BPR Quote of the Day:
“Print-based culture, in which fact and assertion could be traced and distinguished, has ceded to a culture of emotionally driven narratives where facts and opinions are interchangeable. This is a decline and a degeneration that has crippled the reality-based culture, in which fact was the foundation for opinion and debate, and ushered in a culture in which facts, opinions, lies, and fantasy are interchangeable.”
Chris Hedges
from Death of the Liberal Class (2010)
thebigpicturereport ™ 
I think facts are a little more solid than you imply, Dougsan. They used to be checked and researched and mostly could be counted upon if from well-established reliable sources. Nowadays facts don’t seem to be respected, and are often dismissed, because as Steven Colbert famously said, facts have a liberal bias.
Is it just me, or have most facts always been a product of consensus, agreement, opinion or assumption?
Are ‘facts’ in the social media age any less real than they were in this ‘golden age of fact’? Or is it just that now they’re shaped by collective opinion more and it’s harder for those who used to decide what was fact to control what the narrative is?
Don’t get me wrong – crowds are invariably dumb. But a world where Rupert Murdoch or the pope gets to decide what is true isn’t all THAT much better. Is it?