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.
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.
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?"
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.
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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