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In Search of Journalistic Integrity
What are the hottest news topics of the New Year?
I turned to Google News to find out. By adding “2017” in my computer’s search bar, I created my own (small and unscientific) database profiling some of the most reported current events topics.
One might expect – naively, to be sure – that the most pressing issues of the day would populate the brightest constellations of reportage across the firmament of internet news. So let’s take a look at which topics got the most hits:
- Vladimir Putin: 15.6 million
- Terrorism: 24.7 million
- Climate change: 29 million
- Gay: 41.5 million
- Israel: 74.4 million
Now what can we make of all this?
Is there a difference between “opinion” and “bias”?
On Tuesday 3 January — apparently in response to a hail of letters accusing the paper of editorial bias — the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a full-page editorial attempting to justify their approach to opinion pieces. I responded as follows:
Dear Editors,
In last Tuesday’s defense of your paper’s opinion pages, you claim that your reporting is free from editorial influence. Many would dispute this point, but I wish to address a more objectionable assertion in your argument.
You write: “Where you will absolutely find bias is on the opinion pages.” This remark is as astonishing as it is disconcerting.
Bias and opinion are not synonyms. Bias is by definition emotional, often to the point of irrational. Opinion expresses a principled position, ideally based on accurate information and sound reasoning.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed that you’re entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts. A responsible news organization, however, is duty bound to make sure that its opinion pieces are fact-based and logically developed. This requires an understanding of both sides of an issue and the commitment to intellectual integrity. Only then is an opinion deserving of publication.
Hail to the new chief
Congratulations to Missouri’s new governor, Eric Greitens.
After serving as a Navy Seal, devoting his career to help returning veterans, and defining himself according to the value of character over ideology, Governor Greitens will enter his new role as public servant with today’s inauguration ceremony.
He offers the kind of hope that we all so desperately look for: modesty, civility, and a commitment to service above political agendas. He faces the challenges of anyone who seeks to confront a culture of entrenched partisanship and cronyism.
King Solomon says that the heart of kings is in the hands of God. May the Almighty guide him and all our leaders to recognize what is right, to retain purity of vision and purpose, and to rally support to lead us on the path of peace and prosperity.
Write your Headline before you Run your Story
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
How often have we heard someone say that? How many times have we said it ourselves? And it almost always comes as a response to the same question:
“What were you thinking?”
Our minds have a funny way of convincing us that our ideas will succeed on strength of creativity, sincerity, ingenuity, and necessity. We might have identified the true source of the problem; we might have formulated a real solution; we might be 100% committed to making things better.
But none of that is enough without two critical components:
Implementation and perception.
Beyond the Stars — A tribute to John Glenn
If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.
~Sir Isaac Newton
There are two kinds of visionaries.
The first type sees farther, like Sir Isaac Newton. They possess a special gift of brilliance, genius, or perception. They see what others cannot, recognize mysteries that hide in plain sight, uncover beauty and order where the rest of us see only chaos. For the most part, they are born, not made.
Then there are those who are blessed not so much with the ability to see, but with the ability to bestow vision, to illuminate the world not with new insights but by giving the gift of insight to others. It is not their acumen, but rather their irrepressible pursuit of transcendence that inspires us to do as much with our lives as they have done with theirs.
Thirty-six years after becoming the first man in orbit, John Glenn became the oldest man in space, not as an ego trip or publicity stunt but to observe the effects of weightlessness on his 77-year-old body. As with his first trip, he showed that the limits upon human beings are mostly self-imposed.
Most of all, he showed us not only what a person can do, but what a person should be.
President Evil
On 10 December, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran an editorial suggesting that Donald Trump was largely responsible for the gunman who attacked a Washington pizza parlor and the deranged woman who made death threats against the mother of a Sandy Hook massacre victim.
I submitted the following letter to the editor in response. Inexplicably, the paper chose not to print it.
Dear Editor,
Your editorial was absolutely correct. Donald Trump’s irresponsible rhetoric definitely has contributed to the corrosion of our culture and our safety. But please explain why you limit your indictment to Mr. Trump alone.
Why don’t you lay equal blame in the lap of Hillary Clinton for her amoral campaign of distortion, deception, and corruption? The former next-president-of-the-United-States racked up 24 pinocchios last year from the Washington Post, and has lied about everything from her emails to her foundation, from her fictitious ducking under Bosnian sniper fire to the origins of her own name.
Why don’t you assign equal guilt to Barack Obama, who denied calling ISIS “the JV team,” who misrepresented Republican filibustering by a factor of ten, and whose misinformation about Obamacare could fill a government website?
And why don’t you admit your own complicity as part of the injudicious media that perpetuated the big lie of “Hands up, don’t shoot,” continues to indulge the wicked moral equivalence that excuses and enables radical terrorism, and — oh, the irony — provided Donald Trump with millions of dollars in free column space and air time, helping catapult him to primary and ultimately national election victory.
By all means, blame Donald Trump for all of society’s ills. But first show the moral fortitude of placing the blame everywhere it belongs, including on your own shoulders.
The real story about fake news
Responding to headlines about “fake news,” silver-screen icon Denzel Washington offered up this classic quote from Mark Twain:
If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed, if you do read it, you’re misinformed.
He’s right, of course. The irony is that Mark Twain probably didn’t say it.
Which doesn’t make it fake news. To be fair, Mr. Washington himself didn’t cite Twain as author of the quote, which seems to derive from similar remarks by Thomas Fuller and Thomas Jefferson.
When I first saw the Fake News stories populating my newsfeed, I thought they must be referring to those absurd and provocative headlines that infest so many internet news pages. It seemed sad but not surprising that people give credence to this kind of salacious click-bait, but hardly worthy of national discussion.
I soon realized that the subject was more serious and, indeed, more substantive. Nevertheless, there may be a closer connection between the fraudulent and the whimsical than one might imagine.
Let’s start with the serious.
First of all, it’s not news that there is fake news or how harmful it can be.
Scorched-earth redux
If you’ve never heard of the Daily Banter, good for you. Here’s one of its latest headlines:
Trump Is Officially An Illegitimate President-Elect And The Democrats Have To Destroy Him
In a nutshell — or a nutcase — the hyper-hormonal screed asserts that Democrats need to take Republican scorched-earth policies to the next level to save our democratic republic.
Whatever one may think of Donald Trump, the manner of his election, or his adolescent tweeting, he has blunted the onslaught from many of his critics with the measured judgment of his cabinet picks and administrative appointments.
Aside from that, after eight years of partisan sniping, bullying, and obstructionism — from both sides of the aisle — what the country needs and wants is a spirit of cooperation from its lawmakers, not more posturing, bickering, and gridlock.
But here’s the question that really needs answering:
Why is a scandal sheet like the Daily Banter showing up at the top of my Google News feed?
Yonason Goldson 