People either are, or are not, being subjected to sexual abuse by satanic cults. Focusing largely on alien-abduction stories, Dean doesn't merely refuse to pass judgment on the claimants, she argues against the very possibility of judgment itself in a thoroughly democratized mediated communications culture. This is not to say that Dean finds the popular eruption of tabloidesque beliefs a source of despair. This narrative climaxes in the 1990s when the Internet explodes into mass culture and the consensus reality of the experts collapses. America at the millennium is cyberia.
Television is a tabloid.
Sixty Minutes bleeds in with Sightings . The New York Times puts flying saucers on its front page, above the fold. Of course, a significant number of people, presumably those older than the wired Generation X, still won't admit that the distinctions have collapsed. They still want to appeal to authoritative sources, to get their news from reliable media. These people don't recognize that they've already lost key ground in the early wars of the information age.