In a previous column, I discussed why people resist the truth. In this column, I consider tactics used by those in power to facilitate such resistance.

One such tactic is called, by philosophers, “poisoning the wells.” It consists in calling into question the trustworthiness of all the usual sources of the truth, thereby paving the way for an acceptance of some other source.

Descartes employs this tactic and ends up with his own thinking as a source of the truth that he exists. Kierkegaard does the same and ends up advising us, in the absence of any unquestionable source, to make a “leap of faith,” and accept Christianity’s truths.

In this country, over the past four years, something like the poisoning of the wells has taken place. Donald Trump has tried to persuade us that the mainline media can’t be trusted. He insists that all they provide is “fake news,” because most of them are run by Democrats, who all hate Trump and print lies to make him look bad. Most recently, he’s concluded that even Fox News cannot be depended upon for the truth.

He has also questioned the government as a source of truth, citing the traitorous “deep state,” i.e. government employees, who wish to poison our minds against the president out of a similar political bias against him.

In the face of this alleged, general conspiracy of the media and others to deceive us, we’ve been asked to make another sort of leap: a leap to Trump’s Truth.

I don’t mean to suggest that Trump has consciously utilized the “poison the wells” strategy. I’m sure that he’s never heard of it. Trump has simply labeled as deceitful and untrustworthy any source of information that he dislikes, and, over the years, those stigmatized sources have added up to almost all of our normal means of acquiring information about the world. As a result, there are now tens of millions of Trump followers in this country who have cut themselves off from the truth, and may continue to do so after Trump is gone.

These people live in a different world from the rest of us, believing only what Trump or right-wing social media tell them. They believe that Trump won the election, that COVID-19 is nothing more than the flu, that Joe Biden will usher in a socialist regime, that protesters are anarchist terrorists, and so forth. They live in an intensely politicized world, where a news source’s alleged political allegiance explains away any facts it presents that are at odds with Trump’s claims.

That the most uninformed and prevaricating president in American history became the only fountain of truth for a great many people is incredible, but Trump’s persistent invalidation of our traditional sources of information is certainly part of the explanation.

Yet there is simply no evidence that our traditional sources of information, like PBS News, NPR, the standard television news channels, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, are untrustworthy.

It may be that those sources have often taken note of Trump’s lies, but that doesn’t establish that they have an anti-Trump bias, it simply means that they have felt an obligation to let the public know when Trump has said something untrue — something that contradicts known, well established, facts.

I subscribe to the New York Times, and I am well aware that insofar as the newspaper occasionally expresses its own political opinions, that they are liberal. It’s also true that most (but not all) of the columnists who write for the paper are liberals. But neither fact proves that the Times’ news reporting is untrustworthy.

Perhaps people need to be reminded that, within a newspaper’s departmental structure, there is a figurative wall between the news department, and both the advertising and the editorial departments. The editorial section is free to express opinions — the opinions of the paper itself and of its columnists — but the reporters who write the news stories are not free to do so. They, as professional, trained journalists, are required to be scrupulous in evaluating sources and report only what the evidence establishes to be true. That is what a journalist’s ethical code demands, and that is what the newspaper’s management expects. If reporters violate that code, if they mis-report or invent facts, they damage the credibility of the paper, which threatens the paper’s bottom line. If a reporter misrepresents the facts, either by getting them wrong, or by slanting a news story through selective reporting, that reporter usually get fired.

Of course, reporters are human and they err, and, of course, complete objectivity is impossible, but I believe that, on the whole, reporters — certainly reporters who work for the great national newspapers — abide by the rules of their profession.

It is unfortunate that, locally, some people’s confidence in the trustworthiness of major media has been shaken by my fellow newspaper columnist, Martin Hackworth. Last June, Hackworth, decided to make a great show of cancelling his subscription to the New York Times. He cited an internal kerfuffle at the paper about the publication of a piece in the opinion section — I repeat, in the opinion section, not the news section — by a right-wing U.S. senator. Hackworth was offended that the Times did not display a commitment to publishing a diversity of views, though he surely knows that the Times is under no obligation to do so, just as the Wall Street Journal is perfectly free to publish only conservative columnists.

Hackworth chose to publicly attack the newspaper’s management and accuse it of political bias, over an incident that in no way implicated the trustworthiness of its reporting. He himself said, in that same column, that he will “miss the excellent reporting and in-depth pieces.” It was not a good time to cast a shadow over one of the country’s most trustworthy sources of the truth, and aid and abet Donald Trump.

Leonard Hitchcock of Pocatello is an alumnus of the University of Iowa and did graduate work at Claremont Graduate University and the University of California, San Diego. He taught philosophy in California and Arizona for 15 years. In 1985, after earning a library degree, he was hired by Idaho State University. He retired from ISU's Oboler Library in 2006.