In late July, a self-described “eyewitness” finally emerged—a former US Army green beret named Anthony Aguilar, who had been dismissed as a security contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. News organisations (including the BBC and PBS), websites, and numerous podcasts carried interviews with Aguilar in which he was described as a “whistleblower” and permitted to allege “barbaric” tactics and “war crimes” on the part of US security contractors and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Nobody seemed to mind that the accompanying footage from Aguilar’s body camera showed not a single killing. Aguilar’s most heart-rending story—in which he claimed to have been kissed by a grateful Palestinian boy whose killing he then witnessed—was later found to have been fabricated in every detail. The boy was never shot and remains alive. At the time of writing—four days after Aguilar’s claims had been fully discredited in early September—neither the BBC nor PBS had amended their earlier coverage.
As consumers of this kind of evidence-free “content,” ordinary citizens can be divided into roughly four categories, depending on the topic at hand. Some of us accept unverified information out of naked bias. In the case of the Gaza food-aid story, millions of our fellow citizens in the West require no evidence to embrace the familiar and uncomplicated fable of Israeli (or Jewish) evil. Indeed, facts or even nuances are highly inconvenient for these consumers, who then must take the trouble to cancel or wilfully ignore the purveyors of such evidence.
Others of us respond with what might be called “learned ignorance.” This fast-growing group has simply never been taught how to distinguish between fact and fiction, let alone fact and claim. On the contrary. Their education includes fewer and fewer examples of objective inquiry, the scientific method, and the principle of innocence until proven guilty, but many classroom hours of propaganda and critical theorising that condemns the disfavoured without a hearing. In today’s post-truth information environment, the learned ignorant are society’s babes in the woods.
A third group of us go along to get along. We conform—or appear to conform—via our social-media “likes,” our cocktail-party commiserations, our bumper stickers, or simply our silence. This is how we avoid the professional or social consequences of perceived dissent from the prevailing narratives of powerful in-groups. It is one thing to set your drunken uncle straight at a family dinner, but it is quite another to question the chosen dogma of your CEO, your pastor, your university dean, or a vaunted international organisation on the issue of the moment.