a racist, and so the circle of what counts as bigotry, hatred and racism expanded to include more of the Left’s social agenda (particularly, but not exclusively, around gay issues).

It was an effective weapon and it worked, until Trump refused to be cowed by this narrative and still won.

Benedict XVI prophetically foresaw the challenge of truth in our times in his Regensburg address. If we only accept scientific proof as rational and declare everything else irrational, then, Benedict pointed out, we exclude from rational reflection most of the searching and deepest questions human beings face: those areas in which empirical proof is not possible, which require rational reflection – judgment, not proof. (Read more.)
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