When the Marines crossed into Iraq twenty years ago, it still existed, but just barely. You could find it in any college town and the big metropolises, but you had to purposely seek it out in slacker coffeeshops, underground video stores, countercultural bookshops. You had to read alt-weeklies like the Village Voice, but also Z magazine, sections of the Nation, and the full corpus of writings from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (my alma mater).

For lack of a better term, and at the risk of anachronism, I’ll call “it” the world of alternative facts.

At the moment the United States barreled into Baghdad, a typical American could comfortably access a maximum of, say, a dozen original sources for national and international news, give or take a few: five TV news bureaus (NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, and Fox), NPR on the radio, the three national news magazines (Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report), one or occasionally two regional newspapers, plus the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. (In most localities it had only just recently become possible to conveniently find a copy of the New York Times).