Mainstream Media

I’ve never been a political animal, and never supported one party over another.  Two of my favorite modern Presidents are Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.  While radically different in some ways, both Presidents were sincere patriots who offered what they felt the country needed at the time.  And big majorities of voters agreed.  Donald Trump is totally different, however, and presents a number of very serious threats to the US, its system of government, and our way of life.  This is one of many commentaries on him and the dire situation we find ourselves in under his administration.

According to the Knight Commission on Trust, Media, and Democracy “Eighty-four percent of Americans believe the news media have a critical or very important role to play in democracy, particularly in terms of informing the public…”  I mean, how else are we to know what’s going on in the world, and what our leaders and potential leaders believe, say, and do?  Our form of government counts on people being informed, since the people elect our government leaders and vote on ballot measures.  It only makes sense that uninformed voters can’t do a good job of that, being ignorant of the facts and the candidates. 

The sad part is that “less than half (44 percent) can name an objective news source.”  Worse yet, The Hill.com reports that “seventy-two percent of Americans believe traditional major news sources report news they know to be fake, false, or purposely misleading.”  This lack of trust in what has come to be called Main Stream Media, or MSM, is due to perceived bias (mostly liberal) on the part of the press, reports “based on opinions or emotions,” sensationalism in the news, not to mention the recently common claims of “fake news” and “alternative facts.”  This is a disaster for the nation, which less and less knows what are legitimate reports and facts, vs. opinions and blatantly false reports.  And it goes a long way toward explaining the election of Donald Trump, his continuing popularity with his base, and the Republican party’s unwillingness to stand up to him.

There is some merit to claims that sources like NBC, NPR, CNN, and the “failing” NY Times are biased against conservatives.  I remember telling my high school students years ago about how those sources have a clear liberal bias.  One girl in particular politely argued with me about that throughout the school year.  Then, at the end of the year, she gave me a present – a book titled Bias, written by former CBS employee Bernard Goldburg.  It presented a lot of evidence to support that network’s, and most media’s, liberal bias - probably her way of saying I might be right after all.

So I understand.  But the important thing is that having a liberal bias is not the same thing as deliberately offering fake, false, or misleading information.  The sources listed above are all rated as having a left-center bias by MediaBias/FactCheck.com, which itself is considered a neutral judge of such issues.  Left-center bias means that the source “utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes) to favor liberal causes; they also may cherry-pick which stories to present, and which evidence they feature in their stories.  Yet importantly, the website rates their level of factual reporting as High, and adds that “These sources are generally trustworthy for information.” 

That’s a key distinction, and something that most people claiming “enemy of the people!” apparently don’t consider.  So NBC doesn’t like Trump and is going to favor stories that justify their stand, presented in ways that sometimes seem biased against him.  But they don’t make stuff up.  Or at least, there are precious few examples when they reported something about Trump or the right or Republicans that turns out to be incorrect.  And when they’re wrong about something, it likely is unintentional, and they inevitably offer a correction and an apology.  I am unaware of any story that NBC or any of those other top-tier MSM sources have reported that was blatantly, intentionally, false, and invite you to share evidence to the contrary.

On the other hand, the “alternative facts,” as broadcast by the right’s most-followed sources like Fox News, Breitbart News, Infowars, and folks like Rush Limbaugh, are rated as having a right bias (not even right-center), or worse yet – being “questionable sources.”  Media Bias/FactCheck characterizes them as using “strong loaded words, publish misleading reports and omit reporting of information that may damage conservative causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy.”  In the case of the “questionable sources,” like Breitbart and Infowars, they exhibit “one or more of the following: extreme bias, overt propaganda, poor or no sourcing to credible information and/or is fake news. Fake News is the deliberate attempt to publish hoaxes and/or disinformation for the purpose of profit or influence.” 

It makes more sense how these news sources (MSM vs. Fox et al) differ when we consider who their faces are.  President Trump’s favorite, and Fox News’s biggest star, is Sean Hannity, a college drop-out whose entire career has been as a conservative radio and TV personality.  Rush Limbaugh is also a college-dropout, but whose career has not all been as a conservative radio and TV host – he had a short run selling tickets for baseball’s KC Royals as well!  Alex Jones of Inforwars?  Community college dropout, whose total career has been as a far-right radio personality.  To be fair, some of Fox News’s other hosts include Laura Ingraham with a doctorate in law and lots of legal experience (along with a Nazi-sympathizing father, according to her brother), and Jeanine Pirro, also with a doctorate in law and a former judge with strongly conservative views and who is a “fiery defender" of President Trump.

The exception at Fox is Shep Smith, managing editor of their news department who presents an actual newscast, Shepard Smith Reporting.  He regularly debunks the false and misleading claims coming out of the other Fox programs, calling them “opinion programming (that) is there strictly to be entertaining,” and NOT factual news.

What all of these folks, Smith excepted, have in common is little or no actual journalistic and political training/education, while on the MSM side, things are quite different.  CNN’s Anderson Cooper, for example, is a Yale graduate who has worked as a journalist since 1995.  He has won numerous awards as a TV journalist, including 8 Emmy Awards, Peabody and National Headliner Awards, and a GLAAD Media Award.  NBC’s Lester Holt didn’t finish at UC Sacramento, where he studied government, but he spent 19 years as an investigative reporter, anchor, and international correspondent for CBS, before moving to NBC.  Holt, a registered Republican, also hosted one of the 2016 Presidential debates, after which Trump said he “did a good job.”  At MSNBC, rated like CNN as “left”, Rachel Maddow graduated from Stanford with a degree in public policy, before getting a doctorate in political science as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.  These people are pros; they know what they’re doing; they’re not just political talking heads.

At the “failing” NY Times and the “radical leftist” Washington Post, most of the top reporters have college degrees in journalism or a related field.  Many are recognized for their excellence in reporting by winning Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, including the Times’ Michael J. Schmidt who won for his reporting on the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia in 2016, and the entire staff of the Post for their investigatory reporting on the Russia probe and Roy Moore’s senate campaign. 

This matters, because these reporters from the MSM actually engage in serious investigative research before reporting out their stories.  They verify sources, usually something along the lines of “according to four different sources closely associated with the White House,” before running a story.  On the other hand, Fox News and those other folks seemingly take any sensational, anti-left story and spread it with little or no background checking.  The result is that those quasi-news sources continuously broadcast ridiculous stories such as “Pizzagate” and the “3 million fake voters” that are soon easily disproved.  One may not like the “loaded words” or “cherry-picked stories” that the MSM use, but we can probably count on one hand their stories that have significant errors, vs. the countless number of bogus stories from the other side. 

But finally, the far-right (which sadly includes most Republicans these days) will claim that all those MSM types are in cahoots together.  They’re all – CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, TIME Magazine, USA Today, NY Times, Washington Post, BBC, NPR, The Economist, your local newspaper – ALL of them and many more conspiring together to hide the truth and spread liberal lies.  Thus, Trump’s claim that only he knows the real truth, and that he’s “doing the country a great service by telling us what to believe.”  Can you believe the hutzpah of this man and his posse?

Well, there are a couple of problems with that extreme conspiracy claim.  First, we have neutral sources like the Christian Science Monitor and card-carrying conservative sources like the Wall Street Journal regularly reporting things that discredit Trump and the conspiracy crowd.   Those on the far-right will find some reason to trash those sources anyway, but at least for those with an open mind and rational thinking processes, the “fake liberal news” line doesn’t make as much sense given that fact.

An even bigger safeguard against the MSM spreading “fake news” is the reality of intense professional competition in the media.  It’s easy to show that the guys and gals at ABC are always trying to get a jump on their peers at NBC and CBS and every other TV network.  They’re also competing against the news pros at the NY Times, the London Times, the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Al-Jazeera, Politico.com, the Wall Street Journal and many more.  ALL of them are slugging it out to get the biggest stories, and to get them first.  Getting a big “scoop” is a matter of great pride for the journalists involved, not to mention a way to advance their careers.  For the network or newspaper or magazine or website, it’s also a matter of pride, but also more ad revenues, big bonuses, etc. 

And if there’s anything that tops a big story skyrocketing their careers, such as when Bernstein and Woodward blew the top off the Watergate story in 1972, it is finding mistakes in the work of others.  So thinking that EVERY legitimate media source is going to lie about what’s happening, conspiring to hide the truth, and NO reporter is going to make his career by spilling the beans about that happening – well, that strains credulity.  It defies the competitive system in the US and in the media business, and it defies human nature's desire to excel and get ahead.

Finally, there is the fact that each of us can confirm for ourselves most of what the MSM reports, regarding Trump or anything else, just by doing a little digging.  In Trump's case, for example, we can find actual video or tweets of him saying one thing one time, and something totally different a year or a month or a day earlier.  MSM didn't make that up!  Similarly, evidence to confirm other claims on other topics is relatively easy to verify by checking sources, evaluating contrary claims - the kind of thing we all learned in college and even in high school.  It's just that most people don't put in the effort; they choose to believe whatever is convenient for them to believe, rather than taking a few minutes to find out who's really lying and who's truthing.

It’s sad but important to realize that none of the above comments are likely to change the opinions of those firmly on the right, or the far left for that matter.  But for the target readers, those who would consider reasoned discussion of a different point of view, it should be clear that the “Mainstream Media” is actually very reliable, and very unlikely to present outright lies and misleading information.  Tweaked a bit to their bias?  Sure, and we need to keep that in mind as we consider what they report.  But all in all, it’s a shame that the large majority of Americans consider our major news sources to be “false, fake, or purposely misleading,” since the alternatives are mostly ghastly and truly misleading. 

What do you think about the MSM and my observations?  Click on "Comment" below and let's hear from you. 

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