If Only the News Were Fake

Have you noticed that we’re not hearing much about fake news anymore? 

In 2017, the term was the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year. Of course, back then a certain someone was barking “fake news” every time the press showed us his warts. Mercifully, for us noise-averse types, he’s barking into a much smaller megaphone these days.  

Still, fake news was COVID before COVID in the sense that it went global, infecting millions with the belief that the only trustworthy information was the kind that buttressed their preferred understanding of what was happening in the world. This wasn’t healthy skepticism (don’t believe everything you read in the paper) but toxic denialism (don’t believe anything you read in the paper).

Except, people mostly did continue to believe what they read in the paper, as long as the topic wasn’t political or susceptible of being politicized. Stories about extreme weather might still generate disagreement as to the cause, but you’d be hard-pressed to find folks who refused to believe the flood or the fire was even happening, whatever their feelings about CNN or The New York Times. 

This brings us to the present newsy moment. Ten years ago, when word got around that I was going to spend a semester in Ukraine, the country was so far off the American radar screen that one acquaintance told me he heard I was going to Uganda. Another thought I was bound for Uzbekistan; a third, for Kosovo.

Now everyone can find Ukraine on a map and news junkies like me are overdosing on news of the war. During normal times, I look at my phone during the night only to check the time. Now, every time my eyes pop open – which is often, alas – I tap the red “Load new posts” button on The Times app, unable to resist keeping up with the latest developments. Not healthy. 

In so doing, I’ve been enormously impressed with the coverage. First, there’s that red button – the constant updates, sometimes no longer than a paragraph. 

I used to mock the superficiality of Twitter: How in-depth could you get with 140 characters? But when news is breaking – and during a war, news is breaking around the clock – I want the latest, provided I’m told the source of the information, and whether it has been independently verified. This, the Twittery Times is doing.

Then there are The Times’ formidable resources. We’re not just hearing from a lone reporter in Kyiv. Times staffers have fanned out across Ukraine and throughout Europe, including techies who cross-check satellite images, citizens’ cell phone footage and witness accounts to verify what has happened when and where.

Last week, for example, The Times compared radio communications among Russian soldiers with visual evidence to document a brutal, yet ineffectual Russian assault on the town of Makariv. The Times newsroom, long a bastion of telephones and typewriters, seems to be morphing into the Situation Room in the White House.

A couple of days after I watched that Times clip, I talked to a communications class about the state of journalism in the third decade of the 21^st century. 

For context, I started with the good old days when audiences trusted – naively, at times — Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley and the other patriarchs of TV news, and journalism played its essential role of shining bright light in dark corners. 

Then I reviewed the twin causes of declining trust in journalism: the revelations, in the late ‘90s and the aughts, that reporters at The Times and other top-tier news outlets made up stories, and the self-serving squawks of politicians who claimed to have been victimized by biased and slipshod coverage.

Into the breach stepped social media, which provided citizens with the tools to tell their own stories. Who needed the gentlemen and gentlewomen of the press?

The Times’ coverage of Ukraine reminds us why we all do. In a guide to “How We Verify Our Reporting on the Ukraine War,” The Times makes clear that social media isn’t the enemy of professional journalism – far from it. As we know from the deaths-by-cop of George Floyd, Eric Garner and Walter Scott, among others, citizen witnesses, too, can shine a bright light in those dark corners.  

But we also know that not all information circulating on social media is reliable. This is where you need the technology and the know-how to separate the real from the fake. And this is where you need an independent source to verify claims made by interested parties. (Notice how in wartime, each side inflates the enemy’s casualties while downplaying its own?)

Following the war in Ukraine is tearing me up. But I’m grateful to the journalists at The Times and other news organizations who are risking their lives to tell me about it.