Editor criticizes media bashing

Editor of the Capital Region’s largest newspaper denounces President Trump’s repeated attacks against journalists

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. >> The editor of the Capital Region’s largest newspaper denounced President Trump’s repeated attacks against the media, during a Skidmore College program with more than 100 people on hand.

Trump recently said news organizations are partially to blame for recent bomb threats against prominent Democratic political figures, and mass murders at a Pittsburgh synagogue, because of the societal anger created by “fake news.”

In a Monday morning Tweet, he described the media as the “true Enemy of the People.”

“I’m a patriotic guy,” said Times Union Editor Rex Smith, who grew up near Mount Rushmore and later worked for a South Dakota congressman. “I don’t know who this guy thinks he is to call me an enemy of the people.”

Smith discussed Trump’s hostility toward the media during a recent two-hour-long program where he also dealt with challenges faced by newspapers and journalists in the Digital Age.

“In the era of Donald Trump, the standard of truth-telling has simply gone off the tracks,” he said. “I just don’t know what to do with the fact that we are confronted daily with mistruths, halftruths, and falsehoods.”

The problem, Smith said, is that telling the public about misleading Trump comments only fuels his argument that the media is against him.

“All we can do is keep doing what we’re doing,” he said.

But that task has become increasingly more

difficult since the advent of the internet and social media, which many people turn to now instead of newspapers whose circulation and reporting staffs have undergone dramatic declines.

“The advent of the Digital Age and the coming of the Trump era have created a perfect storm,” Smith said. “Because it is so easy for non-credible information to be postured as credible, we become gullible.”

“Great journalism will survive only if there is an audience that will recognize it,” he said.

However, he said many “people care less about the truth than they do being sustained in their misbeliefs.”

Specifically, Smith said the 1996 emergence of FOX News is responsible for a major socio-political divide in America. Viewers now turn to networks that support their own biases, rather than seeking out credible fact-based journalism, he said.

The late Roger Ailes was chairman and chief executive officer of FOX News for 20 years until his resignation in 2016. Previously he was a media consultant for Republican presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush.

After leaving Fox, Ailes was an adviser to Trump during his 2016 presidential election campaign.

“FOX News was created to bias the news with a conservative bent,” Smith said. “We are now getting different pictures of the news from different corners.”

“The evidence suggests we are going to divide even more, perhaps into warring camps,” he said. “I think we are in a more precarious state, in terms of pulling apart, than at any time since the end of the Civil War.”