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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?
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?
When Satan Calls
Few people set out wanting to do evil. So how does evil happen?
Most evil begins with the desire to do good. But when we don’t recognize where good ends and evil begins, then we’re bound to cross the line between them.
Something about a certain road paved with good intentions.
But the most insidious kind of evil is the kind that continues to masquerade as good long after we’ve crossed the line. This is the favorite device of Satan, one that we usually recognize too late, after we have everything we wanted… and we’re stuck with it.
We’ve embraced the information revolution, which has so efficiently opened the floodgates of knowledge that we’re now drowning in a sea of pseudo-facts and misinformation. We’ve embraced the communication revolution, which has so thoroughly created lines of connection that we are more deeply disconnected than ever from one another and from reality.
Now that correspondence is effortless, we often leave emails unopened and, even more often, unanswered. Now that recorded messages are a click away, we’re too distracted to check our voice mail. We think it’s rude to call without texting first, and we consider it rude to end a text with a period.
We click to the next page only halfway through the current page, and we escape exposure to ideas that make us uncomfortable because mysterious algorithms are filtering the information that reaches us. And when unpleasant news does make it through the gauntlet of ideological censorship, we sink into a morass of emotional angst and cry out against a world that defies our comprehension.
Satan is laughing all the way to the motherboard.
But not everyone is deceived. There’s a growing, grassroots movement to observe a technology Sabbath, to unplug in order to turn on and disconnect in order to reconnect. No phones, no computers, no videos, no texting.
Does that sound horrifying? Impossible? Cruel and unusual?
Convince your friends and family to try it. Pull a dusty book of the shelf and remember what it’s like to feel what you’re reading. Go to the park, play softball, plan a progressive meal with friends and neighbors, enjoy a family game night.
Feel the technology toxins flow out of your body. Once the shock wears off, you’ll wonder why you didn’t start it years ago. And when you start the new week, you’ll be more rested, more relaxed, more focused, and the envy of your coworkers.
And then you’ll wonder how you will make it all the way to your next Sabbath.
The Gift of Gratitude
If I were to say, ‘God, why me?’ about the bad things, then I should have said, ‘God, why me?’ about the good things that happened in my life.
— Arthur Ashe
There’s no arguing that tennis legend Arthur Ashe had good reason to complain. His mother died when he was four years old. His brilliant tennis career was cut short at age 36 by a heart attack, followed by two open-heart bypass operations and one brain surgery, only to discover that he had contracted AIDS via blood transfusion. He died at age 49.
It’s extraordinary that a person could suffer so much and not cry out against his fate with anger and bitterness. But the explanation used to be obvious, before it became increasingly rare:
Gratitude.
Donald Trump has finally gone too far
Perhaps we can forgive the president-elect for his crassness, his coarseness, his ultra-nationalist rhetoric, his mockingly superior tone, and for dragging the electoral process deeper into the mud than anytime in the last century.
But now he has officially gone too far.
Donald Trump has committed the unpardonable sin of not telling the press where he went for dinner last Tuesday evening.
By doing so, reports the Washington Post, Mr. Trump has “dispensed with generations-old traditions and formalities,” adopting a “combative approach to press relations” in a way that shows “he clearly doesn’t respect the media.”
Gee, is this the same media that rallied all its collective forces to discredit Donald Trump as a candidate and convince the country that a humiliating electoral defeat to Hillary Clinton awaited him come November 8? Might that have something to do with his perceived lack of respect?
But that’s not even the real issue.
More significant is the sense of entitlement the media feels to invade the private lives of every public figure, and the selective metric they apply when they do so. They grudgingly accord scant airtime and column space to stories that don’t fit their ideological agenda, then cry foul when they’re denied access to the not-yet-president’s family meal and frame the perceived offense as a threat to national security.
If the election results taught us anything, it’s that the media has become so skewed in its reporting that it can’t even trust itself. Maybe if reporters learn that lesson they’ll find themselves more welcome beside the presidential dinner table.
The Pathology of Praise
You’re so cute. You’re so sweet. You’re such a doll.
You slob. You moron. You’re such a loser.
Anyone who has studied education or taken parenting classes has heard the eight-to-one rule: offer eight positive comments for every negative one. The theory is sound. By responding to good behavior, we accomplish three things:
- reinforce that behavior so it will be repeated more often
- encourage a positive self-image inconsistent with bad behavior
- legitimize occasional criticism so it will be taken to heart
All well and good. Except when it doesn’t work.
In her acclaimed bestseller, Mindset, Dr. Carol Dweck reports that grade school teachers criticize boys eight times more often than girls. If that weren’t enough, school-age boys typically pepper their conversation with insults, put-downs, and name-calling. Consequently, we should expect to find that girls grow up into self-confidant over-achievers and boys grow up into meek underperformers.
In fact, just the opposite is true.
Professor Dweck observes that the constant negativity directed at boys makes them increasingly impervious to criticism, which may boost their confidence but leaves them unreceptive to constructive advice. In contrast, the praise lavished on girls can leave them hypersensitive to criticism, to the point where they are afraid to take risks and tend to indulge in constant self-doubt.
Applied to society at large, this may explain a lot about our collective cultural dysfunction.
Down with Democracy?
AMERICANS AGAINST HATRED AND BIGOTRY.
DUMP TRUMP.
NOT MY PRESIDENT.
[EXPLETIVE] UR WALL.
WE WON’T GIVE UP. WE WON’T GIVE IN.
UNITED WE’RE STRONGER (you have to love the irony).
These are just a few of the slogans that bedecked the nation-wide protests against Donald Trump’s electoral victory, i.e., against the American democratic system. Accompanying images included swastikas and pictures of Adolf Hitler.
Of course, protest is a fundamental part of our democracy, guaranteed by the First Amendment (which, incidentally, many Yale students petitioned to repeal). But protest is only productive when it advocates a viable solution to a problem. When protest is nothing more than collective whining, it easily turns into mob violence — indeed, as it did in several instances.
So what do the protesters actually want? To repeal the democratic process? To overthrow a legally elected chief executive? Public lynching?
If they want to advocate dismantling the electoral college, they might find support on both sides of the aisle… but only for the next election cycle. And they could make their point without vandalism, arson, or public obstruction.
On the other extreme, you have college students so traumatized by the election results they have requested exemptions from classwork and midterm exams. Such fragility does not bode well for the future leadership of the country.
It’s a pity we can’t conjure up an alternative reality portal; it would be amusing to get a glimpse of how the anti-Trump contingent would be reacting — had the election gone the other way — to disgruntled Trump supporters protesting the “rigged” election that stole victory from their candidate.
But one does have to acknowledge that sometimes the left is right. One protest sign manages to say it all:
Of frogs legs and scorpion tails
Indifferent to the specter of unleashed state-sponsored terrorism, France and China announced this week that they have joined forces to help Iran develop its natural gas fields. Apparently, an enriched and empowered radical theocracy is nothing to worry about — assuming the infamous Iran nuclear deal actually ensures any measure of global security.
It’s hard not to recall the parable of the frog and the scorpion:
A scorpion once asked to ride on the back of a frog to reach the other side of a river. At first, the frog refused, fearing for its life. But then the scorpion reasoned that the frog had nothing to worry about since, if it stung the frog, it would drown in the river as well. The frog could not argue with the scorpion’s logic and allowed it to climb aboard.
Midway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog. “Why did you do that?” cried the frog. “Now we will both die.”
“I couldn’t help it,” replied the scorpion. “It’s in my nature to sting, so I had to sting.”
The truth is that it’s easier to sympathize with the frog than with the French. The frog wanted to do a good deed and — albeit mistakenly — saw no cause for mistrusting the scorpion.
In contrast, the French and the Chinese want nothing but a larger slice of the world-economic pie, and they are willing to ignore the inevitable long-term dangers for short-term profit. The mild satisfaction of being able to tell them “we told you so” some years down the line will hardly supply adequate consolation for the precarious state the world will find itself in.
Of course, the allegory is imperfect for a different reason. France and China are scorpions, too. Dangerous, irresponsible, and unwilling to change their natures.
At the very least, however, their self-serving self-deception should make us ask ourselves: Are we frogs or scorpions? What about the candidates we vote into office?
And if we refuse to change our individual and collective natures, how far across the river can we expect to get?
Yonason Goldson 