0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
. . . For conservatives, hating the media is a reflex, and sometimes a funny one: Speaking on his “Morning Minute,” Sean Hannity once read breathlessly from an Associated Press report on a federal surveillance program, ending with the instinctual harrumph: “The mainstream media won’t tell you about that!” There is no media more mainstream than the Associated Press, which is a nonprofit cooperative owned by its member newspapers, television networks, and radio stations. Its reports appear in practically every daily newspaper in the United States, and big scoops like the one that caught Hannity’s eye routinely lead front pages from sea to shining sea. The Associated Press has bias problems and some notable competency problems, and, like any organization that does any substantive reporting, it makes errors. But it does not, for the most part, traffic in fiction . . . . . . What is happening right now is not salubrious skepticism but a kind of mass hysteria, millions of heads plunging with struthioniform insistence into the same sand, as though insisting that reality is something other than what it is, or merely averting our gaze, would somehow alter the truth. Something has changed radically with remarkable speed. Not long ago, when I would inform someone that they had passed along an Internet hoax or erroneous claim (writers on public affairs spend a fair amount of their correspondence thus engaged) the response would be a sheepish “oops.” About once a week, someone will inform me that Hillary Rodham Clinton was disbarred for misconduct (she wasn’t) or that Barack Obama’s mother-in-law is receiving a six-figure federal pension for having babysat his children (she isn’t) or some other such non-sense, and then cry “fake news!” when corrected. The irony is that they have fallen for fake news, and retreat into “fake news!” when their gullibility is shown . . .. . . Senator Ben Sasse, the best thing to come out of Nebraska since vise-grip locking pliers (apologies, senator: best I could do for a state whose other key contributions to human flourishing are Spam and Kool-Aid) has made something of a public campaign out of calling for a general reform of our political culture that would allow the emergence of “shared facts,” i.e. the acknowledgement of reality, which is necessary to addressing reality’s problems. But we cannot do that when we simply retreat into tribalism every time we read something in the newspaper that displeases us.We owe it to ourselves to take account of reality. And we owe it to the country, too. It is cheap, it is cowardly, and it is bad citizenship to simply shriek “fake news!” every time reality forces a hard choice upon us. Living in a free, self-governing society means making a great many hard choices, and there is no one to make them but us.
Author
Topic: How to Read the Newspaper (Read 328 times)
