‘Fake’ news
and real politicking
Sometimes you can’t win for losing. It’s something that people in the news business understand perhaps better than others do.
These days, people on both extremes of the political spectrum seem to regard truth as something that’s in the eye of the beholder. Agree with their spin on things, and what you say is true. Report something contrary to their spin, and you’re immediately accused of biased and false reporting.
To an extent, it’s always been that way. That’s part of the reason for the saying, “Show me a beloved newspaperman and I’ll show you a sh***y newspaper.”
What’s changed in recent years is the addition of anti-social media.
Online, people believe they can totally control whatever message they want to put out. Aside from a few contrary trolls who seem to delight in opposing anything that’s posted, audiences online typically consist of people who will believe anything said by their small cocoon of like-minded people.
But it’s actually more than that. Among people who grew up with Barney the Dinosaur and Mister Rogers, forever touting how important it is to be agreeable and pleasant, expressing any sort of view other than what seems popular in the cocoon is somehow considered rude.
America is in danger of becoming a nation of people who would rather fit in than stand out — a serious challenge to our ability to compete globally and a mortal challenge to our democracy.
One anti-social media troll recently posted about us: “I believe this rag is pretty one-sided. I don’t believe it reflects the values or views of the majority of their readers.”
I’d like to thank him for the compliment. News organizations aren’t supposed to reflect what people who rely on them think. They are supposed to reflect truth and fact, not mirror audience opinion like the array of overly biased cable news channels on both ends of the spectrum.
The fact that so many people can’t see their way to be exposed to facts or alternative opinions is part of what’s wrong with America today — why we can’t seem to accomplish anything and why our leaders, locally and nationally, seem more and more to resemble the type of autocrats America historically has rejected.
We in the news business aren’t infallible. We sometimes make mistakes — though we believe, as do referees and umpires in sports, that we’re more than willing to investigate further and admit when we’ve erred.
Refs and umps generally aren’t beloved people, either. But they, like journalists, have a mission not of enforcing rules but of independently and dispassionately determining what actually happened.
Challenging prevailing thought is how a democracy tempers its steel to avoid the metal fatigue of continually thinking in only one way.
A favorite TV show is an obscure Smithsonian series called “Air Disasters.” Each episode explores an airline crash as if it were a Sherlock Holmes mystery. The goal, however, isn’t the find whodunit. It’s to make sure the airline industry has sufficient information to avoid future crashes.
It may be presumptuous for journalists to think of ourselves that way, but that’s largely what we see our mission as. It’s rendered much more difficult when politics on both sides label news as fake. Repeat any claim long enough and loud enough — an apparent goal on both sides — and public trust in truth and accompanying willingness to examine views withers in favor of closed-mindedness and condemnation.
— ERIC MEYER