Fact checks don’t change minds anymore.
This-it’s not a popular opinion but we’re suffering from too much democracy in an information environment that’s too dispersed for most normal media consumers to critically work through and analyze every new piece of information.
This fracturing of attention makes capturing any block of voter’s attention paramount, and by any means necessary. It sort of begets a Fox News, which before it went bananas was still sensationalistic instead of going for credible. Big media on the left are struggling with the same challenge (how to compete with social media), and are/have adopted similar strategies (for example, the NT TImes website ran nine articles in on their page the other day about “Trump bad”, and the 10th was about Dr. Pimple Popper).
All of this, of course, feeds into the distrust of institutions generally which is just fucking terrible for running a democracy.
The biggest long-term problem is, in my opinion, the lurch from GOP to DEM every election that I’d expect from citizen unrest (because the media environment has created a “whoever is in power sucks” malaise among the slice of the electorate that decides non-gerrymandered elections).
I don’t know what the solution is, either, aside from some kind of armistice between parties that lets them carve up power so that less partisan candidates candidates can be successful.