More than 350 newspapers from the drowning east to the burning west published editorials last week defending themselves against President Trump’s attacks on American journalists as purveyors of “fake news” and “the enemy of the people.”
You would think this would not be necessary because you would think by now that no one would fall for the old blame-the-messenger gambit, given how transparently self-serving it is. I mean, no one ever says that positive news about themselves is fake or that the journalists who report such news are “sick, disgusting people,” right?
But report facts that might cast doubts on my honesty, my integrity, or my competence, and I can respond in one of two ways: acknowledge my shortcomings and apologize, or accuse the reporters of those facts of defaming me and plotting against me. As far as I know, Trump has never admitted he was wrong about anything and therefore has never apologized for anything, so on the attack he goes, taking the term “fake news,” which means something when it refers to phony stories written by non-journalists, and applying it to any reporting that might cause readers to doubt his wonderfulness.
The reason it works, the reason media bashing has always worked, is because journalists believe it is their duty to report the pronouncements of public figures, including their attacks on the news media. They also believe that they should not assume an adversarial stance toward the people they cover, so the attacks go unanswered. (Perhaps the folk advice to “never get in a urinating match with a polecat” applies.)
These one-sided assaults on journalistic credibility have been so relentless that people all across the political spectrum have come to accept them as self-evident truths. The right thinks journalists are a bunch of flaming liberals who skew the news in accordance with their own left-wing agenda. The left thinks journalists are a bunch of corporate stooges who skew the news in accordance with their bosses’ right-wing agenda.
Both sides have been right – on occasion. Their mistake is that they generalize.
Critics on the left and the right hold to what anthropologists might call a superorganic view of the culture of journalism. That is, they see it as a monolithic system, probably because few of them have spent time with real, live journalists.
Go among the newsroom natives – I just spent a day at the Daily Item in Sunbury — and what you see – surprise! – aren’t cogs in a propaganda machine but humans who are trying like hell to suss out what’s going on in the world and then present it as accurately and compellingly as they can to the public.
Do they blow it sometimes? Of course they do. Remember, they’re humans, which means they can be lazy, arrogant, greedy, careless, vain and myopic, just like the rest of us.
During my 30 years as a journalist and teacher of journalism, I have criticized the news media, in print and in the classroom, for just about every imaginable ethical lapse: sensationalism, insensitivity, deceptive practices, sacrificing accuracy to speed, giving equal time to people who don’t deserve it, paying too much attention to the movers and shakers and not enough to the moved and shaken.
None of this means that reporters are incapable of producing accurate accounts. In fact, close attention to the work of news outlets great and small finds that unbiased accounts are the rule; inaccurate, biased accounts the exception.
And yet, thanks to the decades of unanswered attacks and the availability of “alternative facts” from Trump’s mouthpieces, wide swaths of the public have abandoned the most reliable sources of information we have.
That’s why I was glad to see all those editorial writers circle the wagons last week, even though some disapproving commentators thought – rightly, as it turned out – that Trump would construe the show of unity as proof that they’re all against him.
The we-are-not-the-enemy editorials that interested me most were the ones from small-town papers. Here is an excerpt from the one that ran in the Daily Item, written by editor Dennis Lyons:
“When a crane collapses and blocks a major road like Route 15, as happened Tuesday night, we are there to tell you what happened, why it happened and how long it will be before it is fixed…
“We report on the actions of local governments and the impact of those actions on your life, your home, your children, your schools and your taxes. When those governments don’t act in your best interests, we call them on it…
“We are not perfect. We make mistakes. When we do, we correct them. Mistakes happen for numerous reasons, but they are never deliberate or malicious. They are not ‘fake news.’
“We are not the enemy — unless you happen to get caught doing wrong and would prefer nobody else knows about it.”
