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.
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.
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.
3 comments:
"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 shit up". I have to disagree Jon. Is there really any difference between spinning a story so it means something completely different than how others see it and "making shit up"? Trump's response, although rude, and inappropriate, is not totally unexpected or unwarranted. Trump is not the only one with a different perception of the same event or issue. Whether you see the folks from SA coming here as an invasion or as refugees is a matter of perspective and perception. When the media refuses to acknowledge people's right to perceive an invasion, they manipulate the "news" to reflect those people as "bad". It's not just "favoring stories", they make shit up.
Let's hear what you think!
Once again, I disagree, CD. Your example of the MSM characterizing Latinos coming to the US as refugees vs. an invasion hardly qualifies as making shit up. They very clearly are refugees, as confirmed by the US military's own report on them that ridiculed Trump's claims. It is true that the millions of refugees who come to the US do represent an invasion in the longer-term sense, but that wasn't the context the President used in his political stunt of ordering out 15,000 troops "to defend the US." Notably, all his bluster about that ended the day after the mid-terms. Coincidence?
But in any case, you chose to ignore the bigger point of the essay, which is that Trump and Fox and that group regularly, blatantly, and intentionally lie. Do I need to list 100 or more examples where that is undeniably true? MSM reporters are qualified and spend great effort in vetting their stories before publishing them, while Fox and that crew usually aren't and don't. Are you saying that is not true? Do you disagree with the point about neutral and conservative sources having many of the same opinions about Trump as the MSM? You have taken one small example with only a small kernel of relevance, and used it to dismiss the big picture with tons of verifiable evidence. This tells me that you're not really interested in evaluating the issue on an open-minded basis.
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