#power

All forms of knowledge creation and meaning-making are shaped and crafted by power relations and the justification for those relations. A common way to shape knowledge and meaning is to reframe the denial of atrocity by those in power as a "debate." This tactic creates a rhetorical "Schrödinger's cat" in which the atrocity is simultaneously happening and not happening, according to who you ask. It turns the material reality of the situation into a hypothetical thought experiment that the audience is invited to debate forever, with any conclusion being cast as "biased."

For a well-known example, oil lobbyists tried to suppress the scientific consensus on climate change for decades, and a significant amount of media aided in this by shaping all reporting on climate crisis into a "controversy." Reporting construed economically motivated denial as another "point of view," and positioned their own journalism as being "neutral" and "objective" in presenting "both sides."