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A free press: The people’s friend

By TIM MANNELLO

On July 24, 2018, President Trump had this to say to an audience of Veterans of Foreign Wars at its national convention in Kansas City. “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening. JUST STICK WITH US (emphasis added), don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.” He then pointed accusingly and derisively at the members of the press in their assigned area, cordoned off from the rest of the audience.

In the wake of these provocative words by President Trump, the leadership of the VFW reacted swiftly. In a tweet sent after the event, the national headquarters for the VFW offered support for the media. “Today, we were disappointed to hear some of our members boo the press during President Trump’s remarks. We rely on the media to spread the VFW message, and @CNN, @NBCNews, @ABC, @FoxNews, @CBSNews, & others on site today, were our invited guests. We were happy to have them there.”

President Trump chilling comments have a frightening effect on a lot of people. According to a recent poll, 43 percent of Republicans — compared to 21 percent of independents and 12 percent of Democrats — believe that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” Notwithstanding the fact that our military die to ensure to ensure we continue to enjoy our many freedoms, including a free press.

Reporters often die trying to bring us the truth. Reporters without Borders has noted that around the world in 2017, 79 journalists were killed. Thirty-nine were murdered and deliberately targeted because of their reporting, while 26 were victims of conflict.

The prospect of government control of the news is absolutely terrifying. The very last thing in the world this country needs is an authoritarian government deciding what news is and is not fit to print and broadcast. For all it’s shortcomings and faults, and however many times I may have disagreed with some of its coverage, I trust the main stream news media as the best available self-correcting source of news among those available today. Calling all the news they report fake news and characterizing the entire industry as the “enemy of the people’ is false and a threat to our constitutional rights. It can incite people to acts of violence against reporters, it intimidates members of the press and thereby endangers our first amendment right to a free press.

Thomas Jefferson himself severely criticized some of the coverage of the newspapers of his time, but I agree with him wholeheartedly when he said: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Our free press is not “the enemy of the people,” as President Trump likes to say. A free press is the people’s best friend.

What sets the “the mainstream media” (including newspapers, TV channels, and internet news sites) apart from genuinely “fake news?” There are about bout 32,000 reporters working for the 1,390 newspapers in the United States; 1700 working for for TV channels and an unknown number for internet news sites. This is how representatives of these reporters describe how they go about their work.

1. They rely on evidence and statistics.

2. They employ staff whose only job is to check the facts that appear in their news reporting.

3. Though they depend on the best available facts, they sometimes make mistakes.

4. They issue corrections or make retractions when they are made aware of their mistakes.

5. They try to separate news reporting from editorial comment.

6. They are challenged by competitors to make their news reporting accurate.

7. They employ professionally trained staff. Ninety percent of reporters involved in the mainstram media have collge degrees; 50 percent have majors in journalism or communications.

These principles are what differentiates a responsible free press from propaganda (for example FOX News minus Shepard Smith, Chris Wallace and Bret Baier), the conspiratorial media (for example InfoWars minus no one) and the social media house of mirrors where FOX and Russian inspired tweets become bots, where 50 percent of Americans get their news and where the Journal of Science found “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,” One thing for sure: all the organizations in the main stream media combined did not make and fail to acknowledge and retract 4,229 lies or misleading claims in the last 18 months the way President Trump has done. I’ll take the likes of Lester Holt and the news sources he respects over Alex Jones and anonymous blogs using pseudonyms and the folks who regurgitate them any day.

Assertions that ALL reporters working for mainstream sources of news provide “fake news” are simply not backed up by supporting evidence. Such assertions themselves can be accurately called” fake news.” They are examples of deliberate misinformation spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media. The only information that is ever provided to support these assertions are isolated anecdotes falsely generalized to the entire universe of news outlets and reporters. Reporting the bad behavior of public figures is not bad reporting. The very opposite is true: failure to report bad things public officials do is bad reporting.

It may be fun to demolish stories you don’t like to read or hear by simply dismissing them as “fake news.” Doing so is so convenient, however intellectually lazy.

It exempts one from the onerous task of doing some reading and research in a wide variety of places to dig out the truth.

For example, labeling personally unpalatable stories about Donald Trump as” fake news” makes it effortless to criticize main stream’s news reports about his unending negative behavior as negative coverage of Donald Trump. And since Trump does so much that is objectionable and the main stream media covers everything the President does, critics of the media continuously whine that reporters are always picking on poor Donald Trump.

It’s bad enough that Trump supporters reflexively reject reporting on Trump’s outrageous actions as false news. But they are also ready to swallow obviously ridiculous stories from the sources they trust even if they are preposterous. So news outlets supporting Donald Trump did nothing to rebut stories like: the pope endorsed Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and was involved in an alleged child-sex ring involving the Washington, D.C. restaurant Comet Ping Pong (Pizzagate); Barack Obama founded ISIS, Democratic staffer Seth Richards was involved in the DNC hacking and was murdered to cover up that fact, ISIS leaders called on American Muslims to support Hillary Clinton etc., etc., etc.

But don’t try telling all of this to a lot of people. Despite the lack of evidence, 31 percent of Americans say they believe t major traditional television and newspaper media outlets deliberately report “fake news” regularly, and 46 percent say they they deliberately report “fake news” occasionally. They call these occasional misstatements intentional, not just the result of human error. The people who make these charges never back up their convictions with evidentiary facts beyond individual non-representative instances.

Assertions about all the mainstream media are unsubstantiated beliefs.

Still it is an absolutely frustrating waste of time to expose the falsehood of these allegations to correct information on the subject. That just entrenches “fake-newsies” in their belief.

When incessantly repeated by a cult leader like Donald Trump and by a propaganda machines trusted as infallible, like FOX News, beliefs create their own “facts” including the characterization of the entire main stream media as “fake news.” In the words of one philosopher, such faith amounts to not wanting to know what is true.

And it is a waste of breath to try to convince such believers otherwise.

Well-meaning psychologists, communications’ experts, pundits and journalists have written countless articles about how to engage die-hard Trump believers constructively on the subject of “fake news.” I say: “Fuhgeddaboudit.” As Benjamin Franklin once said: “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” Welcome to the Age of Post-Truth, the age in which our very own president calls our constitutionally protected best friend, the free press, “the enemy of the people.” Now that former FOX New’s former co-president, Bill Shine is the White House’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications, I anticipate the establishment of the Federal Government’s Ministry of Truth. After all, there is a grain of truth in every joke, as in this joke by President Trump: “Kim Jong un is a strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.” LOL.

Tim Mannello is a retired hospital executive and business consultant from Williamsport.

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