Faking the news

Mainstream media are suddenly concerned about “fake news.” It used to be that phony stories were easy to spot, like aliens endorsing presidential candidates, with pictures of the alien photoshopped next to its preferred candidate.

In the internet age, things once thought incredible are often accepted without scrutiny. From spam email that claims someone in Nigeria wants to send you money, if you provide personal details, to politicians engaging in behavior that only sounds true if you happen to hate the politician and believe he (or she) is capable of anything, it has become a lot easier to fool some of the people all of the time.

A recent fake news story claimed Hillary Clinton was involved in a child sex slave operation run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant. It prompted a deranged man with a gun to fire shots inside the place in hopes of liberating the “enslaved” children.

A definition might help sort out what is fake and what is real. The dictionary definition of fake is “anything made to appear otherwise than it actually is.” If that is the standard by which falsehoods are discerned, the mainstream media have been faking news for decades.

Recall the reporting on Obamacare and claims by the president that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” and if you like your health insurance plan you can keep that, too. Obamacare will save money, the president said. The media reported it all as fact and blamed him not at all when his misstatements proved untrue.

Space does not allow a chronicling of the numerous examples of false, misleading, and biased stories favoring liberal Democrats and their preferred issues. Exhibit A: The New York Times.

In a post-election column, New York Times’ public editor, Liz Spayd, referred to a memo from the newspaper’s executive editor and publisher promising subscribers to “rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences. …”

What were they doing pre-election? As Spayd noted, “they also used the occasion to congratulate themselves on their swift, agile and creative coverage on election night, and they praised their journalism as fair to both candidates and unflinching in its scrutiny.”

Never mind that so much of their coverage—and the TV stories that follow the Times’ lead on what’s news—labeled supporters of Donald Trump as uneducated, racists, sexist, and homophobes, among other smears. There was no apology for any of this.

In the end, it matters less what the mainstream media think of themselves than what news consumers think.

Picking up on this self-congratulatory theme, the co­–editor in chief of Variety, Claudia Eller, wrote that the show business publication, which leaned heavily in favor of Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy and regularly trashed Donald Trump, pledged to continue “our tradition of presenting balanced reporting that reflects multiple points of view. …” If only.

In the end, it matters less what the mainstream media think of themselves than what news consumers think. Polls show that public trust in journalists had hit a new low. In other industries, that would prompt serious self-examination and conversations with people who aren’t buying what the company is selling. Only journalists sit on such a high mountain of self-regard that any challenge to their honesty and fairness is dismissed as the public’s problem, not theirs

Such an attitude can only produce more fake news that serves neither journalism, nor the public.

Listen to Cal Thomas’ commentary on the Dec. 15 edition of The World and Everything in It.