JOCHNOWITZ

of election fraud on air that it knew to be false — allegations that have been tearing the country apart since Trump began spewing them. Fox executives and personalities disparaged and ignored the network’s own political analysts and fact checkers. Carlson — who said behind the scenes that he hated Trump — at one point called for a fact checker to be fired for putting accurate information on social media that contradicted Trump’s narrative.

Journalists don’t hide what we know out of fear that some readers might be angry at us for reporting facts they refuse to believe.

Another host, Maria Bartiromo, was aware that Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s “proof ” of her outlandish election fraud allegations was an email she received from a woman who claimed that the wind spoke to her and told her she’s a ghost. A Fox producer warned that host Jeanine Pirro should not even be on the air, so reckless were her claims.

I mention my own record of errors in this context not to express some sort of “there but for the grace of God go I.” It’s to underscore that there is a vast difference between the journalism that the mainstream media practices and what Fox does.

We don’t knowingly promote false information. If a lie itself turns out to be news — if a public figure like, say, a president makes a clearly false statement or an outright lie, we may report on it, but we also point out that it’s misinformation. (The Washington Post valiantly tried to catalog all the false and misleading statements Trump made in his years in office, a tally that reached 30,573 over four years as president. That’s journalism, not propaganda.) We don’t hide what we know — as some at Fox sought to do when it was apparent that Joe Biden won the 2020 election — out of fear that some readers might be angry at us for reporting facts they refuse to believe.

This is, in most newsrooms, not some mere ideal but the very culture of the place, passed on from seasoned editors to newbies generation after generation. It’s a hard but simple thing, on which our readers’ trust depends — we’re human, we make mistakes; when we do, we admit them and learn from them.

So if you spotted a news reporter walking under a cloud on North Pearl Street on Oct. 10, 1987, that was me after my very first correction, for getting the name of the Albany Police Officers Union wrong — for the first and last time. I’ll get over it someday.