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We might get nervous, of course, if fewer people were reading newspapers. It could mean fewer voters accessing shared facts on which to base collective decisions. But our nerves would be soothed by the assurance that emerging models for mainstream media would broadcast the truth.

What if, though, the long-awaited saviour of mainstream media didn’t show up? What if media began splintering into many inadequate parts each catering to different tastes, aggravating partisanship and never adding up to anything approximating the whole truth? We still wouldn’t have reason to panic. Just reason to fear the truth was marginalized. Marginalized, at least, is not demonized.

Unless, that is, it were also demonized. This may sound crazy, but imagine that the leader of a major democracy were indeed crazy. Suppose that central to his particular brand of crazy was a fear of criticism so strong it manifested in his reflexively telling whatever baldfaced lie he thought might protect his delicate ego. Suppose that when his lies were exposed by the people employed to expose them, he personally maligned them as liars and the truth as a lie. Suppose further that other politicians in other democracies deployed his pathology as strategy.

Well, we would calm ourselves with the knowledge that politicians must still take journalists’ questions, of course.

Only they must do no such thing. Not if the electorate doesn’t care. Should politicians sense that frustrated voters would happily scapegoat messengers of uncomfortable truths, politicians would speak only to friendly journalists; they might even openly equate friendliness with truthfulness. They might flaunt their ability to shut the truth out.