(Editor’s note: This is from a speech I gave to SOAR, the Society of Active Retirees, last month. Those interested in our news and where it comes from might find it interesting.)
JOURNALISM AND FAKE NEWS: HOW TO KNOW WHO TO TRUST
Once upon a time, Americans believed it when Walter Cronkite told us “and that’s the way it is.” Not anymore. President Trump has essentially declared war on the mainstream media, calling what they do “fake news.” Conservatives and liberals no longer read or watch the same news. So how to Americans know who to trust and how do we make sense of things in these difficult times? Jack Lessenberry, the former head of journalism at Wayne State University and someone who has worked in all forms of media, offers some guideposts and a look behind the scenes
***
Thank you very much for that kind introduction. It is always wonderful and an honor to speak at SOAR.
As always, I want to start by thanking my friend Ralph Stromberg and everyone else who works so hard to make these wonderful SOAR lectures happen, and pay tribute to the memory of Judy Orbach, who was a real dynamo who did so much for SOAR for so many years, and who we lost this past spring.
Thanks also to Sharon O’Brien, who I know is now working on SOAR’s winter series – the rumor that she has been campaigning for President in Iowa is false.
Fake news, in other words – which brings me to our topic.
Which is, “Journalism and Fake News: How to Know Who To Trust Today?” I think we all know that there is a problem.
What’s trickier is trying to find a solution. I’ve been doing journalism and teaching journalism virtually all my adult life.
I don’t know if I have any complete solutions to the problem of fake news. But I do have some ideas.
And what I want to do today is explore some of this with you. First of all – it would be very hard to exaggerate the importance of this topic, or its relevance or timeliness.
You cannot have a democracy without a free and independent news media. And that only works if you have a mainstream news media that people trust.
That doesn’t mean they have to trust them to be right all the time. That doesn’t mean they have to agree with the media all of the time, or even most of the time.
That doesn’t mean they have to believe that the media is always right. The best of us, try though we might, make mistakes. We are, after all, no better at our best than what old Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post called the “first rough draft of history.”
What it does mean is that the people have to trust the media’s intentions – that they are independent and are dedicated to finding out and presenting the truth.
And the need to trust that the news media will, in general, observe the rules of decency, trust and fairness.
Unfortunately, that isn’t true now. According to a recent Gallup and Knight Foundation poll, a majority of American adults have lost trust in the media in recent years, including more than 90 percent of those who call themselves Republicans.
Millions of Americans today don’t trust what the traditionally respectable news media, outlets like CBS and NBC and the New York Times, present as “news.”
I’m not talking about columnists and editorials, I am talking about not believing what is presented as straightforward, “hard” news, and the non-partisan analysis of what that news means.
Interestingly, they trust local news a lot more, though people, especially conservatives, are suspicious there too.
This is a clear and present danger; a clear and alarming threat to the fabric of society and democracy itself.
That’s because the function of a free press in a democratic society is to be a watchdog over those who run that democracy and that society. Plato worried that even in his ideal Republic we’d have to ask “Who will guard the guardians?”
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? as a famous Latin poem put it.
Watching the guardians has been the job of the press in America since even before the First Amendment was adopted in 1791. But if we have no credibility with the people, there will be no check on power and no one to speak truth to it.
Why and how has this happened?
Well, Donald Trump is, of course, a good part of the reason why this is the case. He constantly calls the professional news media liars, even traitors, and accuses them of making up and disseminating “fake news,” which means anything he doesn’t like, especially if it refutes his constant outrageous lies.
Well, I think I need as an aside to say that Donald Trump does present a special problem for journalism and journalists.
We are trained to be scrupulously fair and try to present both sides of an issue. And I don’t know of any politicians in history, even George Washington, who did not shade the truth.
But Donald Trump is a special case. He lies constantly about everything, even when there’s no advantage in lying.
He has no respect for facts, the truth, the balance of power, the First Amendment, the media, any of our traditions, or his fellow human beings.
It isn’t that he doesn’t play by the rules — although he doesn’t, of course. It’s that he seems to have very little understanding of how the traditional rules of democracy work.
And to the extent he does understand, he clearly couldn’t care less, and he couldn’t care less about the truth.
This makes almost any attempt at balance ridiculous.
We know how to do our jobs in normal times, to report say, that Candidate A says we should lower interest rates to boost the economy, and here’s what the experts say about that.
Candidate B says we should not lower interest rates because of the threat of inflation, and here’s what the experts say about that.
But it is hard to do our usual “on the other hand,” analysis when so many times, Candidate X, in this case aka the 45th president of the United States, is just plain lying.
**
I could go on and on, and I may talk more about the current administration and the climate they’ve created later.
But I need to stop right here and say very emphatically that this didn’t start with Donald Trump.
The conditions that made this administration possible started long ago. The conditions that made this a nation where millions believe that the best and most honest journalists in this nation are dishonest and corrupt started more than thirty years ago, during the Reagan Administration.
So let’s talk a little bit about how we got here and what’s happened to American journalism. Now, I’m primarily not talking about newspapers, but the broadcast media.
Since the 1960s, that, and now the internet, is where most people get most of their news. Daily newspaper circulation in this country is less than half of what it was in 1965, when we had less than two-thirds of our current population.
Many newspapers have disappeared; most are much smaller than they used to be and many are no longer delivered every day.
All these facts, especially the fact that so few people read newspapers today is another big, but very different problem.
For when it comes to getting what most people think of as “news” broadcast media is, for most people, more important.
It has been since the Kennedy assassination.
Now for many years, from 1949 to 1987, over-the-air broadcasts, television and radio, were regulated by something called the Fairness Doctrine. It did two basic things:
It required all stations to devote some time to discussing matters in the public interest, and it required them to present contrasting views as well.
Now you might ask, how could the Federal Communications Commission do that? What about the First Amendment and Freedom of Speech?
Well, the FCC certainly couldn’t tell newspapers what they could or could not publish. But broadcast media were different because of something called “Spectrum Scarcity.”
There weren’t, and aren’t, enough spaces on the over-the-air dial to allow everyone to have a station who wanted one.
So what the government did was agree to serve as a referee and assign the lucky ones a place on the spectrum, 101.9, FM, say, or 950 AM, and they’d lease it to you in return for your promising to provide programming in the public interest – and observe the rules of the Fairness Doctrine and some other things, like the Equal Time Rule for political candidates, as well.
That is a big part of the reason we used to generally trust the media, and believe what icons like Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley told us.
When Walter said “that’s the way it is,” we believed that was the way it was. When he did his famous editorial saying he didn’t think we could win the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson, who was president at the time, said something like – if I’ve lost Walter, I’ve lost the country.”
Of course, it was a different time too. Our leaders, especially Presidents, were far more respected in the years after World War II than they are now.
The country may have been torn by divisions over issues like civil rights, but we were more or less united on foreign policy – there was a saying that “politics stopped at the water’s edge,” meaning the oceans, and our media reflected that too.
But by Ronald Reagan’s second term, broadcast media access was really exploding, mostly because of cable. People weren’t limited to three over-the-air networks anymore.
They had thirty or more. Reagan, and those around him who shaped his ideology, felt there was no longer a need to regulate the media to insure access for all viewpoints, because there was so much different media.
The FCC them repealed the Fairness Doctrine on a unanimous vote in August 1987. Congress passed a law that was designed to reinstate it. Reagan then vetoed it, and Congress didn’t have enough votes to override the veto.
The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine is what made Rush Limbaugh possible. Limbaugh, and all the others who followed – Laura Ingraham, etc, etc. And that psychologically led to the rise of Fox as a partisan right wing “news” network.
And then later to MSNBC. Now I need to dispel a couple myths about all this. First, we now think of liberals and Democrats as people who want to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine and Conservatives and Republicans who wanted to keep it – and that’s pretty much true now.
I don’t see any chance that the Fairness Doctrine will be restored, but those who favor that are virtually all Democrats.
But at the time, in 1987, the impact of losing the Fairness Doctrine wasn’t that clear. Both Democrats on the FCC joined Republicans in voting to keep it. And some Republicans in Congress voted to reinstate it.
They feared that without the Fairness Doctrine, the liberal networks would bash Reagan every night. Well, that didn’t happen, because they were professional news organizations run by journalists who were trained to be fair.
But talk show hosts like Limbaugh, who essentially has only a high school education, and those running the new cable networks had no such scruples. And from the start, right-wing talk shows have been far more successful than liberal ones.
Why that’s so isn’t clear, other than that perhaps those supporting the right have more advertising money. My own theory is that more people are, unfortunately, interested in nasty attacks and hate speech, which right wing hosts tend to do.
The other false rumor, which I see published as fact all the time, is the assertion that if we still had the Fairness Doctrine, our hyper-partisan Fox News Network could not legally exist.
Well, that probably is not the case. The Fairness Doctrine probably applied only to over-the-air networks. Spectrum Scarcity doesn’t exist on cable. It is a subscription service people pay for, not something available to everyone.
There are a few scholars who think the FCC could have extended the Fairness Doctrine to cable, or at least put serious pressure on outfits like Fox and MSNBC to moderate their behavior. I think that might have been true, but we don’t know for sure.
What we do know is that most people weren’t thinking about having an entire news network that was completely partisan before the Fairness Doctrine was repealed.
So here’s what happened.
Ronald Reagan evidently thought, or said he did, that people would sit down and watch different channels and compare and contrast information and points of view.
Well, almost no one did that.
Instead, conservatives started watching only
Fox News, whose motto was, “fair and balanced.”
My personal motto, by the way, is “young and athletic.”
Presidents, even great ones, can
be dead wrong sometimes. George
Washington actually believed we could have a democracy without political
parties.
He was wrong, of course, and so was Reagan, and the effects of no longer having news that strives for fairness and balance has been to divide America into two warring camps.
Ancient societies gathered around their campfires at night to listen to the elders of the tribe. In past decades, we gathered around the glowing tube at night to watch Walter and Chet and Dave tell us the way it was in the world.
All of us got the same news.
But not anymore.
Conservatives watch Fox; liberals watch a variety of usually more balanced sources, and MSNBC, which is sort of left-wing Fox light. By the way, one night a few years ago I happened to turn on Rachel Maddow, and she was bashing Governor Snyder over what he did with pensions in this state.
I was not a big fan of Snyder, but while I don’t remember all the details, I do remember that Maddow had many of her facts wrong. She didn’t really know what she was talking about.
And that’s what bothers me.
And that millions and millions of Americans believe partisan lies – things that very clearly are lies – scares the pants off me. That is how our democracy could be destroyed.
So now I want to come back to the question we began with, the question that is the title of this so-called lecture.
Journalism and Fake News – How do we know who to trust today? Well, I once again want to return to America’s hero, Ronald Reagan, for the beginning of the answer.
Don’t get me wrong – from 1976 until 1984, I voted against Reagan every chance I got. But he was right about some things.
Matter of fact, he looks pretty damn good today, by comparison to uh … never mind.
Anyway, back when Reagan was negotiating arms control treaties with Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev, he used to always say. “Doverai no proverai” which is a mangled mis-pronounciation of the Russian for “trust but verify.”
Well, that’s what we need to do, now more than ever, with news, especially political and controversial news.
It may be a pain to have to do that, but the good news is that it is actually not that hard, and in fact, it is easier now than ever. Here are a few easy tips for knowing what to trust:
First of all, brand names matter. Credentials matter even more. Let’s say you suddenly needed open-heart surgery.
You wouldn’t say, my cousin Chuck is pretty handy with a knife and can tie good knots – I’ll ask him to do it.
You wouldn’t even go to just any doctor – you’d want someone who knew what they were doing. You wouldn’t even go to a surgeon who had never performed open heart surgery before.
True? (I wonder how heart surgeons get someone to agree to be their first patient? I mean, every surgeon at one point did a first operation, right?)
I often think that everyone in this country should have to take a course, even a short course, in media literacy. We need the tools to discern how reliable a media source may be.
But since that isn’t the case, let me give you a crash course in media literacy. Or rather, how to figure it out on your own. You have three things you can do to make sure something you read or hear is or isn’t “fake news.”
By the way, there is no such thing as “fake news,” because news of any kind, can’t be fake. It is either news or not.
But the three things to help you tell real news from make news are these:
First of all you need to CONSIDER THE SOURCE :
- Reputable, long-established news sources do not make things up, ever. They may sometimes get things slightly wrong, but they don’t invent stories. Reputable places include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, or on the broadcast side, CBS radio, CBS, NBC and ABC television, and CNN. Regardless of their politics, they are professionals and they don’t make things up. This also goes for the Detroit News and Free Press and almost any mainstream paper owned by a company that has been in the newspaper business.
- Second, try to compare the questionable news in your particular outlet to how other respected outlets covered the same event or events. If you read somewhere that giant space bunnies have seized control of Clawson and it’s not in the News and Free Press and on all the local news stations … it probably didn’t happen.
- Third, as we used to say in the business, if your mama tells you she loves you, check it out – and seek independent and reliable verification. There’s a wonderful tool that you should always use when in doubt, a website called Snopes.com.
It has been around for 25 years and its sole function is to investigate and dispel rumors on the internet. Experts consider it the premier fact-checking website. Some one recently was going to start another such site, went and studied what Snopes was doing, and canceled his plans to do so.
It’s nonpartisan, loyal only to the facts, and absolutely free. You can ask it questions or search the site, or Google things to find out Snopes reports in the past. I tested it by asking whether it was true that Trump’s inauguration drew more spectators than any previous inauguration in history.
That, after all is what President Trump claimed. But Snopes compiled everything from photographic evidence to TV rating figures and subway ticket sales to prove that Trump’s claim was nonsense.
As close as they can tell, there were two to three times as many people at President Obama’s first inauguration, and many more watched on TV
But beyond Snopes, you have all sorts of other marvelous tools. You could, as I heard an old man in a donut shop say recently “look it up on the google.”
You can read what experts say about something you read, consider the facts and make your own judgment.
Now, I know that takes time. This work is a large part of what reporters used to do for us – still do, those who are left. But sadly, we increasingly have to do to for ourselves. And it is much harder to do for local news.
According to an article in the New York Times on October 17, we are facing the first Presidential election since the business model for journalism completely collapsed, due to the flight of advertising to the internet.
Advertising revenue for print newspapers has fallen by two-thirds since 2006. The number of print reporters has dropped by half. Two-thirds of counties in our nation now have no daily newspaper, and 1,300 communities have lost all local coverage.
The conventional way we found out, retrieved and delivered news is dying, and we have found nothing to replace it. And that may be the biggest threat to democracy, certainly local democracy, of all.
Well, I always like to end on an encouraging note … but sometimes when it seems it is the darkest, some kind of unexpected wonderful dawn appears.
Let’s hope so!
