Let’s be honest: when someone starts talking about an “epistemological crisis,” it’s easy to let your eyes glaze over. It sounds like something from a philosophy seminar, not a conversation about the survival of democracy. But Barack Obama’s warning in November 2020 was not abstract or academic. He was describing a world where the basic ability to tell what’s true from what’s false is breaking down. And if that breakdown continues, he argued, the “marketplace of ideas” cannot work — because a marketplace only functions when buyers and sellers can trust the product. That warning has aged terribly well. Since…

Once upon a time, in the old newsroom, the worst mistakes were almost charming in their ordinariness. A dispatch would go to air with someone’s name spelled wrong, or the announcer would misread a figure and tell the whole country that cocoa exports had tripled when they had only ticked up a little. A careful editor would catch it, a correction would be broadcast, and life would go on because these were human slips—annoying, certainly, but understandable. Everyone knew that the person behind the desk had been rushing, that the phone was ringing, that the deadline was breathing down someone’s…