‘… it may be possible that what is being fed to the public is poison, except the public doesn’t know it because it is unaware of the biases, or, worse, the agenda.’
WERE it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
So wrote Thomas Jefferson, one of the most ardent champions of the fundamental freedoms behind the founding of the United States, and in the 1780s some 20 years before he became its third president.
I generally sympathize with Mr. Jefferson but I have to admit that there are times when I feel that newspapers and newspapermen with a very clear agenda that is not the preservation of democracy can in fact be a democratic society’s worst enemy.
It is no surprise therefore that tyrants and would-be tyrants first capture the means of mass communications to proselytize, to spread their “gospel truth.” And when you have – as you always have – a vast majority of citizens unable or unwilling to go beyond headlines and verify verbal or written stories on their own, then you have a playing field that is ripe for manipulation, for brainwashing, underneath the veneer of responsibility investigative journalism.
When an investigation or inquest is launched by individuals or groups that have a preconceived notion on who the guilty party is, the result is a frame-up. And when the framed-up case is presented to a public that is unable to sift through the facts themselves, the result is a lynching.
This is the fate that individuals and classes of individuals, organizations, corporations and even whole nations have suffered through the centuries. In this day and age of social media and its utter lack of fact checking and the basic elements of journalistic responsibility, that fate can befall anyone in the blink of an eye.
And facts? They often come too late. By the time they do, the lynch mob is feasting on someone or something else.
So many such cases are surfacing in America. So many individuals, usually colored, jailed for years only later to be exonerated when the facts come to light. Why didn’t these facts come to light earlier? Because journalism done poorly, worse done intentionally poorly, provokes the lynch mob. And you and I know that there are times when Justice may be blind but she can hear the crowd asking for Barabas.
Just as it takes principle and courage to stand up to those interests with the ability to bend the system their way, it also takes as much principle and courage to stand up to the mob that is provoked if not egged on by the newspapers Jefferson lauds.
Let’s face it, every human being has biases. And because editors and reporters are human beings, they have biases. They can be blue or red (the political divide in the US), they can be pro-life or pro-choice, they can be pro-democracy or pro- discipline, they can be pro-communist or pro-capitalism. Heck, they can be pro- mining or prefer to stop mining altogether although how we can do that without bringing all of human development and progress to a standstill as well still has to be explained to me.
Now, any of these biases will seep into a reporter’s reporting as sure as water seeps into the ground. Which then affects the quality of their output – their reporting – and the impact of their output on the consumer, the reader or listener. So if you listen to Fox News daily you have a view of US politics one way; if you read the Washington Post daily you have a view of US politics the other way.
In other words, it may be possible that what is being fed to the public is poison, except the public doesn’t know it because it is unaware of the biases, or, worse, the agenda.
Like governments and government officials, newspapers and newspapermen can poison people, and they have. And whether we like it or not, whether it is easy to do so or not, and whether we can do something really about it or not, individually and collectively we need to be as conscious of this as much as we possibly can.
