SHAKING HANDS WITH THE DEVIL (WHILE MAINTAINING SOCIAL DISTANCING)

How journalism has redefined itself while making us fools

Fake news. We hear it bandied around often, but does it exist? Of course, you say. But do you subscribe to it or are you intelligent enough to know when you’re being lied to or misled? Of course you can tell the difference because you are wise enough to sift through the fake.

But are you?

Which of the following do you think is reliable and which can’t be trusted? CNN? Fox News? The BBC? Breitbart? Maddow? Hannity?

Virtually everybody who looked at that short list, and probably everybody, put each source into one “news” category or the other, and as consumers of current events we think we know how to identify what is true versus what is not. But again, can we?

If you think you can rely on your source, or sources for news, how certain are you of the information you’re getting? Because if you consider your network, newspaper or Internet site as reliable, answer the following question: On coverage regarding Donald Trump, why does one set of sources consider him possibly the best president in America’s history, while the other side only paints him as worse than Hitler? They can’t both be true, and your source has chosen one side or the other. More important to ask, perhaps, is whether your side is the one telling the truth? Or are both sides lying?

Everybody I’ve posed these questions to agree our news sources are extreme with their coverage of Trump, if not all social and political topics. But we accept the narrative because we figure the coverage is either mostly true, or we’re sharp enough to identify what deserves our skepticism. Yet in the days I worked in a newsroom, mostly true meant entirely false. And we would pay a heavy price for our inaccuracies. Sadly, our dereliction in the newsroom today often earns promotions, and unbelievably, even Pulitzer Prizes.

Day one of journalism school will teach you to always get a name right. Spelling, attribution, everything. Don’t mess up a name. But if we published a photo with the incorrect name of the person in the picture, our editor would give us a lecture and tell us to be better. If the same thing happened the following week, we would be talking about whether we were going to keep our job.

Rarely did a newspaper have to publish a correction for a mistake, and most of the time, we would have an example like the one mentioned in the previous paragraph. Today’s corrections, if they even make them, are monumental and deliberate errors, corrected only after being exposed by a rival media outlet. That is, IF they even choose to correct the information. Yet, astonishingly, we seem to be okay with this phoniness as long as the fake makes our rivals look bad.

So why the change? Did reporting once have integrity or a moral code? Was journalism ever a vocation built on getting the story right, or even on the principle of acting balanced? I would argue yes, a newsroom operated under a precept of finding the facts, confirming them, finding out what the people affected think of them, then skilfully putting the pieces together in something we want to read, watch or listen to.

Getting a scoop could be exhilarating. Watching your rival get it before you could make you look like an amateur. But worst of all, getting it wrong would be the biggest and most damaging embarrassment in your line of work. And that stain would remain on your resume for a long time.

No longer.

Today? Today our reporters tend to have only two qualifications to work in a newsroom: What is your political opinion and did you take a creative writing class?

Which leaves us where? Typically, who has time to tune in to both the Fox Newses and the CNNs to see the different perspectives nowadays? Furthermore, each side has picked its demographic and keeps spoon feeding us what we want. If we turn on CNN, we’re there to hear about the latest war crimes Trump has committed. And if we watch Fox, we want to hear about how much of a champion he has been in the face of attacks from the media and his political rivals. They know their audiences and we are guilty of tuning in or clicking on the “news” we want them to tell us.

During the 2016 presidential campaign and through Trump’s presidency, some non-political stories were left untouched, which would have been part of the front page news cycle without question 10 years ago. For example, what do you know about the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Asia? Look into this story and ask yourself why you didn’t know about this. Meanwhile, when the long serving White House doctor met the press for more than an hour in January, 2018 to discuss the president’s health, the most important story, apparently, was when he claimed Donald Trump weighed 239 lbs. This announcement generated three, full days of scrutiny and debate. Really?

Really.

So weigh that out, pun intended. An entire group of people were being violently exterminated at the same time a doctor said President Trump weighed 239 lbs. And what made the “news”?

Whenever a hurricane develops in the Caribbean, competing networks have drastically different approaches to its coverage. CNN outlines how history has never seen this much extreme weather before, and the station has plenty of experts who will claim to prove it. Meanwhile, Fox has a different group of experts tamping down the panic and illustrating how the current hurricane season is actually less violent than normal.

Who is telling the truth? Or maybe we should ask which one is misleading us the least?

Coverage of the current COVID-19 crisis is just as shameful. In fact, I’d argue more so. And given the agenda our source of “news” has for its readers/listeners/viewers, we’re getting information based on what we’ve told that source we want. And as mentioned, they don’t disappoint. The coverage matches the audience, meaning if you want to hate Trump, this pandemic is his fault entirely if you click to CNN. On the other hand, if you want to see how heroic his decisions have been, Fox is for you. Even the most biased among us know this is true. The way we justify our “news” is where we make the compromises.

I’ve been trying to illustrate how both sides on our media spectrum are flawed. And the longer our governments are keeping drastic measures in place, presumably to prevent the spread of the virus, the more people are beginning to question the legitimacy of our sources. Here are some examples of the questions we’ve asked or have been asking:

• Do face masks help or hurt?
• If the demographics of COVID-19 victims is virtually the same as the flu, why are we keeping the young and healthy quarantined?
• With our constant isolation, hand washing and sanitizing, are we allowing our immune systems to stay mostly dormant when they should be constantly working to prepare us for when we could get sick?
• Are the consequences for a shut down economy worth the outcomes when depression, domestic violence, substance abuse and foreclosures are sure to rise dramatically?
• Would we be better off if we gave more control to our leaders?
• If we’ve been infected and recovered, can we get sick again?
• Despite faulty data with the original models, should our governments have made more radical decisions earlier? Or should they have taken their foot off of the brakes sooner when the crisis didn’t look like it would emerge as predicted?

Note these are just examples of some of the questions Joe and Jane Public are beginning to ask because as a group, we’re starting to get suspicious of what we’re being told whether the information comes from our elected politicians, our unelected public officials, or the press.

And make no mistake, we either think Trump is constantly lying, or the media covering him is, but Fox News, CNN or any media outlet are not on the same pedestal much anymore. Given the more of us wondering what we can believe from them, our “news” providers may soon face a reckoning where they can’t sell us their crap much longer.

Like I mentioned earlier, as an industry, journalism once had a level of integrity it could fall back on, even if its reputation wasn’t necessarily honourable. But for decades, writers and television producers could use subtle tricks to help play a story in a particular direction. For example, we generally want to cheer for David when he’s facing off against Goliath, and we could get behind a little exaggeration to add drama to the story. Or to keep us through the commercial break, the station would tease us with a hyperbolic lead in so we felt we needed to stick around.

Today’s version of journalism is different, though. The end of the story has essentially been written, the actual journalists just have to find a way to get there. And I’ve seen it in action many years ago.

My first job was covering the Vancouver Canucks in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The team’s record year after year was abysmal, and most of the writers in the press box enjoyed the perks in the press box to eat, drink and gamble. Then they would spin the same story line game after game rather than dissect the events on the ice. Pure laziness.

Today’s writers and networks, however, are not lazy. Instead, they see themselves as the most important voice of reason in our world, and believe they have to influence their audience for the good of their cause or country. In a similar fashion, the end of the story, whether social or political, must be met. In America, that means whatever the story is, Donald Trump is either the villain or the hero even if the article has nothing to do about him.

Don’t believe me? Wherever you get your news, find a random article about the one of the following topics and see how Trump is injected into the fabric somehow. In fact, you won’t have to look a story up because you should know your opinion about the president on the issue already because our “news” source has outlined it dozens, if not hundreds of times:

• China is accused of lying about the Coronavirus outbreak.
• Joe Biden has been accused of sexual assault.
• Anything related to climate change.

“Your trusted news source.”

“We report, you decide.”

“Original reporting.” Please.

We can’t blame a network or Internet site entirely for all their faking in the making of “news” coverage because like I said, we are the ones who tune in, click on, and call in with the issues and stories most important to us. And we do it over and over again.

But they are guilty of using marketing research to train us to need the good or bad stories they produce. In the process, they have created the modern day substance abuser where we are the addict and they are our dealer. Want proof? What headlines do you look for each day?

What racist thing did Trump tweet today? How are the Democrats trying to ruin the economy this time? How can we ensure Biden wins in November? What illegal alien is charged with murder now?

Still, the current COVID coverage is wearing us out, particularly the emphasis on politics when most of us were wondering initially whether we might live or die. Thus, more people are beginning to look up one report a day instead wasting their time with the endless chatter about how Trump has killed more people than those who died in the Vietnam war, or how we have to make China pay a heavy price for misleading the world about the origins and the data they had about the virus before the critical worldwide spread.

Are you one of the many scanning endless headlines, bypassing virtually every one of them, worn out by the endless finger pointing of why the other side of your political spectrum is at fault? Do you crave non-partisan analysis where we can piece together solutions on how to protect people from getting sick or dying, and align those concerns alongside being able to go back to work, church or a restaurant?

Would information on finding a vaccine or a combative medicine without the president’s name injected into the story be soothing for once?

Or even a good, old-fashioned, feel good article about helping somebody out without any of the shame, accusations or lectures which need to be in every story? Good luck with that.

The bottom line is journalism is incredibly flawed. Again, I believe most of us know this, but have spent the past several years pretending we’re not part of the problem. But we are. Whether you accept this or not, my next post will highlight many of the common tricks the media uses to deceive us, and you can evaluate your opinion through the examples I provide.

We need to enter the world of “news” wary and skeptical, and I will help you navigate through the tall, tall weeds of the fake. Armed with this knowledge, perhaps we can start the process of changing the corrupt, counterfeit pages of our newspapers and teleprompters to actual information rather than deceitful commentary? If these outlets want to survive, I truly hope we can.

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