Remote Control

A regular television occupies a furnished white room. On the television is what appears to be a normal news broadcast in-progress. The news broadcast is, in fact, entirely computer generated. All graphics, the character, the voice, and all images are generated in real-time. The news text itself is continually accessed from Internet news sources. It is a live, continuously self-updating television program.

A remote control unit near the sofa has only two buttons: TRUTH1 and TRUTH2. These allow the user to choose between just two channels. On one channel the anchorman reverses the truth of the news, and on the other channel supports it. The effect is two news channels reporting the same information, but opposite in truth. (An underlying linguistic manipulation program makes this possible.) Depending on whether the underlying remote news sources are accurate, one of the channels will be true and the other will be false. Since one channel presents the meaning of every sentence reversed, and the other, the meaning of every sentence supported, one channel is guaranteed to be true whether or not the news itself is.