Why we're Post-Fact
&gt;Not merely a world where politicians and media lie – they have always lied – but one where they don’t care whether they tell the truth or not.<p>&gt;How did we get here?<p>This whole article is based on the false assumption that we ever lived in a fact-based world.  Before recently people never had accurate and cheap means of data recording and information sharing that let them look behind the curtain and realize that they have been lied to all along.  From the Lusitania to the Gulf of Tonkin to the USS Liberty to WMD in Iraq, history is built on lies and distortions.  The internet allows people to get occasional glimpses behind the curtain, which is one of the reasons restricting the internet and stifling free speech is the dream of dictators from Beijing to Moscow to Washington DC.