Some time ago, I listened to Lulu Garcia Navarro interview Megyn Kelly on the New York Times “The Interview” podcast. If you’re not familiar with Megyn Kelly, she was a long-time Fox News host until she had a dust-up both with then-candidate Trump and ultimately with the Fox organization. Now she is an ardent supporter of the President—she even endorsed him on stage at a rally prior to the election—as she hosts her YouTube show.

I don’t know Kelly’s work well and this is not really a post about Kelly, or the New York Times, or the President, or Lulu Garcia Navarro.

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This is a post about a word I don’t think I heard throughout the entire interview. The most informative element of the interview—at least for me—was Kelly’s description of the new media ecosystem that has grown up outside of traditional media venues, channels, and outlets. As Kelly has moved away from sources of news that are often referred to as “main stream,” (specifically, networks such as Fox News and NBC), she has moved toward a heterogenous group of people who in one way cover news, but in another way make news.

In this “new media” world, Kelly sees herself as a co-participant with people who we might easily recognize as political pundits in the old fashioned sense (for instance, she specifically mentions Ben Shapiro). But she also sees herself as a co-participant with voices that we might not, at least not until recently, have recognized as pundits (she specifically mentions Joe Rogan and Theo Von).

Kelly suggests that with this new media frontier, there is also a new set of rules and norms. The old rules no longer apply. In old media, she argues, journalists had biases, but they attempted to hide those biases from their viewers, listeners, and readers. They attempted to put on a facade of objectivity that belied a more genuine subjectivity beneath the surface. On Kelly’s view, they pretended to be objective.

In new media, she contends, the viewers (and listeners and readers) value authenticity above all else. She claims that the viewers of her YouTube channel—even those that did not support a second Trump term—supported her public endorsement of him because that endorsement was an act of authenticity and in new media, authenticity is the highest good.

Usage of this word, “authenticity,” has grown rapidly over the last couple of decades. According to Google NGram data, the term was almost nonexistent one hundred years ago, and its usage has ballooned in the first quarter of this century. (For a brief overview of how Google Ngram works, you can look at an earlier Views Expressed newsletter called “A Visual History of AI”).

What I’m about to say is not a criticism of Megyn Kelly. I don’t watch her show and I don’t know her work. What I know is what I heard in the interview. And in the interview, one thing she never said was that new media values the truth.

This is, to me, a striking omission because—whatever its flaws, whatever its failures to live up to its own ideals, whatever its unstated biases and unclaimed subjectivities—it seems to me that one of the most dominant principles in old media was that those who report the news should tell the truth.

I can already feel the responses welling up inside of many readers. “But old media was dishonest.” Yes, of course. There were times that old media failed to live up to its own standards. “But old media did lie.” Yes, there were times that those who reported the news cooked up stories and lied to those who consumed their products.

The most egregious case that has managed to lodge itself in my memory was when CBS News’s Dan Rather published, and then defended as authentic, memos that besmirched President George W. Bush’s Air National Guard record even though he couldn’t validate their authenticity (and they proved ultimately to have been fabricated).

That was a pretty big failure. Rather prioritized something—though I don’t know if it was authenticity—over truth. But he never committed that mistake again, because CBS fired him. And, presumably, they fired him precisely because he failed to live up to the stated principles of the profession of journalism.

This is my fundamental point: There is a difference between, on the one hand, asserting a standard and then failing, at times, to meet it and, on the other hand, abandoning the standard altogether.

This is the problem with binary approaches to morality. If the only categories available to us are “good” and “bad” and we can never avail ourselves of categories such as “better” and “worse,” then we put ourselves in the position philosophers cannot abide: we become unable to recognize distinctions.

To assert a journalistic principle such as “journalists should tell the truth” and then to fail to live up to that principle is bad. But it’s worse (at least, I think it’s worse) to abandon the principle altogether.

I worry that participants in the new media don’t see it that way. I worry that they can see only that failing to live up to the “tell the truth” principle was bad, and since bad things are bad, we should abandon the principle altogether.

Truth is sacrificed upon the altar of “authenticity.”

It reminds me of a scene in C. S. Lewis’s 1943 novel, Perelandra, the second book in what is often called his “space trilogy.” The hero, the philologist Professor Ransom, is engaged in a discussion with a man who has hitherto been the world-renowned physicist Professor Weston. Weston has just explained that he believes that a kind of life force drives the whole universe forward and that all things, even all principles, must be sacrificed in the name of this life force.

Ransom asks the crucial question about the limiting principle.

“How far does it go? Would you still obey the Life-Force if you found it prompting you to murder me?”

“Yes.”

“Or to sell England to the Germans?”

“Yes.”

“Or to print lies as serious research in a scientific periodical?”

“Yes.”

“God help you!” said Ransom.

There is an academic joke buried here. The joke, of course, is that, for academics, there is no sin greater than fabricating research results and then publishing those results in an academic journal.

But beneath the joke, there is a more basic question. One must be very careful what one adopts as the highest good. If the highest good is scientific progress or, as Weston puts it, this “Life-Force,” then all other principles must be subjected to the Life-Force. That’s what a highest good is.

If the highest good in new media is authenticity, then all other principles must be subjected to authenticity.

The idea that authenticity and truth could be distinct from one another may sound implausible. How could it be, you must be asking, that abandoning the truth can be authentic? But that’s just it. That word “authenticity” that has gained so much traction in the last decade or so has to mean something other than truthfulness, otherwise, we would just say “truthfulness.” Being true to oneself is not the same thing as telling the truth.

That’s just not a sacrifice I’m willing to make. I think truth—and the search for truth, and institutions that are aimed at truth, and dialogue formed around the assumption that there is such a thing as truth—these things are just too valuable to give them up in the name of authenticity, even if those institutions and dialogues often fail to deliver truth.

In one of the earliest internecine fights within the discipline of philosophy, Aristotle (Plato’s star pupil) rejected what is often called Plato’s “theory of the forms.” And when he did so, he said that it’s “only right to destroy … what is close to us … to preserve truth. We must especially do this as philosophers; for though we love both truth & our friends, reverence is due to truth first.”

Aristotle prioritized truth over friends, however inauthentic that might have been.

Credit where it’s due

Views Expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the US Government.

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