Fake news. Alternative facts. My truth. Post-truth. We have plenty of names for the problem. What we don't have is an honest account of where it came from.
In this episode, Clive and Mark trace the crisis of truth from the French philosophy departments of the 1960s to your social media feed in 2025. Along the way? The academic hoax that got a feminist reinterpretation of Mein Kampf accepted by a peer-reviewed journal. The brain imaging study that shows facts literally activate our self-defence systems. The Gallup numbers that show trust in American media has fallen from 70% to 28% in fifty years.
And then there's AI. A billion people are now using it as their primary source of information. It hallucinates false claims on news topics at a rate that doubled in a single year. MIT research shows it uses more confident language when it's wrong than when it's right.
So where do you go for the truth? Clive and Mark have some answers and a few uncomfortable questions about whether the institutions we used to trust to provide it were ever quite as reliable as we thought.
Tags: Politics, Current Events, Misinformation, Media Literacy, Nonpartisan, Critical Thinking
