Cactus Flower, I thought you'd appreciate this, too.
"The construction of trust"
Have you thought about the House's 1/6 committee as a fact-checking apparatus?
Anne Applebaum has. The Atlantic staff writer attended the annual GlobalFact conference earlier this month, and the event informed her insightful new column about the 1/6 hearings.
Fact-checkers and scholars have "often argued that shouting about the objective truth will never work," she wrote, "and that what is needed instead is the construction of trust." She asserted that the hearing organizers have taken that argument to heart by creating, in essence, "a giant fact-checking project designed not only to write an accurate account of what happened in the run-up to the Capitol attack, but to convince people to believe it. The point is not to establish whether some detail that one witness reveals is true or false, but rather to tell a larger story, using a wide range of perspectives, delivered in a manner optimally designed to create trust."
How so? Well, Applebaum contended that Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican, is the "single, authoritative voice that unifies the different parts of the story," above and beyond any single witness. This approach, she wrote, "seeks to restore a common framework for generating knowledge — that is, a network of people and institutions and fact-checking mechanisms whose overall story should resist even the attempts to cast doubt on one or another witness. Should, of course, is the operative word here."
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