TRUTH AND THE MEDIA TODAY
Craig R. Whitney
Sometimes we seem to be living in what Charles Sennott, a veteran journalist who founded the Ground Truth Project and teaches at Boston College, calls “a post-truth era,” all over the world. In Russia, after Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation” in Ukraine, a new law threatened anyone who said or wrote that this was an invasion, or a war, with jail for 10 to 15 years. The New York Times withdrew its correspondents because of the threat. I worked in the Moscow Bureau of The Times when Russia was part of the Soviet Union and Pravda, which means “Truth,” was the leading paper. Communist censorship kept truth out of all the Soviet media. Today Putin’s Russian state media tell Russians that Ukraine is part of a plot by the U.S. and NATO against their beloved motherland and that scenes of death and destruction in Ukraine portrayed in western media are made-up and fake. Millions of Russians have now downloaded virtual private network software that gives them access to what the media here and elsewhere, are reporting, but what effect that might have remains to be seen.
A half century ago in America, “the media” meant print newspapers, magazines, wire services like AP and UPI and Reuters, and news reporting on TV and radio. The media’s job was reporting the news. Reporting was supposed to be precisely that: Telling what is happening? Who or what’s doing it? Why? What could be the consequences? There were mistakes in reporting, as in any other human endeavor, but mistakes could be corrected, and usually were. News reporting and opinion were recognizably kept apart. If you didn’t like your paper’s editorials, you could subscribe to a different paper, but the news reports in most of them were pretty much the same. Most of them believed that their job was, as one of the greatest, Carl Bernstein, has put it, “proceeding without judgment or predisposition to wherever the facts and context and rigorous questioning” lead — to “the best obtainable version of the truth.”
Today we have a media crisis in America. The Internet exploded our media into a million pieces in the past two decades. And “social media,” which vastly outnumber news media today, aren’t in the business of bringing us reporting based on facts. What they do is bombard us with opinion, facts be damned.
Before the Internet, newspapers depended on advertising for their revenue, but it has flown away to Facebook and Google and the like, because their algorithms allowed advertisers to reach out directly to customers. Since 2004, 2,100 daily newspapers in America, many of them the ones that told people in towns and cities across the country what was going on in their communities, have closed.. There were 71,000 newspaper journalists in 2008; by 2020 only 31,000 were left.
Newspapers that could started digital editions, but they didn’t attract enough digital advertisements. Only papers that set up paywalls charging subscription fees for access to content survived. The New York Times didn’t start doing that until 2011, which was almost too late. Now The Times has about half a million print subscribers, but 6.7 million online news-product subscriptions all over the world. Online subscriptions now account for somewhere around two-thirds of the company’s revenues.
The social media that have overwhelmed newspapers bombard us with opinion, not news reporting, and millions of Americans are now hard pressed to find out what is going on in their communities.
Facebook, U-Tube, Twitter, thousands of podcasts, talk radio and satellite television, digital streaming news platforms, blogs, newsletters, even music streaming platforms — all are mega-soapboxes for opinion, and too much of it blatantly partisan, prejudiced, and even crazed. Legally, news media that publish information they know to be false can be penalized for it. Social media have tried to claim they are not responsible for the personal views they let individuals post on their sites — even demonstrably false ones, which they resisted pressure to excise. In Europe, the European Union has adopted a measure that will punish online media and the Big Tech companies that own many of them with huge fines if they don’t police outright lies and falsehoods on their sites, and will start enforcing this next year. Here, only lately have social media begun to make feeble efforts to weed out outrageous falsehoods, and then only under pressure.
Direct TV, owned by AT&T, dropped the One America News Network early this year because it was full of anti-vaccination rants and Donald Trump’s completely false claim that he won the 2020 election. The facts are that he lost big-time in the national popular vote. But when the electoral college vote went against him, more narrowly, Trump said it was because Democrats in six states had stolen the election by stuffing ballot boxes or throwing Republican votes away, and sued or charged election officials, including Republican ones, to reinforce his claim that the real results would show that he had won, not President Biden. Although in all six of the states where he challenged the votes, the facts, repeated recounts and other examinations showed that his claim was baseless. Only 475 votes were found to be suspicious, not enough to swing the results in a single state. Trump repeated his claims before the huge rally in Washington a year ago Jan. 6, inciting the crowd to march on the Capitol to prevent certification of the Electoral College votes that made Biden the President. The rally turned into the deadly and destructive insurrection inside the Capitol that the Republican National Committee later absurdly described as “legitimate political discourse.”
The Twitter social media network cut Trump off entirely then, but Fox News’s biggest star, its host Tucker Carlson, draws millions of viewers every day with his rants, and he has continued spreading Trump’s fake claims. Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire who may soon buy Twitter, has indicated he would restore Trump’s privileges there because he has the Constitutional right of freedom of speech. Now 47 million Americans believe him, according to a University of Chicago national survey early this year, And 21 million believe that use of force would be justified if necessary to put him back in the White House in 2024.
Carlson has also given huge amounts of time to the notion that liberal “elitists” are encouraging immigration so that demographic change will create a majority of voters who can outnumber “true Americans” like Trump’s supporters at the polls. This “replacement theory” was cited to justify his actions by Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old loner who shot 10 black Americans to death and wounded 3 others at a supermarket in Buffalo on May 14. He may have found out about it from another digital site, 4chan, but Tucker Carlson talked about it at least 400 times in the past few years, according to The Times. And many leading figures in the Republican Party, have been repeating this garbage for years.
Their main goal is keeping Trump’s voter base for the midterm elections. Tucker Carlson’s main goal is building a big audience of viewers by pandering to their prejudices. Carlson attracts millions, and makes millions of dollars for Fox from advertisers eager to reach that huge audience.
Trump supporters accuse MSNBC and Rachel Maddow and other “liberal elitist” web sites and news media of spreading ideas like Critical Race Theory to build their own audiences. But they haven’t had nearly the same success. They actually take facts seriously. But too many Americans don’t care to be reminded of facts — they want to be told that what they believe is true.
Media splinterization has led to media polarization, and it is one of the most important reasons for the now-acute polarization of American public opinion on critical issues. This political polarization is the most dangerous threat to our American democracy that we have seen since the days of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.
The question of how to keep the Internet from spewing out lies, lunacy like “replacement theory” and incitements to violence like the massacre of ten people in Buffalo just because they were black skirts the critical issue of how degraded so much of our thinking has become these days. What our children learn in school about civics and the Constitution and the way our government works is crucial, but is civics even taught any more the way it was three generations ago? What’s on the curriculum itself is now a bone of political contention in many places; look at all the discussion in school boards around the country of how to keep Critical Race Theory and anything that even hints at sex education out of elementary school classes. How about more emphasis on logic, and scientific method, not just in physics and chemistry and mathematics? How about broader emphasis on how important accurate research is for understanding not just history but current affairs? Civics either has fallen off many schools’ curricula or is not enabling many Americans to understand how government works, what the Constitution says about citizens’ rights, not just free speech but the right to vote. Basic education should also teach logic, how to distinguish fact from faction, truth from lies, whether to believe or to be skeptical about ridiculous assertions that we see or hear when we scan our screens.
Our founding fathers believed that the press was essential to the success of democracy. But some of the changes in our modern media have wounded it grievously. What we need is more media that report facts that can help us to decide for ourselves what the truth is on the critical issues that divide us. And I mean facts, not opinions, which should be more clearly distinct from one another than they have become lately even in some of our best news publications.
Digital media supported by subscriptions and/or contributions are rising around the country to replace print media that disappeared. The American Journalism Institute offers help and guidance on how to do this. The Texas Tribune in Austin is a good example of success — a digital-first nonprofit founded a dozen years ago, it now has 50 journalists among its 81 employees. It distributes stories free to other papers, and now has $100 million in income from memberships, gifts, and public events, according to Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post. The Columbia University Journalism School is setting up a new professorship in Local News. Its aim, the school said, is to “offer a vision for rebuilding the public square in communities large and small, while nurturing the development of journalists who dig deeply into local issues, who connect with residents and who use innovation to build news organizations that can thrive.” There’s a project called “Trusting News” sponsored by the American Press Institute and the Reynolds Journalism Institute to help television newsrooms build trust in their audiences by inviting groups of viewers to participate in the meetings that plan what stories to cover, so they understand what motivates coverage of particular issues.
“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate said dismissively 2,000 years ago. Too many of us Americans today have stopped using our brains to make judgments about what is going on in our own country. We need to demand facts when ideologues, prevaricators, and provocateurs spew falsehoods to exploit our vulnerabilities. Our democracy has never been perfect, but it is in danger of being overwhelmed by bigots who are interested not so much in making America great again as in controlling what we think to get what they want for themselves.
The news media will never be perfect. But we need media that concentrate on uncovering and reporting facts, and keep repeating them to remind people what the truth really is. We need, all of us, to think for ourselves rather than to blindly accept opinions foisted on us by others whose motivations we cannot know. We need truth, and only truth will help us keep our freedom.
