Who Do You Trust?

By SAM URETSKY

For anyone still following shelter-in-place and become tired of Netflix, one of the better books of the season is “Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth The President’s Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies” by the Fact Checking staff of the Washington Post. The 384 page book (paperback edition) is a bit like the review by the man reading the telephone book: “the plot is dull, but the cast is fantastic.”

As a matter of veracity, in December 2017, the New York Times compared the rate in which President Trump lied compared with his immediate predecessor. Using the same methodology, number of lies reported by fact checkers, President Trump was averaging 124 lies annually, and a more recent review shows he’s been averaging 15 lies per day. In contrast, President Obama averaged two blatant lies per year. Note that President Eisenhower was found to have lied only once in his two terms, but that was before full time fact checking.

For anyone following the New York Times, Washington Post, or any of the other reliable news sources that have managed to survive in the current markets, Donald John Trump and his enablers in congress represent a serious threat to the United States. The problem is that Trump supporters exist inside a bubble known as Fox News.

Pew Research has been following the patterns of news sources of groups within the political spectrum. They reported, “One of the clearest differences between Americans on opposing sides of the political aisle is that large portions of Democrats express trust in a far greater number of news sources.” Of Republicans and independents who lean Republican, 65% trust Fox as their news source. ABC news is a distant second at 33%. In contrast, Democrats and independents who lean Democratic have a basket of 13 sources, all of which are trusted by over one-third of those surveyed. It may be significant that five of these sources, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, have price tags. The Wall Street Journal, after an introductory rate, costs $38.99 + tax every month, perhaps accounting for its relatively low, 38%, standing. The Washington Post is a best buy at $9.99/month for a digital subscription, and it has comics.

The question then becomes, given the influence and penetration of Fox News, how reliable is it as a news source. In a Columbia Journalism Review interview, Lauren Feldman, an associate professor at Rutgers, said “While MSNBC is certainly partisan and traffics in outrage and opinion, its reporting — even on its prime-time talk shows — has a much clearer relationship with facts than does coverage on Fox.”

There does not seem to be a well-conducted study of the accuracy of Fox News, but one Pew study reported, “The group who names MSNBC as their main news source is far more likely than the Fox News group to answer correctly that the coronavirus originated in nature rather than a laboratory and that it will take a year or more for a vaccine to become available. On both questions, the portion in the CNN group to answer correctly falls between the MSNBC and Fox News numbers.”

Similarly, the Seattle Times carried a report, “Fox News published digitally altered and misleading photos on stories about Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in what photojournalism experts called a clear violation of ethical standards for news organizations ... Fox’s site for a time on June 12th, ran a frightening image of a burning city, above a package of stories about Seattle’s protests, headlined ‘CRAZY TOWN’.“

The image was actually a mashup of photos from different days, taken by different photographers — it was done by splicing a Getty Images photo of an armed man, who had been at the protest zone June 10, with other images from May 30 of smashed windows in downtown Seattle.” In spite of this, because the Republican base is loyal to Fox, they are unlikely to accept the facts from any other source, and will maintain their support of President Trump.

One lesson about the effects of misinformation came from a University of Chicago study of the impact of misinformation on behaviors of Fox viewers regarding response to COVID-19. “(Tucker) Carlson warned viewers about the threat posed by the coronavirus from early February, while (Sean) Hannity originally dismissed the risks associated with the virus before gradually adjusting his position starting late February.” The rates of infection and death were significantly higher among Hannity viewers than among Mr. Carlson’s audience. Of course in a report by Vox “A new investigation reveals Trump ignored experts on COVID-19 for months.

In the pandemic’s early days, Trump heeded friends and political whims over his own medical and security experts “ and Mr. Hannity was simply following Fearless Leader. The truth, it seems, can only make you free if you’re willing to accept it.

Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in Louisville, Ky. Email sdu01@outlook.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2020

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