When Power Decides What Counts as Reality

Jul 16, 2026

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The First Victim Is Not Truth, but Participation

What do a barred Olympic delegation and a propaganda machine have in common?

At first glance, almost nothing. One belongs to the world of sports, the other to media and politics. One is about athletes who never got to compete, the other about a network that turned misinformation into a business model. But both reveal the same uncomfortable truth: power does not merely influence outcomes, it decides who gets to enter reality on fair terms.

That is a deeper and more disturbing question than simple censorship or bias. The real issue is not only whether people are lied to. It is whether people are allowed to participate in the public world as equal humans, equal citizens, and equal witnesses to what is true.

In Kabul, the denial of women’s sports under Taliban rule did not just exclude women from a stadium. It excluded them from visibility, aspiration, and public life itself. In the media ecosystem surrounding Rupert Murdoch’s empire, the problem was not simply that falsehoods were repeated. It was that profit incentives helped manufacture a parallel reality in which truth became optional, trust became exploitable, and democratic participation became easier to distort.

The common thread is this: when institutions control access to the arena, they can control what counts as legitimate presence inside it.

Exclusion Is Not Only Physical. It Is Also Epistemic.

A sports ban is easy to recognize because it is visible. If women are not allowed to play, the injustice is obvious. But there is a deeper kind of exclusion that works more quietly: the exclusion of people from the shared frameworks through which society decides what is real.

This is what makes modern misinformation so corrosive. It does not merely tell people something false. It fractures the common ground on which collective decisions depend. A democracy can survive disagreement. It cannot survive at scale if millions of people are trained to distrust every source of shared evidence except the one that flatters their fears.

That is why the relationship between media and democracy is not ornamental. It is infrastructural. The news is not just content, it is part of the operating system of civic life. When a powerful media channel repeatedly rewards outrage, denial, and tribal certainty, it does more than mislead. It redefines the boundaries of the permissible conversation.

Think of it like a stadium with invisible walls. In one case, the wall keeps athletes out. In the other, the wall keeps facts out. The effect is similar: people inside the system are told they are free, while the structure quietly decides which forms of life, evidence, and participation are allowed to exist.

The deepest form of exclusion is not being silenced. It is being told that the world itself does not have to make room for you, your voice, or your reality.

This helps explain why the Taliban’s ban on women in sport and Fox News’s style of profit driven distortion feel so different yet morally rhyme. Both depend on asymmetry. One group gets to define the terms, and everyone else is forced to adapt to them.

The Business Model of Reality Distortion

It is tempting to explain misinformation as ignorance, ideology, or carelessness. Those are part of it, but they are not the whole engine. A more revealing lens is business model.

The most dangerous lies are often not the ones that accidentally spread. They are the ones that are repeatedly profitable. Sensation attracts attention. Attention attracts advertising. Advertising rewards provocation. Provocation then becomes a loop, and the loop slowly teaches the institution what kind of world it is financially rewarded to produce.

That is the perverse genius of modern media manipulation: it does not require total faith in the lie. It only requires enough market logic to keep the lie circulating.

This is why climate denial, anti vaccine rhetoric, and election falsehoods should be understood together. They are not random errors on separate topics. They are examples of a single pattern: monetizing distrust. If audiences can be kept in a state of permanent suspicion, they become easier to retain, easier to activate, and harder to persuade with inconvenient facts.

The result is a strange inversion. Instead of media serving as a corrective to human error, it becomes a machine that amplifies our worst cognitive habits: tribalism, confirmation bias, fear of uncertainty, and appetite for dramatic narrative. In that environment, truth is not defeated by one grand falsehood. It is weakened by a thousand profitable distortions.

A useful mental model here is the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat. A thermometer measures reality. A thermostat changes the environment to fit a desired setting. Much of modern propaganda no longer pretends to be a neutral thermometer. It behaves like a thermostat for perception, nudging the public climate until outrage feels normal and evidence feels negotiable.

That is why the financial motive matters so much. It is not just that money corrupts. It is that money can make corruption self sustaining. Once falsehood becomes a reliable revenue stream, an institution may no longer need to believe its own claims. It only needs to keep selling them.

From the Stadium to the Screen: Why Visibility Is Political

The Olympic story is heartbreaking not only because athletes were denied a chance to compete, but because sport is one of the clearest symbols of merit, aspiration, and shared standards. In theory, the stadium is where talent can cross borders that politics cannot. It offers a rare fantasy of fairness: the clock is the same, the rules are public, the results are visible.

That is exactly why exclusion from sport matters so much. It does not just take away a game. It tells a population who counts as a full human being in the public imagination.

Media systems do something similar, though less obviously. They are the modern stadium of public life. They determine whose pain is visible, whose expertise is respected, whose fears are amplified, and whose identities are treated as legitimate. If a network repeatedly spotlights some grievances while mocking or erasing others, it is not only reporting the world. It is scripting who belongs in it.

This is where the two cases connect most powerfully. The Taliban’s rules on women’s participation and Murdoch’s media empire may operate by different means, but both reveal that visibility is never neutral. Whoever controls visibility controls aspiration, legitimacy, and often the first draft of history.

Imagine a child watching the Olympics and seeing a runner who looks like her. That is not a trivial image. It quietly expands the possible self. Now imagine a voter watching a news channel that makes lies feel patriotic and facts feel contemptible. That, too, is formative. It shrinks the possible self by narrowing what the person believes a citizen is allowed to know and do.

The point is not that sports and news are identical. The point is that both are institutions of public meaning. Both can widen human possibility or shrink it.

The Real Battle Is Over Shared Reality

Democracies do not collapse only when institutions fail. They weaken when citizens lose the ability to agree on the same basic world. That is why election lies, vaccine misinformation, climate denial, and war propaganda are not isolated mistakes. They are attacks on the social capacity to deliberate.

The public sphere depends on a fragile but essential assumption: we may argue, but we are at least arguing about the same thing. When that assumption breaks, politics becomes a competition between sealed realities. At that point, compromise looks like betrayal, expertise looks like elitism, and accountability looks like persecution.

This is why authoritarian systems often care so deeply about narrative control. If they can define the story, they can define the stakes. If they can define the stakes, they can define the acceptable range of thought. If they can define the acceptable range of thought, they can govern without needing as much overt force.

The lesson is not that all strong institutions are bad. It is that institutions become dangerous when they combine three powers:

Control over access: who gets in, who gets heard, who gets seen.
Control over incentives: what behavior is rewarded, what behavior is punished.
Control over interpretation: what counts as truth, relevance, or legitimacy.

When these align, exclusion becomes self reproducing. The public stops noticing the rules because the rules are experienced as normal.

The most effective form of domination is not to ban the truth outright, but to make the truth feel irrelevant, annoying, or socially costly to defend.

That is the real danger shared by these seemingly different stories. They show how power can turn public life into a managed theater, where some people are allowed to appear, some are allowed to speak, and some are allowed to exist only if they accept the script.

How to Resist Reality Capture

If the problem is deeper than misinformation, the response must be deeper than fact checking. Facts matter, but they are not enough. A society also needs institutions that protect visibility, reward integrity, and preserve shared standards across difference.

Here are three practical ways to think about resistance.

First, distinguish between disagreement and reality erosion. Not every conflict of opinion is a crisis. But when one side repeatedly rejects the possibility of common evidence, it is no longer participating in good faith debate. Calling that out clearly is not partisan. It is hygienic.

Second, follow the incentives, not just the statements. Ask: who profits when a falsehood spreads? Who benefits when people are confused, angry, or alienated from institutions? Misinformation rarely survives because it is beautiful. It survives because it is lucrative, identity confirming, or politically useful.

Third, defend institutions that expand participation rather than merely broadcasting claims. This includes local journalism, public libraries, transparent school systems, and civic spaces where people encounter one another outside algorithmic bubbles. Participation is not a luxury. It is a defense against reality capture.

A society that wants truth must build environments where truth is easier to inhabit than lies. That means reducing the rewards for outrage, increasing the costs of deception, and creating visible pathways for people who have been excluded to re enter public life on fair terms.

This is why the Olympic metaphor matters so much. Competitions only feel legitimate when the rules are shared and access is meaningful. The same is true for democracy. If the field is tilted, if one side owns the microphone, if truth is priced as a disadvantage, then participation becomes theater.

Key Takeaways

The central issue is not only lying, but exclusion from shared reality. When people are denied equal access to visibility, voice, or credible information, democracy and dignity both erode.
Follow the incentives behind misinformation. If falsehood is profitable, it will be repeated long after it has been disproven.
Visibility is political. Who gets seen, heard, and believed shapes what a society thinks is normal, possible, and legitimate.
A healthy public sphere needs common standards, not just free speech. Freedom without shared evidence becomes chaos that benefits the most manipulative actors.
Defend institutions that expand participation. The strongest antidote to reality distortion is not only fact checking, but structures that make inclusion, accountability, and trust easier to sustain.

The Final Reframe: Truth Is a Public Good, Not a Private Preference

The easiest mistake is to think these stories are about two separate abuses, a regime banning women from sport and a media empire bending reality for profit. They are actually expressions of the same civic disease: the conversion of public life into a space where the powerful decide who may appear, what may be said, and which facts are convenient enough to survive.

That is why the struggle over truth is never merely intellectual. It is institutional, economic, and moral. Truth is not just a statement that happens to be correct. It is a shared condition that must be protected so people can participate in one another’s lives without constant manipulation.

Once you see that, the stakes become clearer. A stadium without women is not just unfair. A media system without integrity is not just noisy. Both teach the public that access to reality is granted by power, not by right.

And that may be the most dangerous lesson of all.

If we want democracy to remain more than a slogan, we have to treat truth the way we treat clean water, public health, and fair rules of play: as a collective asset that can be polluted, monopolized, or denied. The question is not whether powerful actors will try to shape reality. They will. The real question is whether the rest of us will continue to mistake that control for normality.