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In the unctuous style of the four-anchor team at the CBC’s flagship evening news report, The National, two of the anchors — Adrienne Arsenault and Andrew Chang — for some time have been promoting their program on CBC radio with a short promotional commercial. One expects a commercial to be self-promoting, but this one gets a little too enthusiastic when Chang tells listeners that The National’s role is “to assure that you always know the truth.” Catherine Tait, the public broadcaster’s CEO, said last year that the CBC “will be a beacon for truth and trust in the face of an information disorder cacophony that puts our democracy and the respect for different perspectives at risk.”

The truth? Respect for different perspectives? Not to get too deep into philosophy, but the concept of truth is not something that most philosophers would associate with daily television news or any other form of journalism. As Aristotle put it (384-322 BC): “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.” Or, to rewrite Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), “daily journalism is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality.” But since scores of journalists present half a dozen versions of external reality in different media on a daily basis, there is, ipso facto, no truth to be observed.