ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the Left has a particular and partisan mediating role–to intervene rhetorically and not just argumentatively in the space between experience and consciousness in ways that reach ordinary people beyond the level of the fact. The corporate news media, once targets of ideology critique for their framing practices, become authoritative in a way that belies that critique. R. Geuss argued most controversially that critics of ideology could legitimately fault a claim on the basis of who was making it. Just as the media and political system deny societal class divisions, the ideology of fact-checking denies that the experience and interpretation of reality could also diverge along class lines. Discourses surrounding the objects of a moral panic are always ideological. Avid fact-checking sustains and symptomatizes the moral panic. Converts to the post-truth panic ridicule those they consider wrong; they also convince their followers that matters of truth and falsehood are simple.
