Sunday, December 18, 2016

News consumers need thinking (not tin-foil) hats

Many years ago, in a place not that far away, a story appeared on the front page of a weekly newspaper announcing that the nearby and long-abandoned missile silos would become a regional garbage dump. The story, accompanied by a large photo of a silo replete with a missile at the ready, jumped to the inside of the paper. The last line of the story: "April fool."
Readers were not amused. The not-in-my-backyard crowd was irritated at the thought of a garbage dump nearby, but so were readers aghast at the weekly's stunt. Phones began to ring at the small daily paper in the adjacent city where I worked. Readers demanded we retract, run a correction and set the record straight.
 
My editor demurred. We didn't run the story. It wasn't our job to correct another paper's poor judgment. I agreed at the time. Today I'm not so sure.
There's always been fake news; there always will be. Some of it, like the silo story, is a lame attempt at humor. Some of it of the I-was-abducted-by-aliens variety is aimed at the tin-foil hat crowd. Some of it is a nefarious attempt to hoodwink the gullible, the uninformed or appeal to existing biases. Of its various forms, the latter is the most wicked, evidenced by the recent election cycle. Half-truths and out and out lies circulated widely and were given undeserved false equivalency by much of the media in the name of fairness. The great casualty was public trust.
William Randolph Hearst did public trust no favor when he in 1897 he ordered his bored newspaper illustrator to remain in Cuba, infamously wiring him: "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Less than three weeks later the USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor and Hearst had his war.

Before he was finished building his media empire, Hearst controlled about 25 percent of the American newspaper circulation at a time when radio news was in its infancy and television (let alone the internet) was nonexistent. No wonder Hearst liked to be called Chief.

Eventually, we would have Edward R. Morrow doing "This is London" radio broadcasts and later challenging Joseph McCarthy on television; Walter Cronkite questioning the Vietnam War, the New York Times publishing the Pentagon Papers, and Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward at The Washington Post challenging President Richard Nixon. All of this was in the finest tradition of muckraking journalism under the mantra that it is the duty of the press to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Stockton's deposed mayor no doubt has a decidedly different view, but then so too does our soon-to-be president.

When Ted Turner came along in the early 1980s and started CNN, the nation's first around-the-clock television news organization, I was editor of a small Mississippi daily newspaper. I found Turner's audacity thrilling. I've come to loath it.

Sure, we now have instant broadcast news, truncated as it is, 24/7. What we also have is ever increasing breathlessness as news organizations use limited resources to cover fewer stories. And what's too often lost is contemplation, time to analyze and put information in perspective. That's only gotten worse with the advent of the internet.
There has long been a behind-the-scenes media industry argument: do you give readers what they want or what they need? No newspaper publisher is going to argue against giving readers what they want. If you're going to stay in business you're got to attract and keep readers/viewers, but - and this certainly is the view of the majority of reporters and editors I've known - there is an over-arching obligation to give them what they need. That's the goodness and light, First Amendment argument. Publishers argue you gotta keep the lights on or the First Amendment gets pretty hollow, pretty fast. Finding the balance is the trick.

Years ago when I was The Record's business editor, I had an illustrative discussion with a former editor - as fine a newsman as I know - who argued that people spend more time planning their vacations than they do their retirement finances. The statement was as scary as it was correct. Similarly, readers may want stories about the Kardashians or their favorite sports teams, but they also need to know the Stockton mayor got himself arrested and that the County is addressing homelessness. And they need to have reasons to trust the information is as up-to-date, fair and accurate as is humanly possible at the time it's produced.

The flip side of this is an obligation by the audience to recognize the importance of having a shared body of knowledge. They need to put in the time, energy and curiosity to understand what's going on, and need enough skin in the game to have their personal balderdash meter in the "on" position. That's a lot to ask of someone bombarded with information from all sides and under the constant strain of career and family obligations. It's also absolutely essential if anything resembling self-government is to work.

Much of the population thinks government doesn't work; a message made clear by the election of a new president who supporters like to believe is a "blue-collar billionaire." That's a dubious proposition but also a discussion for another day. What is clear is that for many voters the election turned on the basis of outlandishly bogus information, fake news if you will. (And ignoring for the moment the idea that the Kremlin was working the election information fringes or the scary, out-of-hand dismissal of such meddling by the president-elect and his apologists.)
Just last week an item circulated on Facebook with this headline: "JUST IN: President Barack Obama threatens to remain in office!" Immediately Trump supporters breathlessly picked it up and ran with it. No time to check, to question or to even ask "really?"
  
    
The "story" was utterly bogus. Simply clicking on the "about me" link for the author would have revealed nothing except that the fellow has been a blogger since December 2016 and has had 29 profile views (assuming any of that's true).

And it's not just the way too many voters who fell for fake news. We're raising a whole generation of the ill-informed, if a more than year-long study by Stanford University researchers is any indication. Some 7,800 young people from middle school through college were asked to evaluate information presented in tweets, comments and articles. The researchers were "shocked" - the researchers' word - by what they found. The students showed a "stunning and dismaying consistency" in their answers, getting duped time and again.
"Many assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally savvy about what they find there," the researchers wrote. "Our work shows the opposite."
And there is your argument for teaching critical thinking.

What to do?

For one thing, information consumers always should have those balderdash meters set to critical. They need to question. Take a few deep breaths and think. Is this the only source for this information? What other channels of information, if any, are reporting this? Are the sources identified? How are the sources connected to the information? What are the qualifications of the sources? Who benefits and who is hurt by this information, and how?
Sound bites don't qualify as analysis and neither does an eight-inch newspaper story even if it's embarrassingly labeled "analysis."

There's an old saying, often but perhaps mistakenly attributed to H.L. Mencken: People are only born with two talents, to practice medicine and to edit the newspaper. It's absurd on its face (although my late mother-in-law was convinced she was among the best doctors she ever met).
I know this: I was a much better reporter in the last years of my career than in my first. Experience and practice counts. So does training. So does making mistakes and having them pointed out by some agitated editor and then by the public.
Politicians love to point out the shortcomings of the media. They don't want news stories. They want strokes, propaganda. In our polarized political climate too often information consumers want that too, as long as it conforms to their biases.

That's not good enough if the ship of state isn't to list dangerously. What is needed is an educated, informed citizenry that questions constantly, seeks out opposing viewpoints and understands there's a difference between a demonstrable fact and an out-and-out lie.

And one last thing: don't depend on the media to slap down every fake story that comes along - including ones about missile silos becoming garbage dumps. Only the big fake stories will be addressed by a press that each day scrambles to sort through the tsunami of information that washes over them. News organizations need the help of engaged, thinking readers and viewers.

Contact Eric Grunder, former opinion page editor of The Record, at elgrunder@msn.com. Follow him at oncruisecontrolafter65.blogspot.com and on Twitter @elgrunder.
#media #election #fakenews #United States #consumers #Internet #newspapers #television

 

     
     
     
     
      

Sunday, November 20, 2016

On understanding ... and economics


Way back, when Bubba Clinton was "not having sex with that woman,” the lady across from me at the breakfast table was outraged. She wanted him out. She thought his behavior demonstrated character flaws that utterly disqualified him for the presidency, ignoring that any number of presidents as far back as Jefferson had sexual escapades that were questionable at best.

Me? Not so concerned. Certainly not outraged. Sure, Bill Clinton’s hanky-panky with an intern was disgusting, but …

I had a good job. They paid me enough that I didn’t miss any meals. And my portfolio, oh how it grew during the Clinton administration. My pocketbook was safe and that was my focus as I roared toward my fifties. Selfish and short-sighted to be sure, but also perfectly in line with the political adage that in the privacy of the voting booth people vote their pocketbook.

James Carville, Clinton’s 1992 campaign strategist, coined the phrase "The economy, stupid" to focus the campaign to defeat George H.W. Bush.

It’s still the stupid economy and that’s really what a lot of us who are left of center missed about the just-completed election cycle. Coming to grips with my own willingness to overlook Bill Clinton’s alley cat behavior helps me, in a small way, understand how so many Trump supporters were willing to overlook his shameful moral proclivities and his hate mongering. I was worried about my retirement back then. They’re worried about their jobs and the blindingly-fast changes in the world today.

Mind you, Trump’s wedge campaign — the misogyny, xenophobia and outright bigotry — did not advance human progress. He ginned fear and aided and abetted scapegoating. When he made fun of the disabled New York Times reporter I was outraged. Our younger daughter is disabled. What kind of a person, especially a candidate for the highest office in the land, makes fun of the disabled?

By the same token, Hillary Clinton didn’t exactly conquer the moral high ground when she said half of Trump’s supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables.” Such a broad brush dismissal hardly is a recipe for support.

Remember Kim Davis? Last year she refused to immediately issue a marriage license to a gay couple in her Kentucky county. If the separation of church and state, not to mention a Supreme Court ruling, means anything it meant Davis violated the law and her duty as a public employee. She was wrong.

But her religious beliefs, on which she based her refusal, didn’t make her deplorable even if I couldn’t fathom the depth of such devotion. Many of us dismissed her, reduced her to a caricature, according to Emmett Rensin of Vox in April in a 7,000 word essay, “The smug style in American liberalism.” What he failed to note was the smugness about Davis was the same kind of dehumanization Trump used on Muslims and aliens and women and minorities and the disabled.

Our politics long have been a game of polls and demographics and bumper sticker solutions. If political opponents talk at all it’s to talk past each other. There are the fly-over states and the coastal elites, the educated and the rubes, the religious right and the secular humanists. Compromise has become dismissal. Political discourse has become preaching to the choir.

Hillary Clinton never set foot in Wisconsin because polls told her she didn’t have to. Save the one time he showed up in Fresno, President Obama never set foot in the Central Valley, even though Stockton was ground zero for the housing crisis and the pain here was palpable. George W. Bush came to Stockton twice, but each time he was shielded from even the sight of those in opposition. When you’re out of sight, you’re out of mind.

Trump tapped into the anger of those who Washington hasn’t thought about in years. Of course, a forceful argument can be made that the GOP’s years-long intransigence against the Obama administration on things like the minimum wage, jobs infrastructure funding, affordable child care, equal pay and student debt hurt most those who felt left behind.

It wasn’t long after Trump’s win that an internet campaign began by Californians wanting to secede. The state can go it alone, supporters argue. It’s the sixth or seventh economy in the world. We don’t need the great unwashed of Middle America. Politicians, left and right, haven’t needed them for years, so why should we?

Of course, that idea by liberals is no less silly than the State of Jefferson movement by north state conservatives who feel ignored by Sacramento. Rightly or wrongly, both groups feel disenfranchised.

Feeling like an alien in your own land is nothing new. A whole section of the country felt that way when Lincoln was elected in 1860. In 1968, the most horrific political year of my life saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, a ghastly riot at the Democratic National Convention and the election of Richard Nixon, all of it played out against the backdrop of the carnage in Vietnam.

In Arc of Justice, historian Kevin Boyle quotes Clarence Darrow’s closing arguments in the 1925 murder trial of African-American physician Ossian Sweet and eight others. Shots were fired from Sweet’s Detroit home in an all-white neighborhood when it was surrounded by an angry, rock-throwing mob.

“I do not believe in the law of hate,” Darrow told the all-white jury. “I may not be true to my ideals always, but I believe in the law of love, and I believe you can do nothing with hatred. I would like to see a time when man loves his fellow man, and forgets his color or his creed. We will never be civilized until that time comes. … I would advise tolerance; I would advise understanding; I would advise all those things which are necessary for men who live together ….”

We’re still waiting. We’re still hoping.

It’s impossible to know where Trump really stands politically, what he will really do. As Bill Maher said just after the election, the president-elect has been known to change positions within a sentence. We do know that his campaign gave license to intolerance. Trump’s appointment of Stephen K. Bannon as chief White House strategist, an appointment praised by both the KKK and the American Nazi Party, does little to allay fears. At Breitbart News, Bannon was provocateur-in-chief, running headlines such as: “Bill Kristol, Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew,” “Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement's Human Shield,” and “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.”

The nation has survived many political and cultural spasms. We’ll survive this. It will take time and more understanding than has been demonstrated by either side for years.

Contact Eric Grunder, former opinion page editor of The Record, at elgrunder@msn.com. Follow him at oncruisecontrolafter65.blogspot.com and on Twitter @elgrunder.
#Trump #Clinton #presidentialelection #angrywhitemen #economics #United States #election #BillClinton #intolerance

 

Monday, June 20, 2016

Trump only knows how to build walls

Donald Trump didn't cause the events in Orlando, but neither did he help heal the wounds caused by that tragedy. Isn't that one of the things we ask of our leaders?
http://www.recordnet.com/opinion/20160619/grunder-amid-tragedy-trump-builds-walls

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Lessons from SCOTUS history

A few thoughts on the GOP's vow not only to reject any Supreme Court nominee President Obama offers but also to block the nomination process itself.
http://www.recordnet.com/opinion/20160220/grunder-lessons-from-scotus-history
#Scalia #SupremeCourt #Obama #nominee #Republicans

Correction: I erred in the above column when I said Scalia's 1986 confirmation came on the eve of Reagan's election to a second term. Scalia was confirmed on the eve of an election, but it was a mid-term election during Reagan's second term. That election saw Republican fears realized when they lost control of the Senate. That looming reality made pushing the confirmation process along in advance of the election rather important for the Reagan White House. My argument stands -- that the high court is a political animal -- but it would have been nice if I'd actually looked at a calendar. See https://medium.com/.../scalia-was-confirmed-right-before...

Sunday, January 17, 2016