Joanna and Chip Gaines from HGTV’s “Fixer Upper.” (Brian Ach/Invision via Associated Press)

Every week, I answer a question from the Monday Act Four chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of our Dec. 5 discussion here, and you can submit questions for the Dec. 12 chat — which will happen a few hours early at 11 a.m. so I can make a critics’ screening of “Rogue One” — here. This week, a reader wonders about the wider implications of a particular trend in television.

I’m starting to wonder how much reality TV is contributing to the fuzzy attitude we’re seeing toward facts today. I’m a huge fan of HGTV, but I know much of the shows are entirely made up and then presented as “truth.” With reality tv being so popular, have we just collectively embraced being lied to and treating it as truth?

I think you’re probably not the only person watching reality television who knows that what you’re watching is actually scripted. In fact, part of the pleasure of watching competition reality television is watching the contestants slot themselves into pre-existing roles, just as the fun of home improvement shows is pretending that it’s actually that easy to make your house look that designer-worthy. So it’s not so much that reality television dupes people about what’s real. It’s that the genre trains us all to believe that we know how the real world actually works, and that we can detect the seams where the fiction’s been welded together.

Obviously it’s not a good thing if people stop being able to distinguish between what’s real and what’s fiction. But there’s a danger to conspiratorial thinking, too. If you believe that there’s a truth out there that’s been concealed and only you are smart enough to know what’s real, that can lead you to actively reject not just what’s real, but the methods for determining what’s real. This sort of thing has real consequences. A man fired an assault-style rifle in a Washington restaurant I’m fond of this weekend: he claimed he was there to investigate a bizarre and slanderous fiction tying the pizzeria to non-existent child trafficking.

Let me be clear: I don’t think there’s a causal line between reality television and shooting up pizza joints. But I do think misinformation is advancing on more than one front, and it’s important to address both the person who just doesn’t recognize that a news story is fake, and the person who is actively undermining a shared sense of what’s real and what’s sensible. And in the meantime, watch your HGTV without guilt.