Keynote speaker Jeet Heer questions the role of fact-checking in an increasingly distrustful society at the Rethinking Political Journalism Conference at Carleton University on November 15, 2024.
(Natasha Baldin)
In this week’s podcast, I’ll post the talk I gave Awarded at Carleton University In early November of this year, he spoke in Ottawa, Canada, about how the crisis of democracy is connected to the crisis of journalism. In my speech, I argued that we live in a time when the political divide is not so much left-wing/right-wing as it is establishment/anti-establishment. Liberals are trying to combat political dissidents like Donald Trump by increasing fact-checking.
But I argue that this strategy is deeply flawed because voters who respond to anti-establishment narratives are also skeptical of institutions that claim to check facts. This talk attempts to offer strategies for dealing with dissident anger in a more productive way.
