On holding the media accountable

A recent Washington Post-ABC poll indicates about 70 percent of Republicans believe that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president. According to the Post article in which the poll results were cited, the alarmingly high number of Republicans who continue to think that the election was stolen suggests that “Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud, propagated by many other Republicans, have taken root within the party despite the absence of credible evidence, dozens of failed legal challenges and multiple recounts affirming Biden’s victories in Georgia and Wisconsin.”

There is no doubt that Trump and many Republican elected officials bear a great deal of responsibility for proliferating the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen despite all the evidence to the contrary. Yet what is being underplayed in the article as well as in many other analyses of the last election is the role that right-wing media played in perpetuating this falsehood. For instance, for weeks after the November 2020 elections, various anchors and commentators on the Fox News network, Newsmax, and One America News Network spent hours echoing Trump’s false claims that the Dominion voting machines had changed Trump votes for Biden, that thousands of dead people had illegally cast ballots, and that in Pennsylvania, large amounts of mail-in and absentee ballots were processed illegally. In the case of the lies about Dominion, not until the company warned that it will sue for defamation did a number of conservative networks begin to counter the falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the problems with their voting machines.

What many Americans fail to realize is that the media do not just report the news; they actually produce news and information. That is, all media outlets make thousands of choices daily, choices regarding what to cover and what not to report, what should be emphasized versus what gets mere cursory attention, and how to present the news that is reported. The headline on Fox News from Saturday, Nov. 7, the day that Biden was declared the winner of 2020 election, read: “Pro-Trump demonstrators, some armed, rally around U.S. following Biden victory projection.” Notice that the emphasis in this headline is on the pro-Trump demonstrators and not on the Biden victory, which is categorized merely as a projection. The Newsmax lead story from that day, titled “We’re not calling election for Biden,” is even more misleading. The Newsmax story states that “the election remains very close and President Donald Trump continues to contest results in several states.” I refer to the Newsmax story as “misleading” since it is promoting a false narrative that the election has not been decided and that Biden has not won.

Although media outlets cannot compel their viewers and readers to believe certain distortions and lies, in choosing to highlight particular content and interpretations versus others, they shape their audiences’ worldviews. Thus, the Nov. 7 headlines of Fox News and Newsmax, not to mention all of the airtime they provided to spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation, helped sow distrust among their audience about the integrity of the 2020 presidential elections. The video testimony of many of the Jan. 6 rioters at the Capitol suggests that they had been conditioned to believe, by Trump, their social contacts and the right-wing media machine, that the election was stolen, and that it was their duty to take back the country.

So how do we hold the media accountable for spreading misinformation and falsehoods? One way is to follow the lead of Dominion and threaten the networks that propagate lies with defamation and other types of lawsuits. Another option is to lobby advertising sponsors to withdraw their support of networks that are guilty of systematic lies and distortions of truth. I prefer the latter option since it is based on the pressure exerted by ordinary citizens on corporations to uphold truth and accountability and, as such, is more democratic.

But we also need to do a much better job of educating the next generation of citizens to question and critique the information that they are consuming rather than taking it at face value. The advent of modern communications technology like social media has contributed to a situation in which fake news and alternative facts are ubiquitous. Hence schools and universities need to spend much more time educating students on how to distinguish between facts and misinformation, about the nature of strong versus weak evidence, as well as on how to substantiate their views with the best available data.