Outside influence and cultural conditioning to disbelieve the truth

followup | Update: Now, I can't recall what kind of a post caused me to write this.

Outside influence is easy to explain away as a source of corruption. I thought of a mystery element that would leave UFP Starfleet ppl inside a problem, but unable to find a solution. Sort of like cultural complacency, whereby people notice the house on fire when it's almost too late already. I recall there's a picture meme with a big-eyed doggy surrounded by flames.

Strangely enough, political corruption on the grass-roots level can happen just like that, too, with swathes of people putting party before country, and a large and vocal chunk of them unable and unwilling to believe verified and well-sourced information, just because it disagrees with them. Some of those and some others contend, that 'everybody lies.'

This unwillingness to accept verified information as truth, and pliability to conspiracy theories is nearly always a dangerous situation, IMO.

In part, such a massive disbelief of truth is actually borne out of the methods of competitive newsmaking, which perhaps unwittingly has culturally conditioned large segments of different populations to believe bad or worse-sounding news as being truer than actual facts. This makes a population gullible to only believe the lying liars who are the loudest in shouting the worst.

A little out of context: Past events do have a lot of true meaning in real life; it's that in-universe prequelisation (in Star Trek) sort of gives off a feeling that we've been there already.

24.04.2017 Update:

wrt massive disbelief of truth, then there are two other factors in having such disbeliefs:

* One is gullibility in believing everything that's seen on tv.

The argument "But it was on tv!" inherently suggests, that proper and diligent fact-checking was performed—when it really was not. Assumption of proper fact-checking of news aired on American television dates back to the early days of tv in functioning democracies. In Europe and Canada and several other countries, this remains true even now and into the foreseeable future.

But not so in the very competitive news tv market in the U.S., where lying whilst professing the reportage of news is somehow acceptable to very many people.

There, a famous (or, rather, an infamous) tv channel about news would by all appearances rather prefer to disseminate falsehoods; as if it almost specialised in shrouding the truth in a web of lies. Because, in what I could infer to be their worldview, a garish untruth supposedly sells better. As if. (Hint: One of its major personalities recently left the network amid multiple scandals over harassment, and major loss of sponsorship.)

Since that channel's audience will lap anything up, then that channel's leadership would be wise to consider reporting verified and accurate information — instead of their usual fare that's been bandied around for twenty-odd years now. Because their advertised terms of 'f a i r' and 'b a l a n c e d' do not equate with truthful or accurate.

Production of lying news can—and often does become news in and of itself, and inevitably, it becomes bad news for those that have spread and continue to spread untruths.

Alas, what causes bad newspeople to be fired and bad politicians to leave office, is often a sex scandal, or a scandal involving large amounts of money.

Disseminating lies and proselytizing hate wrapped in news-like entertainment is irresponsible, and so devalues freedom of speech. Countering lies with truth and facts enhances this freedom, and thus increases its value.

Once informed, the public and advertisers will eventually lean towards those newspeople and outlets they deem to be consistently reliable and responsible in their newsmaking.

One can still be entertaining while reporting accurate and verified information, and earn great revenue with that.

* The other factor is confirmation bias. I might expand on it later, but it boils down to this: "I like their news, because I agree with their worldview."

On the surface, it looks like an innocent statement, but is not right, when the the news source intentionally spreads falsehoods, hate, supports discrimination and harassment, and promotes war, or a combination thereof.

Such a viewership would even accept lies in lieu of news, if these lies confirm their (hateful) worldview, which some use as justification to commit actual acts of hate.

The hate crimes statutes were implemented for a reason.