Sean Illing

A Q&A with Lance State, a professor of communications at Fordham University.

The author of "Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World", Strate has written extensively about Postman’s legacy, and about the cultural impact of television. He argues that our desire for entertainment has become “positively toxic” and in this new world defined by TV, the power of the image has overwhelmed our capacity to think and reason carefully. In this interview, Strate is asked what Postman meant when he wrote that our culture had “descended into a vast triviality.” He is also asked if TV has trivialized our politics and made us all dumber as a result.

A Q&A with Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of Snopes.com.

Brooke Binkowski is the managing editor of Snopes.com, a website dedicated to debunking bogus stories, Internet rumors, and malignant falsehoods. Snopes has done the thankless work of online fact-checking since 1995. Unsurprisingly, the site has seen its traffic spike by 85 percent over the past year. The conventional view is that social media is the main culprit in terms of spreading misinformation online. Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg was compelled recently to address Facebook’s role in disseminating “fake news.” Binkowski, who worked for many years as a reporter for CNN, has a slightly different take. For her part, social media is the low-hanging fruit in this discussion. The real problem is the collapse of faith in media as a trusted and credible institution.

A Q&A with Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University.