Media’s Roller Coaster Relationship With The Truth
I’m the type of person who will jump into a heated political argument on a first date.
This is a social faux pas, I’m completely aware — you’re supposed to veer far away from politics, religion, and abortion around new people in your life, but I’ve brought two of those three up within the first 30 minutes of meeting someone (though, for my own good, the abortion debate hasn’t been a part of my date-ruining repertoire).
So, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to hear that I’ve been getting into a lot of political discussions the past few months with Trump-supporting friends and family on social media. I’ll engage them publicly, loudly, openly, because any new consensus or understanding that results from such a discussion isn’t just for the person I’m engaging with, but for anyone else witnessing the interaction. My conservative friend may not be swayed, but one of their friends might.
One obstacle to productive discourse I’ve been running into recently, however, is a lack of agreement on what constitutes a valid source. We’ve heard “Fox News is GOP propaganda” or “MSNBC is part of the mainstream liberal media” for years, and there are reasons for this that I’ll be exploring below, but a deeper mindset has taken hold of a lot of Americans over the course of the past year: The idea that established information sources can be automatically disqualified outright.
I’ve had an acquaintance tell me, with all seriousness, that Snopes is part of the liberal “fake news” (for those who aren’t aware, it’s not — it’s an apolitical fact checking website that tackles everything from the validity of reported news to the validity of your grandma’s forwarded chain emails). I’ve heard the same about Politifact (again, apolitical and Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking).
I’ve had another friend try to tell me that a Fox News-reported piece about Obama building a shadow government of 30,000 protestors from a bunker (which was a lie from a self-admitted actual fake news website) was just a joke. When I linked her to the Lou Dobbs segment taking it seriously, she claimed it was taken out of context. When I linked her to the full context, she claimed it was just a commentator, and so “nobody” actually bought it (skating over the public responsibility of opinion shows to spread accurate ideas and not just lie to their audience).
We’ve reached a point where the goalpost-moving and co-opting of the term “fake news” by an aggressive President has lead to an informational vacuum — how do you establish credibility in your arguments when you have people in positions of power destabilizing the legitimacy of your sources? How do you speak to someone about a topic when their sources on that topic are pushing an opposing agenda, regardless of whether those sources are actually based in truth or not?
How did we get to this point in our public discourse?
A little-talked about event in 1987 shaped the course of our media landscape to the present day — the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine, created with the Radio Act of 1927 and more strictly interpreted by the FCC in 1949, stated that broadcast licenses for television and radio should only be issued when doing so serves the public interest. Licensees had to include discussions of matters of public importance in their broadcast, were required to include opposing opinions on the topics, and were required to alert anyone subject to a personal attack in their programming and give them a chance to respond. The Fairness Doctrine also allowed stations the flexibility to produce and give airtime to programs about “boring but important” issues — documentaries and news programs about everything from nuclear power to gay rights.
This requirement for reasonable discussion was overturned by President Reagan’s FCC chair Mark S. Fowler, citing that “The perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants.” With the Fairness Doctrine gone, came the rise of conservative talk radio — like Rush Limbaugh, who could now (starting in 1987) rant without presenting opposing opinions, without fear of a license challenge.
Fowler was wrong, however, and set a dangerous precedent for the integrity of our political discourse — by interpreting news and media as a commodity that should exist without limits in the marketplace, he effectively neutered the ability of the Fourth Estate to operate as an educational tool for the masses and a check on the overreach of government. Without a requirement to present multiple sides of a news story, stations could keep the pretense of objective journalism while subtly slanting their coverage towards a particular political ideology (as in the case of present-day Fox News and, to a lesser extent, MSNBC), or throw out their objectivity altogether (as in the case of conservative talk radio).
Repealing the Fairness Doctrine, more than anything in our modern political landscape, drove the wedge in between the political left and right, and allowed political opinions to ferment and cement in echo chambers of their participants’ own choosing. If you leaned fiscally conservative, you could listen to Rush, or Hannity, or any of the pundits that came afterwards for confirmation of your beliefs (and the lack of an opposing view allowed you to unknowingly slip further into their worldview). The same could be said of the liberal left (though to a much smaller extent than conservatives, who had the talk radio market cornered through much of the 1990s).
The next blow to the integrity of the news media occurred in 1996, with the passage of the Telecommunications Act by a Republican-controlled Congress and a Democratic President Clinton. The long-lasting and controversial part of the Act came from Title 3, which allowed for media cross-ownership — allowing one corporation or person to own any number of media businesses.
The Act’s effect on the media landscape has been staggering. In 1983, almost all the news media in the country came from 50 different companies. Currently, 90% of the media in America comes from just six different conglomerates. News-Corp owns Fox News, Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post. Time Warner owns CNN, HBO, Time, and Warner Bros. Political spin can be coordinated and unified across multiple outlets, and misleading information can become calcified by viewers when it’s repeated by enough of the news programs they ingest (even if all those news programs are financed by the same parent company).
This practice is viewable in polling data — a 2011 poll by Farleigh Dickinson University showed that Fox News viewers were consistently the most ill-informed of all news consumers, even more so than people who didn’t watch any news. Lest you think this is only a Republican problem, MSNBC viewers didn’t fare much better. Sticking to your preferred media empire for your news intake left you with a slanted, incorrect impression of how our political system was functioning.
As the years after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed, these media empires slowly solidified, and their viewership became more and more entrenched. Without the abundance of diverse news programs done away by the 1996 Act, without the abundance of diverse opinions on those news programs after 1987, I believe that our sense of objective reasoning has atrophied. Until the rise of the internet as an established outlet for news (more on that soon), you had your pick of only a handful of opinions to choose from, carefully curated by the heads of media conglomerates. Why should I as a viewer have to choose between two or more sides to an issue, when I can instead have one side presented to me as the truth and the other side caricatured?
The media was eager to encourage these divisions in order to maintain their viewership, as well. Conservatives blast headlines off of MSNBC and even CNN as bias of a “liberal media.” As a liberal, myself and many others consider Fox News to be a laughingstock of spin and misleading headlines.
The divisions growing across the country because of how our news institutions framed politics continued to widen, and the legitimacy of those news institution continued to weaken. A Gallop poll released in September 2016 has American trust in their news institutions at an all-time low (though it’s been steadily dropping over the past few decades, and has been below majority level since 2007).
And then came the rise of the internet as a legitimate source for news — Twitter and Facebook’s roles in the Arab Spring lent legitimacy to social media as an objective source for up-to-the-minute information about unfolding events. News aggregators like Reddit gave an opportunity for alternate viewpoints to gain somewhat mainstream notice.
And then came Donald Trump’s campaign, and his particular brand of Truthiness.
And then came fake news, as both a legitimate phenomenon of observable lies gaining traction on social media, and the co-opting of the term “fake news” to describe anything with a different political slant than your own.
The term “fake news” has gained prominence during the lead up to and result of November’s election, but the blurring of fact and opinion in such a prevalent way has been building over the past few years. During the Republican’s government shutdown in 2013, a fake piece titled “Obama uses own money to open Muslim museum amid government shutdown” was picked up and reported on by Fox News. The same author of that article, during this election cycle, created other fake pieces like the oft reported “Trump protestor getting bankrolled $3,500” (picked up and repeated by Trump’s campaign manager), and believes his satire helped put Trump in office.
There’s truth to his claim. An analysis of the 20 top shared fake news articles that trended on social media during the 2016 election showed that, while all but three of them were overtly pro-Trump or anti-Hillary, they generated almost 9 million shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook — more than the 20 top shared real election stories and op-eds. These included fake articles with the titles “Pope Francis Endorses Trump,” “WikiLeaks Confirms Hillary Sold Weapons to ISIS,” and “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leak Found Dead in Murder Suicide.” There were also over 100 pro-Trump websites this election cycle registered to a single town in Macedonia, spreading fake news across Facebook to take advantage of ad revenue tied to page view. One sensational article isn’t going to convince you to change your political alignment — but it leaves a slight impression, which multiplied by the dozens or hundreds of similar articles creates a compelling gestalt.
At the same time, the term “fake news” has begun to lose its meaning through dilution. At a Wisconsin rally post-election, Trump’s introductory speaker cited the New York Times and CNN as “fake news,” while others at the rally attributed the reports of Russian hacking of the DNC (which have since been confirmed, along with a number of other worrying Russian revelations) as “all made up.” Trump himself has repeatedly claimed that most established news outlets and unfavorable leaks from the intelligence community are “fake news.”
I’ve seen this sentiment echoed amongst friends and family members — sharing easily disprovable claims about Hillary Clinton laughing at rape victims, and having ties to Monsanto, and stealing items from the White House, while ignoring or brushing off legitimate and sourced articles regarding Russia’s influence on the election, Trump’s business conflicts of interests, and any number of his easily verifiable lies. I’ve seen Hillary continue to be a topic of discussion amongst my conservative friends, even half a year after the presidential election.
And for their part, legitimate news organizations haven’t lived up to their mandate — they haven’t allowed for the nuanced discussion that we demanded of them pre-Fairness Doctrine. “Boring but important” topics, like the economic potential of clean energy, don’t help ratings. Holding our elected officials’ feet to the fire when they state obvious lies isn’t as interesting of a news story as reporting on Trump’s latest Twitter feud. The advent of the 24-hour news cycle in 1980 is arguably part of the cause for this (it made news programs more reliant on ratings than ever before), but the main brunt of our media’s current laziness stems directly from 1987 and 1996.
Last night, a brief clamor was made over the announcement that Rachel Maddow had acquired Donald Trump’s tax returns. A countdown to the episode was placed on MSNBC during the lead-up to her show, and the event was sold as a “big breaking news story.” Unfortunately, the exposé itself was less exciting than most had hoped — the release was a two-page 1040 filing from 2005, and the most damning revelation within was that, were it not for the Alternative Minimum Tax that Trump is currently attempting to repeal, he would have paid only around 4% taxes for his ~$150 million income.
I don’t fault Maddow for the implication of bait-and-switch journalism — though these documents don’t reveal any of Trump’s sources of income, she did a good job in the outset of her episode making the case for why a full tax release is necessary (not just for Trump, but for any president or presidential candidate), and shattered the oft-repeated “I’m under audit” Trump campaign excuse for not releasing his taxes. But I believe the way in which her network hyped up the show will give more ammunition to Trump supporters’ cries of “fake news,” and potentially distracts from coverage of the Republicans’ disastrous healthcare bill.
Because of the public’s weakened trust in legitimate news organizations, they’ve turned to an alternative source of news that’s undoubtedly more unreliable, less trustworthy, and more sensational than its predecessor. And because of the precedent set by network news that you don’t need your objective reasoning intact in order to form an opinion on an issue, the public will continue to become more and more reliant on these ridiculous stories.
And there’s the crux of the issue — I’m not entirely sure how this sinking ship is supposed to right itself. When you have a loud minority of the population decrying the major news institutions as “fake news” (to be clear, despite their biases and slants, major network news still rely on accurate and well-sourced fact based reporting most of the time) while feeding into actual fake news, you create a vacuum in which objective, provable facts can be questioned and dismissed without thought.
Our President thrives in this vacuum; his compulsive lying can’t be brought to his supporters’ attentions, because the news you bring has to be liberal spin, has to be fake news, you have to be part of the “enemy.” The people trying to tell the truth now have to disprove the lie before they can begin to make their argument. And Trump’s success this past November has set the stage for others to take up that mantle in the future — you can say and do anything, and as long as it’s entertaining and for the right side you’ll be rewarded.
But fixing the vacuum requires a moral strengthening amongst our news institutions that I don’t think is possible with the current six mega-corporations. It requires reasoned, non-polemic discussion that I don’t think is possible without the Fairness Doctrine, or with a 24-hour news cycle ratings race. It requires the public to regain their trust in the establishment news, which I don’t think is possible with their reliance on less-reputable, alternative news sources.
Already, there has been talk of internet censorship being the answer to the “fake news” problem — but that doesn’t solve our issue, opens up a whole other potential world of government oversight abuses, and gives fodder to the loudest conspiracy theorists amongst us.
Instead, a journalist revolution is required — and we can see the beginnings of this in the way outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post have been breaking stories about our administration’s corruption, and how (aside from last night) Maddow had been covering Trump’s ties to Russia without hyperbole rather than his inflammatory tweets. But when our current government, and half of the population, seems to not be interested in journalistic integrity because they “won,” that obstinate wall will continue to loom over any media reform.
Part of this reform will have to occur on the part of the viewers themselves, as well. Critical reasoning skills — and the ability to distinguish the differences between false news articles, slanted news articles, and genuinely unbiased reporting — are crucial to changing the way our country approaches political and social issues. That’s a larger conversation that involves the role our education system plays in the development of adolescents, but it’s a conversation that needs to be held (and I’d like to tackle that soon in another editorial).
We’re now living in a “post-fact” world, where narratives and spin are prevalent and expected amongst the Fourth Estate. But facts are harder to come by. Facts require an extensive toolkit of objectivity on the part of both the journalist and their audience. They require a special devotion to the “boring but important” aspects of our country.
And they need to be valued when they’re found.
