Yochai Benkler

(On Cable TV, March 2020) At an age of tribal epistemology, having to even discuss the nature of truth is infuriating… but there we are, hostage to a presidential madman whose narcissism is so strong that he has to distort reality in order to live in the world. That would be bad enough by itself, but it’s made worse by a menagerie of enablers rushing to create a universe of parallel falsehoods, and a mass of people credulous enough (or manipulated enough, if you’re feeling charitable) to believe all of it, sometimes for pure entertainment. So is the world in which After Truth: Disinformation and the cost of Fake News arrives, an HBO documentary meticulously charting how a substantial chunk of America became ready to believe in baseless lies. It goes from Jade Helms to Pizzagate to Seth Rich, giving a fair shake to everyone interviewed and letting fake news apologists present themselves as morons or disingenuous hucksters… which explains a lot. Director Andrew Rossi’s approach is fair enough to dig into a left-wing effort to create fake news during the 2018 Alabama senate race narrowly won by democrats. Still, it’s the right wing that looks worse—behind-the-scenes footage of the infamous November 2018 Jacob Wohl news conference makes the whole thing even more ramshackle than it seemed in the media at the time (plus, good footage of Claude Taylor’s inflatable Trump rat!) Notable interviewees include Yochai Benkler (deconstructing the right-wing disinformation pipeline) and Kara Swisher (talking as a professional journalist dismayed at what passes for news in some quarters). The entire film is framed by an interview with the owner of the Comet Ping Pong restaurant that saw a gunman show up, convinced the establishment has a basement dungeon holding kids while, in reality, the building had no basement. While it’s hard to finish a film with such a topic on a positive note, Comet Ping Pong has a happy ending of sorts to offer—that after the violent incident, the restaurant re-opened and found continued popularity with its regular crowd, which put no stock in outlandish conspiracy theories. It’s not much, but, at this time, we’ll take even a smidgen of good news. Especially considering that it’s true.