Why ‘truth’ beats facts

Gwyneth Williams got vital lessons in the importance of truth while she was growing up in apartheid South Africa. The former editorial leader of the BBC’s World Service and its Radio 4 and spring 2020 Shorenstein Center Fellow said she often returned home from school to find her father, an “admittedly eccentric” professor, on the roof fiddling with the radio antenna. He wanted to ensure his family would be able to hear BBC news, “a lifeline in a society where there was propaganda everywhere.”

That trust in facts seems almost quaint these days, agreed Williams and Michael Sandel, Bass Professor of Government Theory at Harvard Law School, at a Harvard Kennedy School discussion on Thursday. “Does Truth Have a Future?” explored how the boundaries of fact and propaganda are blurring in a deeply riven, post-truth world.