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.
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