The pronouncements of the Delphic oracle were delivered by a priestess, appearing to rise (by a cunning mechanical contrivance) amid clouds of incense on her serpent-throne, from a chasm which cleft to the centre of the earth, in a theatrical display calculated to outscore the appeal of the rival oracle of Zeus at Dodona. Her voice was one of the most powerful influences on the history of ancient Greece. . . .Yet despite the impressive display, the shrine declined in prestige as it became apparent that the messages of the god were politically calculated or purchased by corruption.
—Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed
What’s happening to the sooth-sayers of the media in our own day is hardly unprecedented in human history, and nor, I expect, is the media’s own inability to grasp what has befallen them. The ideas of “post-truth” and “fake news” that have been posited as explanations (and which are the subjects of recent essays in this space) are not without merit, but are pretty nearly useless so long as they are regarded only as someone else’s problem. Those of us who are disinclined to take the oracular pronouncements of the media as to what is truth or fact at their own valuation take a somewhat different view of what constitutes fake news, and think that news outlets ought to have enough self-awareness to see what we see. But I imagine that once you’ve been an oracle
