Believe half of what you see; none of what you read

In a world that is constantly changing we can no longer be sure the news we hear is the “news” and not someone’s version of the news.  Certainly the media has fallen a long way away from “just the facts, Ma’am” to quote Dragnet’s Detective Joe Friday.

It’s not the world of Walter Cronkite any more.  The media has moved from simply providing the unfettered truth to adding in their own spin.  After all, the American public has always been a load of fools, hasn’t it?  Come on now, look at the people to your right and left, surely someone among them, or maybe two, has to be a member of what the infamous Baltimore Sun editorialist H.L. Mencken called the “booboisie”.

A recent Associated Press story by Carole Feldman and Emily Swanson suggests that as many as 94 percent of the population do not have a lot of confidence in the media.  Personally, I think the figures are skewed a bit and the percentage should be somewhat higher, like 99 percent.  But who am I to say?  A part time journalist.

So my thought is for you take a look for yourself.  Read the papers or the news on the Interweb?  Probably the Internet is more honest than a lot of stories in the funny papers, right?

Feldman and Swanson, in their article, say “Trust in the news media is being eroded by perceptions of inaccuracy and bias, fueled in part by Americans' skepticism about what they read on social media.”

In part of this statement, I think they are dead accurate.  The Americans have little trust in the media.  They would like to tie the “why” to social media, to some degree; but I think the problem isn’t that much of an outlier.  I think the problem with the media is the media itself and not any of the so-called social media junk.  Twitter never wrote a front page story in the New York Times, or an article in the Times-Dispatch, The Progress-Index, or the Hopewell News.

I would say an editorial, but then editorials are supposed to be biased and as such really don’t rise to the same level of dishonesty or, as we have learned the term, “misspeaking”.  Misspeaking in my dictionary is a euphemism for lying.  Anyone who steps up to correct a statement they make that turns out to be false, would love to just say “Sorry, I misspoke.”  Who, especially a member of the media or a politician, would ever be able to keep their status if they simply said the truth, “Sorry, I lied”?

Sure admitting the truth is a hard thing to swallow. For a politician, it may hurt for a news cycle or two, until the booboisie or maybe just a general run of homo simpleton’s forget that ever happened.  Maybe it did, and maybe it didn’t.  But the public, in general, has a short memory and is very willing to forgive.  Especially if the perpetrator is your perpetrator. Still, a lie is a lie, right?  It’s not someone “misspeaking”.  Misspeaking implies a sense of accident.  I accidentally said something that was untrue. Sort of like calling a car crash and accident, which implies no one at fault.

Perhaps these people weren’t aware of the fact that they were conjuring up something.  Perhaps, and I know this is a stretch, but maybe it was something from a dream or something that they really, really, really wanted to happen but didn’t but makes the story better.

In truth the media likely hasn’t changed very much.  Mencken, who I quoted earlier, wrote when Warren G. Harding was the president.  He had a lot to say about the American way, and its news vehicles.  For instance, this is how he defined the media of his day “A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”

Mencken would have absolutely adored the current political climate.  The battles between the candidates running for office would have provided a person who said, “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance” a field day writing about our politics.

Probably none of this applies to you, dear reader.  After all, we are part of that portion of society that simply sits, points a finger, and giggles, right?  And then again, as the column writer, I guess that makes me a member of the media and we pretty much covered how much faith you can put into something the media publishes.