Real journalism vital in a ‘fake news’ time
Howard Goodman
Back in journalism school, and in all the newsrooms where I’ve worked since, the professors preached and the pros practiced one cardinal rule: You don’t print anything that isn’t verified.
Or as generations of city editors put it: “If your mama says she loves you, check it out.”
If you hear a tip, it isn’t a story until you have evidence to back it up. That’s why investigations can take weeks or months. Why rumors often remain mere scribbles in a notebook. Why reporting — good reporting — is hard work.
There’s a good reason for this. We want readers to feel confident that when they pick up the paper, they can trust that the stories are true.
From time to time, I’ve idly wondered: What would happen if we weren’t so careful? What would be the harm if we were a little wobbly with the details, if we added a few embellishments to make a good story “better”? Would it really be so wrong to publish a juicy rumor if enough people were already talking about it?
This past year we’ve been finding out.
‘Fake news’ flourishes
In this age of Twitter and Snapchat, it has become as easy as clicking a keyboard for everyone to be his or her own publisher and spread messages around the world in seconds. With the shrink- ing of copy desks and fact-checking, it’s been easier for errors of fact and judgment to creep into traditional media, too.
So we’ve seen news streak from screen to screen that Pope Francis endorsed Donald J. Trump for president. That Trump sent his own plane to transport 200 stranded Marines. That Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager were running a child-sex ring in the basement of a well-known District of Columbia pizza place.
All were false. All widely believed. The pizza story — as ridiculous as it sounded — had violent consequences, with one particularly gullible reader bringing a rifle into the place to “investigate” for himself.
The phenomenon, so widespread as to earn a nickname, fake news, may have played a role in the presidential race’s outcome. That’s a subject of debate.
What’s more certain is that it has upended, for almost all of us, our usual bearings. We are confused on what to trust — whether anything we read can be believed. That’s a bad feeling. It has now become your unwanted task as a news consumer to check out the veracity of the information you see on your Facebook feed before you unknowingly spread a falsehood to your friends. It’s a task most people aren’t trained for or particularly good at. A Stanford University study found that 82 percent of high school students surveyed couldn’t distinguish between a reported news story and an advertisement.
Two California lawmakers have introduced bills to teach stu- dents to detect fake news by adding “media literacy” or “civic online reasoning” into school curriculums. Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez warned that the 2016 election showed “the corrupting effects of a deliberate propaganda campaign driven by fake news.”
This is why the values of traditional media are so badly needed.
Getting it right
Yes, I’m standing up for my profession. It’s been much maligned by readers on both the right and the left, who are certain that political agendas drive the editors and reporters of mainstream media. President-elect Trump has been amplifying that drumbeat all the way to the White House, repeatedly railing against the “lying media,” singling out individual outlets and reporters for reproach or ostracism, vowing “consequences” for stories he doesn’t like.
Now, I’m not going to say that the mainstream media have never been guilty of bias, or laziness, or massive errors of judgment. Of course they have. These are human institutions, and anything that humans do is subject to human frailties.
But serious journalists are impelled by a purpose: to present verified information to the public. And to do that by using certain, consistent methods of checking things out, including interviewing multiple participants and experts, scouring documents, disclosing as much as possible about sources.
It’s these practices that distinguish real news stories from the fake, not whether or not a story you read confirms what you’ve previously believed about a subject.
“The essence of journalism is a discipline of verification.” That’s from a thoughtful book by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, “The Elements of Journalism.”
“In the end,” they write, “the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art ... Journalism alone is focused first on getting what happens down right.”
The skeptical citizen
That crucial phrase, “the discipline of verification,” was threaded throughout last week’s explosive stories about a set of memos written by a former British spy.
As the New York Times reported Tuesday, shortly after CNN broke the story, America’s top intelligence officials had presented Trump and President Barack Obama “with a summary of unsubstantiated reports that Russia had collected compromising and salacious personal information about Mr. Trump, [according to] two officials with knowledge of the briefing.”
Note the care in calling the reports “unsubstantiated” (as well as the descriptions of the sources). Neither the Times nor CNN disclosed the contents of the memos, because they hadn’t been able to verify it. Like numerous other news organizations, they’d had a 35-page document for weeks without making it public.
For, as juicy as the claims were, they couldn’t be verified.
Buzzfeed, however, did publish the whole thing, its editor saying the public had a right to see what reporters, and now the president-elect, already knew.
The result was gold for comedians (ahem), but lousy for the cause of journalism. A furious Trump thundered that he’d been a target of “fake news.” And because at least one point in the memo was easily disproved, conscientious journalists will have a harder time gaining public trust the next time they present a verified bombshell.
We have entered an era when it is harder and harder to distinguish the real from the fake, the honest from the malevolent, the news from propaganda. Real journalism is more important than ever. And the burden on citizens to value verification in what they read and hear has never been greater.