GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet

Fake News Gets Fake Democracy

Once upon a time, Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. nnThe CBS news anchor was revered by all, a unifying voice, and someone who could shift public opinion with a well-placed comment or a deeply reported news story.

Consider his February 1968 commentary on Vietnam. Public support for the war had been waning when Cronkite told American TV viewers that the war was all but lost:

“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”

It was a shocking statement from a mainstream figure, a public admission that the “best and brightest” — to use David Halberstam’s words — were failing and that the promises of the president and the foreign policy establishment were empty.

In the obituary NPR ran upon Cronkite’s death in 2009, David Folkenflik writes that Cronkite was seen as a measured and not ideological figure.

“Unlike the punditry that dominates today’s nighttime cable news shows,” he writes, “Cronkite’s nightly newscasts were so measured that it made his words after the Tet offensive all the more powerful.”

Public opinion continued to turn against the war, as predicted by President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson “saw that newscast” and “turned to his press secretary, George Christian, and famously said, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.’”

Fast forward 50 years and we are in a new news environment, one marked by abject distrust of media, with even the most venerable and reliable of institutions — the news pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, the major news magazines like Time and Newsweek — have been cast in the roll of partisans. This shift is the culmination of several decades of assaults on our independent press, mostly emanating from a conservative movement that has spent 60-plus years painting the press as a mouthpiece of liberals and Democrats.

As recently as the mid-1980s, according to polling by the Gallup Organization, Americans believed news organizations took care to separate fact from opinion by a 58% to 42% margin. Those figures have flipped today as 66% think the media fails to separate fact and opinion.

I’ve seen this first-hand. Students respond to discussions of current events by bellowing “fake news”; a colleague, someone trusted to teach students how to craft well-reasoned arguments, does the same. I do my best to counter this, but I feel as though I’m screaming into bottomless ravine that sends back disembodied echoes of my voice and nothing else.

For me, this is not a partisan question. I tell my students at the beginning of each semester that I don’t care what they believe, only whether they can make a well-constructed argument that is supported by facts and solid sourcing. I don’t have to agree and, in fact, I prefer that they do not — I challenge hem to challenge me.

But I fear, as I said, that we have entered an age in. Which confirmation bias rules. We no longer start with facts and build our cases. We do not challenge our own opinions. Rather, we cherry-pick the data to back up our pre-conceived arguments.

And we distrust anyone — person, organization — that challenges this approach. There are a lot of reasons for this change in approach — right-wing assaults, a growing hyperpartisanism among news consumers, Fox News, The internet and social media. Each of these plays a role in the declining trust in media.

News agencies share some of the blame, as well. As we’ve sought to stay afloat, we’ve chased the latest fads while cutting costs. We’ve replaced on-the-ground reporting, which requires a massive infrastructure and is expensive, with talking heads, which require little more than access. We’ve shuttered both foreign and local bureaus, gutted statehouse reporting, and chased clicks. “If it bleeds, it leads,” a mantra that characterized decision-making by TV news in the 1970s, has metastasized into our raison d’etre.

We helped create the current news environment — one in which a propaganda outfit like Breitbart is seen as more trustworthy by a segment of the population than the New York Times, and in which a president apparently gets all of his information from a partisan cable outfit masquerading as an heir to the mantle left behind by Walter Cronkite.

We think nothing now of a president who trusts truth as fungible. All presidents lie to some degree, but none have shown such a distaste for the truth as the current occupant of the White House. To an even greater degree than the administrations of Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and Bush, the Trump team acts as though it is he only arbiter of reality. Anything that contradicts his version of the truth must be fake news.

And in our hyper partisan times, his followers nod their heads in agreement, the nation as a whole the worse off for it.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. He teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; blog; Twitter @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Facebook.com/Hank.kalet; Patreon, patreon.com/newspoet41; Medium, Medium.com/@newspoet41.

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2018

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