The sub-head to an article in The Wall Street Journal by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., about the GameStop phenomenon (remember that?—it does seem a long time ago now, doesn’t it?) caught my eye. “Robinhood,” it read, “might remind its customers that stocks are about something real.” Something what? There was that word again. Real. Mr. Jenkins was making an excellent point about the GameStop boys, but his choice of the word also reminded me of the extent to which “Reality” has lately replaced “Truth” as the gold standard in which the media are dealing every day. Or think they are. On the same day his article appeared, The New York Times’s tech correspondent Kevin Roose published one in that paper headed: “How the Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis.”

I’ll bet you didn’t even know that we had a reality crisis, though readers of The New York Times will not have been surprised to learn of it. The word and its various antonyms and antonymic euphemisms or circumlocutions—“fantasy,” “dreamworld,” “unreality,” “warping reality,” “conspiracy theory,” etc.—had often been found in its pages in previous weeks, especially since the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, since the invaders were presumed to have been acting upon the fantasy of a stolen election.

Now, at least in Mr. Roose’s view, a full-blown “reality crisis” was upon us. It was said to be “our” crisis, that is, but as so often in The New York Times,