Text: Eduardo Jordá.

Many people believe there was golden era in history when the truth was scrupulously respected and journalists were selfl ess fighters in search for the facts. However, in this age, the truth doesn’t exist and there couldn’t be less respect for reality.

We would be living- or, we are living, if we prefer to express it this way- in the era of “fake news” and informative intoxication, whereas before, a “before” which can’t ever be pinned on a concise time of history, something like a Kingdom of Unquestionable Truth existed.

Let’s think back to the time of “Watergate” for example. Or going back a little further, let’s think back to the glorious age of “J’accuse..!” of Zola, at the end of the 19th century, in midst of the Dreyfus affair, when free journalism which denounced abuse and privilege would point society in the right direction.

If we think about it, the era of the “Watergate scandal”, in 1974, was a time where reality or the respect to the truth was under as much menace as it is now. Let’s not forget that it was the time of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, where facts were completely distorted when subject to the prevailing narratives which divided the world into two irreconcilable sides: the good and the bad, the right and the left (on the other hand, exactly like now)

The only difference is that now these groups are divided on social media and the chaos has become a lot louder and more menacing because it all happens simultaneously and invades us at all times, which we have mobile phones to thank for, and this amplifi es the daunting strength of menaces and lies to the absolute extreme.

And what’s even worse, because this truly is a new reality, are the neo-marxist ideological theories associated to “intersectionality”, reigning in the majority of universities, which question the intellectual legacy of the West due to its contamination on topics like patriarchies, racism and colonialism, in such a way that many intellectual guru’s consider the idea of truth itself a suspicious concept which hides a privilege which should be abolished. Now, this truly is the great danger which we are facing: Questioning the idea of truth itself. Because if nothing is true, where is the value of looking for it and defi ning it? And, what would be the sense of defi ning what is true and what is false? That’s where we are at.