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Speaker: Dr. Tim Scherman, Professor, English

“Fake news”—or more specifically, the newly pervasive difficulty in establishing the difference between what we used to call “fact” and political opinion—has dominated the media since the candidacy of the current president became, for lack of a better word, “serious,” in the summer of 2015. For many, the effects of the president’s habit of insisting on, in print and word, what is for so many patently and demonstrably false can be traced to the simple will to exercise power, for what could demonstrate arbitrary power more than one’s freedom from the rules of logic or evidence, or the history of established facts on which our system of law, for example, rests?

Myriad responses and solutions to this phenomenon have been circulated and repeated, the most futile of which is probably “impeachment,” grounded in a focus on “facts” themselves—as if presenting people with new facts (to be distinguished magically from “alternative” facts) might change their minds or clarify their views. More subtle responses have addressed “facts” within the context of the forms of argument used in their production and maintenance. In this conversation, I hope to inspire further consideration of this last, in addition to, most importantly, the material means by which the whole problem is persistently, if in some cases inadvertently, maintained, along with the putatively “apolitical” business model at its base.