Trump takes (and gives) a lot of heat for tweeting and
talking about “fake news.” While I think he has a point (example provided
below) I think it’s more accurate to call what the news media does is practice
“fake objectivity.”
I have seen first hand how this fake objectivity shapes
opinion. Here is an example. I play tennis with a guy who prides himself on
reading the Washington Post, Boston Globe and The New York Times. With him
being politically liberal and knowing that I’m a libertarian he will often ask
me what my position is on global warming, healthcare or other subjects. My
positions on these and other subjects differ from his, of course. I will
support my beliefs by citing facts I’ve picked up from various sources such as
the The Cato Institute, Reason, Niskanen
Center, and so on. Or I’ll refer to blogs such as Watts Up With That or Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. on global warming. (To balance
my information I also still refer to traditional news sources such as The
Boston Globe, The New York Times, CNN, etc. as well as occasionally watch Bill
Maher to get more extreme left wing views.)
Recently when my friend extolled the healthcare of England
and Canada I told him about the number of people who do not receive treatment
in the overburdened British healthcare system or how Canadians and the British
suffer from lower cancer survival rates compared to the U.S. because they have
to wait longer to receive diagnosis and/or treatment. Every time I refer to a
fact like this my friend is both astonished and skeptical. Why? He is
astonished because he has never heard about this from his news sources. He is skeptical
because he believes the mainstream news sources are telling the full truth (and
nothing but the truth) so the sources I’m referring to have to be
untrustworthy!
Getting back to an example of fake news, Scott
Adams has talked a lot on his vlog about how CNN continued to push the hoax
that Trump was referring to white nationalists when he said there are “fine
people” on both sides of the Charlottesville issue. Adams has produced the full
quote from Trump’s statement in which Trump clearly condemns white nationalists
and neo-Nazis while saying there are fine people on both sides of the
Confederate statue controversy. So there is some truth behind Trump’s constant
tweeting about fake news.
But I think the news media exerts a deeper, more pervasive
and more persuasive influence on how we form opinions by choosing which facts
they report and which they ignore or omit. I’m not saying this is a conscious
conspiracy to squelch contrary opinions. I think it’s combination of a number
of influences: the shift from trying to report the news objectively (or at
least the façade of objectivity) to outright advocating select positions while
jettisoning attempts to be objective, the competitive drive to be first to
report stories without taking the time to check your sources, distrusting or discounting
opinions that don’t conform to the current “conventional wisdom,” and confirmation bias.
As I’ve said many times in this blog objectivity is very
difficult, if not ultimately unattainable. We should still test our beliefs by exposing
ourselves to different opinions and sources. In the process we still might never achieve full objectivity but can
at least be reasonable.
