News Ignorance Must Go

Will Rogers said, “All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that's an alibi for my ignorance.” I wonder what he'd have to say now, nearly 75 years after his death? Certainly, a person can't expect anything remotely like simple, factual information in today's media, print or broadcast. What passes for news is heavily slanted opinion in most venues. Anything like objectivity is long gone.

Forty-plus years ago, my school sent me to a summer workshop in journalism to prepare me to edit my small-town high school newspaper. I remember vividly the basic tenets of news writing. They taught us the 5 W's of reporting—who, where, what, when, and why. Then, the reporters job was only to present the facts. Opinions didn't belong in news but in features, editorials, and columns with a by-line to identify the person presenting an opinion. Teachers drilled objectivity and impartiality into us, again and again. Little did we realize that the day of such unbiased reporting was already fading.

For me, it was many years later until I fully recognized the change and learned where it had originated. My generation, and some who taught them, decided that journalists would no longer settle for reporting the news or simply explaining what was happening in the world. They would become agents of change, shaping the news, using the news to influence people and change their opinions.

I hate trying to navigate in this environment. It is clear that, for many in the news business, it is not even enough to report facts and give one's opinion to support them. Stories abound of reporters who falsely report, twist the facts, and even fabricate events. Inaccurate information goes into a story, and other outlets use the same data without confirmation or correction. Slanted stories continue even after firmly established facts warrant correction or clarification. I will give two examples here.

A decade or so ago, a young Latino man died when he appeared to aim a gun at police who sought to deal with him. His gun turned out to be an extremely lifelike toy. Initial reports stressed the number of bullets that hit the man, implying overkill, that he was Hispanic, suggesting racial bias in the firing of so many weapons by several officers, and, of course, that the gun was a toy, hinting that any competent officer should be able to tell the difference. The Latino community was outraged and demanded investigations by the state police and F.B.I.; all investigations exonerated the police officers involved.

No one found any indication of racial bias in the incident. F.B.I. training, the source of procedure for most law enforcement agencies, teaches officers to shoot suspects who appear ready to fire a weapon until they are disarmed or incapable of shooting; what might appear to be unnecessary is based on experience when an apparently injured party still manages to fire a weapon and take a life, a principle intended not only to protect the officers themselves but others in the line of fire. Pictures of the “toy” gun made it clear just how real-looking it was, sufficient to fool an expert, especially at a distance in less than full daylight. Even so, subsequent stories reported the same implied questions, long after thorough investigations had settled those very questions.

It occurred to me that no one bothered to ask why the young man, himself, had pointed a weapon he knew to be fake at armed officers. Such behavior is obviously suicidal, and I learned from a friend who knew the family that, indeed, that was probably the intent. The man was not a hapless victim, as if any armed man under such circumstances might be considered a victim; he was most likely seeking to be killed intentionally. Unfortunately, such obvious facts are irrelevant to those who want to promote anti-cop rhetoric, find racial bias where there is none, or promote the disarming of cops or citizens.

The second example, more recent, is reporting on the war in Iraq, particularly the question of weapons of mass destruction or WMD's. The scope of the distortion and deception is huge, involving not only what the President, his administration, his predecessor, and members of Congress said, believed, and did, but related stories such as that regarding Valerie Plame, “outed CIA agent,” as they like say, and her husband Joseph Wilson. As with the local story I mentioned, the agenda is ideological: Bush, conservatives, even war is bad; anti-Bush, progressive, and peace-loving is good.

Were there WMD's in Iraq? Apart from the historical evidence that everyone believed, not just George Bush, I have always wondered why Saddam Hussein acted like he had them, refusing full access by inspectors and sitting in Baghdad waiting for the United States to get him and his sons. Like the young man above, he knew whether he had them or not, and he sure acted like he had them. It stretches the imagination beyond credence to think he behaved like he had them, but didn't, to prove his machismo. He had them before, he used them, our soldiers prepared, believing he might use them again, and yet we found no weapons. So, obviously to accept the biased reporting, “Bush lied!”

I am thoroughly disgusted by MSM pretending to report what they know to be incorrect. At the worst, the President may have been mistaken or mislead, as was Bill Clinton, on record as saying Saddam had WMD's. The lengths, however, to which the media will go to push their anti-Bush agenda includes another even more overt fabrication involving Valerie Plame and her husband Joe Wilson. This one ended a man's career while Plame seems to be doing just fine, in the same job she had before.

Agent Plame appears to be a Washington bureaucrat, working for the C.I.A., but regardless of the degree of “covert” to her assignment, a prominent reporter admitted that he “outed” her, not due to any scheme or agenda by the Bush administration. Does this stop any reporter anywhere from keeping the same line alive? Ideology trumps truth in the news business.

In politics, this goes one step further. Take the “Baby Alex” ad. In the ad, a young mother holding a baby says, "Hi, John McCain, this is Alex and he's my first . . . So, John McCain, when you say you would stay in Iraq for a hundred years, were you counting on Alex? Because, if you were, you can't have him." John didn't say that, and he certainly didn't suggest fighting for a hundred years. News ignorance makes this ad dangerous. People who don't listen to news but hear this ad will believe McCain did say what he didn't. That should not be allowed; free speech should not permit flagrant lies, not even in a political ad. Of course, if the people weren’t so ignorant, gullible, and even willing to be misled, this wouldn’t be a problem.

Lou Reed wrote in a song, “Don't believe half of what you see and none of what you hear." I would add, “Don't trust anything you cannot verify, independently, not the news nor political ads, candidates, emails or web sites, or your best friend. Get a good history text, written over 50 years ago, and read about our American heritage; don't accept the garbage that left-leaning teachers use to indoctrinate their students. Get copies of our historic documents, and read them. If necessary, find a good reference to help you understand what they meant, when they were written. Be a skeptic, but become an educated skeptic.

Liberty and democracy require a minimum of knowledge and judgment. Those who care more for their own agendas and power prefer to manipulate a dummied-down electorate, which by complicity or incompetence the public educational system is providing in spades. A generation more concerned with text-messaging, My Space, trashy music, and even trashier celebrities, and rendered ignorant by a combination of biased teaching and apathy, are worse than sheep when it comes to the wolves that would misuse them. Like chickens in the hen house, many appear ready to elect foxes to guard their interests.

I understand the wish to trust those who promise a rosy future, if only you put them in charge. The people of the United States still have the potential to fashion a future that is secure and prosperous--the people can, not the government! Governments, no matter how well meaning or blessed with good folk, cannot do what we want or need, despite the confidence of candidates and their media allies.

Again, a knowledge of history proves this; ignorance leaves us open to passive gullibility. The bigger and more powerful the government is, the more prone to waste, bureaucratic inefficiency and incompetence, and ultimately corruption and abuse it will be. We already have abundant evidence within the numerous agencies of our federal and state, even city governments, as well as many foreign governments and the United Nations. Big business is not immune, but it is encouraged to be big by the monolithic size of government over-regulation. Big unions are equally prone to incompetence and malfeasance. Even large charitable organizations fall into the same traps

Unfortunately, you will read little of that in a newspaper or hear it on the six o'clock news. Politicians only tell you of the failures of the opposing party, though it is obvious that all are comparably guilty (Political parties are also large, powerful organizations prone to misconduct; it sometimes seems that is their only purpose!). The biased coverage of people and issues by news media is beyond scandal; it is a travesty of their historic role of providing accurate information, impartial reporting, and thorough, incisive investigation. Our city newspaper is a joke, worse than the small town paper where I grew up (I won't even start on the abuse of the English language I see printed and hear used in broadcasting ).

I would prefer not to celebrate the demise of the Main Stream Media; TV broadcasts and major newspapers, in particular, are losing audience and subscribers rapidly. Talk radio and the Internet are filling the gap, although they are not necessarily more trustworthy. This process of change will not end well unless we people begin to discriminate and demand factual, unbiased reporting, serious impartial investigation, and simple truth we can trust. They won't change unless we do.