Never Trust Any (Publication) Over 30
Given the legacy media’s track record, who would trust them?
It’s been the underlying theme of the November stories. We forget what came before, even if it directly contradicts what we say or believe now. In this week’s new and improved newsletter I discussed this forgetfulness about feminists and sexual harassment, senators and senses of humor, and lawyers defending egregious defamation cases. (Also known as, feminists wanted women to do anything for Bill Clinton, Sen. Al Franken scolded Justice Willett for being funny hours before his funny pic hit the Interwebs, and Rolling Stone — well, contradictory defenses depending on audience are all they’ve really got.)
This morning it is about journalism. At Vanity Fair’s HIVE Maya Kosoff explains, “Why Zuckerberg’s New “Trust Indicators” Can’t Fix Fake News.” For the record, the HIVE is one of the better sources and I think she’s basically correct when she writes:
[T]ech’s new trust indicators ultimately rely on users deciding whether or not to trust a publisher — the crux of the fake-news problem in the first place.
As the media landscape has fragmented in a world with limitless sources of contradictory information, it has become harder to achieve consensus on even the most basic facts, particularly with a presidential administration hostile to major news outlets. Donald Trump spent much of his campaign bashing legacy media outlets as “fake news,” kicking off his tenure in the White House by lambasting CNN for misreporting the size of his inauguration crowd. And when three CNN staffers resigned earlier this year after the outlet published and then retracted a story linking Anthony Scaramucci to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, the White House latched onto the network’s decision in an effort to undermine its credibility, with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders decrying its “constant barrage of fake news.”
Trust in publishers is the crux of the problem, but contrary to the impression left that the CNN retraction was a one-off, legacy media outlets have been abusing the public’s trust for years. Just a few from living memory that young journalists might want to look up, each of which were big in their time:
- Stephen Glass and the fake stories at The New Republic,
- Jayson Blair and the fake quotes in the New York Times,
- Michael Bellesiles and Arming America (it took The New York Times months or maybe even years to retract his award),
- Dan Rather and the Killian Documents at CBS,
- Jack Kelly and the fake stories at USA Today,
- Jessica Lynch as the Iraq War’s first hero, and
- almost any story involving the Clintons.
They all get tied in a bow in Ben Rhodes and the “know-nothing journalists” affair. Those were just a few off the top of my head. There are more.
The lack of trust in legacy media has been building for at least 30 years, and it is not helped by journalists’ current call to engage in advocacy journalism. That is what they have been doing and what has both lead many astray and and eroded public trust. How do we know when a journalist is reporting the facts or the facts they want us to know for the greater good, as they perceive it to be?
As for Facebook, too many of us have experience with their algorithm preferences. Suzanne Venker is the latest conservative to stop bothering on the platform. (She posted yesterday.) Ericka Andersen’s experience as social media manager for a large conservative publication is common.
Lately I’ve wondered if Facebook lets the fringier stuff trend so they can justify letting the algorithm tamp mainstream right pages down.
Kosoff is correct, however. While there is no trust, no fix is possible. The first step must be building trust, acting in a trust worthy manner. They are trying to skip that step. By blaming others for the loss of trust they are pretending that they can continue as they have been and in the process they ensure that no one is going to trust Facebook or any of the legacy outlets to curate or vet any news.
UPDATE: It came up again. In March I’m reading an otherwise thoughtful piece about investigative journalism and sexual abuse victims by Ipsita Agarwal, and get to this “In the past year, Alesia says, with the beating journalism has been taking with Trump’s fake-news rhetoric…” The problem is not just the rhetoric. It is that it resonates.
