It’s Fake! It’s Truth Police! No, It’s Modern Media |
I am a professor of decision-making and behavioral science with nearly three decades of research experience. I publish a weekly opinion column in a leading national newspaper. I write regularly for Forbes Israel, The Times of Israel, and behavioral economics platforms. I have published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in leading international journals and advise governments, security organizations, and public and private institutions.
Over the years, I have submitted multiple op-eds to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. I have never received feedback. Not a rejection. Not a comment. Just silence.
I’m not trying to complain. Don’t get me wrong – no one likes being ignored. But I mainly write for myself. To better understand what’s true and what’s a convenient lie. I have a bug. More like a feature. I insist on writing only what I can substantiate, or at least what cannot be easily falsified. I care about accuracy. I care about evidence. I care about the truth.
Unfortunately, in recent years, the value of truth has been lower than that of the Iranian Rial.
Welcome to the age of narrative. And narratives, unlike facts, require no verification – only alignment.
What is reliably published today is not careful analysis but emotionally charged storytelling delivered by speakers wrapped in the aesthetics of authority. A white coat. A prestigious academic title. A compelling personal account. And, above all, perfect compatibility with a preferred moral storyline.
Credentials are no longer treated as signals of expertise. They are deployed as rhetorical devices. Authority has become performative. Its function is not to inform, but to disarm skepticism.
This is not accidental. It is psychologically predictable.
Decades of research on authority bias show that people, highly educated professionals included, systematically lower their critical guard when claims are delivered by figures perceived as experts. The bias is robust, automatic, and remarkably resistant to correction. What is new is not the bias itself, but the willingness of elite institutions to outsource their epistemic responsibility to it.
The question is no longer, “Is this claim accurate?” It is, “Does this speaker look credible enough for our audience to accept it?”
Then emotions take their natural course.
The identifiable victim effect ensures that vivid, personal suffering consistently outweighs accurate statistical data. Add an underdog narrative, and critical scrutiny often collapses entirely. Moral intuition takes over, complexity becomes suspicious, and context begins to appear as excuse-making.
In this framework, moral clarity is achieved not through analysis, but through immediacy. The more emotionally compelling the story, the less verification is required. The less verification is required, the more confident the conclusions become.
This dynamic has been especially visible in progressive institutions that pride themselves on moral awareness. Moral confidence, when combined with ideological homogeneity, produces a particularly dangerous blind spot. When every conflict is filtered through a single oppressor-oppressed template, reality becomes optional.
This is not critical thinking. It is narrative alignment masquerading as morality.
The result is a peculiar inversion: institutions that once championed skepticism now treat skepticism itself as suspect – as long as it disrupts the narrative. Doubt is encouraged selectively. Questions are welcome, provided they point in the “right” direction.
Gatekeeping was once about discomfort. About slowing things down. About asking questions that no one wanted to answer. Today, gatekeeping is increasingly about amplification. About selecting voices that resonate, provoke, and confirm what the audience already believes.
Gatekeepers who select truth based on narrative compatibility are not protecting journalism. They are policing reality.
This matters because when ideologically aligned claims are published under the guise of professional authority, the result is no longer opinion journalism. It is cognitive influence masked as expertise. Readers are not invited to evaluate arguments; they are nudged to defer.
The ethical problem is not biased opinions. All journalism is biased in some sense. The problem is denial – the insistence that one’s own bias is simply moral clarity, while all others are propaganda.
And as Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, so eloquently explained: “The only difference between ‘propaganda’ and ‘education,’ really, is in the point of view.”
These same institutions routinely warn about disinformation, radicalization, and ideological media capture. The concern, however, is strikingly selective. Misinformation is condemned vigorously when it comes from the “wrong” sources, and excused when it aligns with the “right” values.
Selective skepticism is not skepticism. It is an ideology with a biased fact-checking department. One that doesn’t just lie. It tells its audience exactly what they want to hear.
But journalism does not fail when it takes sides. It fails when it insists it hasn’t.
The erosion of trust in the mainstream media did not happen because audiences suddenly became anti-intellectual. It happened because audiences learned, slowly yet painfully, that standards are applied unevenly, and that truth is often filtered through moral convenience.
The tragedy is that none of this is necessary. Skepticism is not cynicism. Verification is not cruelty. Moral concern does not require epistemic shortcuts. But abandoning these principles in favor of narrative certainty may feel virtuous in the short term, while quietly dismantling the very institutions that claim to defend them.
The danger is not biased journalism. It is biased journalism that is confident it holds higher ground.
What a wonderful age for extremist movements to thrive.