Leiter characterizes the Internet as undermining the authority of the mainstream media by injecting false rumors into the public conversation. But that is not how the mainstream media lost its perch.
In the Internet era, a random individual who went by the pseudonym “Buckhead” was able to discredit a report by famed mainstream reporter Dan Rather and CBS news. On Sixty Minutes, Rather had shown a damning letter about George W. Bush’s military service. “Buckhead” pointed out that the letter’s proportional spacing showed that it had been typed using Microsoft Word, which did not exist at the time it was purportedly written. Therefore, it was fake.
The Internet era has seen mainstream media’s flaws exposed again and again. And mainstream journalists have styled themselves as activists rather than truth-tellers. They have been unable and unwilling to try to earn back the public’s trust.
The Enlightenment eroded the epistemic authority of the Church, making beliefs contestable. The Internet has eroded the meta-epistemic authority of the mainstream media, making beliefs even more contestable.
Leiter longs for a new meta-epistemic authority to play the role formerly played by the mainstream media. That is not going to happen. We are not going back to letting the NYT tell people who to believe any more than we are going to go back to letting the Pope tell people what to believe.
In a world of contestable ideas and opinions, the solution is not to choose an authority, meta-epistemic or otherwise. The key is to have in place a process that gives higher status to people who pursue truth using careful reasoning.
What we have now in academia is a process that used to work but has become corrupted. It is gamed by recent generations of professors who have been taught to believe that power trumps truth and have proceeded to live by that belief.
Decline is a choice, and our institutions have made their choice.