Unfairness In Public News

Norman Lear offered a terrific take on fake news in The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

Among the points he made:

• False stories were more likely than real news articles to go viral on social media
• We’re more likely to pay attention to the final source of an article — the person who calls it to our attention — than to the original source.

The answer, Lear claims: “There is an urgent need for more and better civics education in our schools, and that must be joined by efforts to foster media literacy and critical thinking.”

There in lies the rub — to quote a source whose authenticity is still in doubt.

People are not all rational human beings like Mr. Lear is. Humans are selfish, greedy and needy. We believe what we want to believe, what makes us comfortable and what is believed by the

people we admire and want to emulate.

In other words, as Lear claims, “The truth doesn’t have a chance.”

People who get their civics education from our mainstream schools don’t get an accurate picture of how the country works. For example, when I was in high school, we never learned (officially) about lobbyists, think tanks and “pundits.”

These are the largest sources of fake news (often called PR or spin). But larger than any of these — social media. There was none invented when I was in school and I doubt it is taught in schools today. In the age before tweets, followers and likes all we had were the big three — TV, radio and newspapers. The first two were under the government oversight of the FCC and were subject to The Fairness Doctrine.

Basically, it required equal time spent giving each side of a story about controversial issues of public importance. That all ended in the great deregulation purge of the Reagan administration (when there was a strong Republican majority in the Senate). The Fairness Doctrine went the way of the dodo bird.

Newspapers were always exempt.

Thus radio and TV became like newspapers, with the honest and balanced truth only an option. Newspapers were known for “yellow journalism” and many broadcasters found out how lucrative that was.

The invention of social media on the internet brought this to a whole new level. News media is based on big numbers of viewers or readers. The goal is to attract the most people, and it didn’t take long for the legitimate media to decide to get into social media and draw followers and clicks.

The truth is seldom as attractive as rumor and gossip. An old saying from the 1960s — “The New York Times will never sell as many copies as The National Enquirer.” Of course, most of the money comes from advertisers rather than single copy sales.

TV has long used Nielsen ratings, radio has its Arbitron. These are used to gather statistics on audience sizes, and the bigger the audience, the higher the rate of advertising.

Truth is just bad business. Such a pity.

Expect fake news to continue to grow and prosper. If you don’t like it, learn to adjust your own filter.

All the numbers really reveal is human nature and what it seeks.