Fake News. Alternate Facts. Misrepresentation. All claims against
mainstream journalism – “The Media” – which come from Trump and those who
support him. With the longest government shutdown in history still going, as
well as the continuing investigation into Trump and his campaign, alleged
collusion with the Russians, and continued unrest for various causes across the
country, news outlets need to be extra cautions about stories, their sources,
and their veracity.
In recent days, we’ve had the news service Buzzfeed report on alleged conversations
between Trump and his former “fixer” Michael Cohen. In their online articles,
Buzzfeed claimed to have evidence through a third party that these
conversations did occur, where Trump directed Cohen to lie about prior
conversations had between the campaign and Russian officials about a Russian Trump
Tower plan. While Buzzfeed tries to be a serious journalistic outlet, in at
least this case they jumped the gun without confirming their sources and seeing
the evidence their source claimed to have. The original Buzzfeed article was
picked up by major news networks and carried nationwide, and then the facts
came into question when doubts were expressed on both sides of the story – even
the Mueller investigation team denied some of the allegations in the article.
Also, just a few days after this bombshell of alleged
wrongdoing, a group of high schoolers were in Washington DC as part of a
school-sponsored trip. The trip was allegedly planned to correspond with this
year’s Women’s March in order to protest against it. Initial reports, after a
video appeared on Twitter, claimed the boys confronted a Native American man
who was walking The Mall near the Lincoln Memorial. Later updates to the
incident also showed another group of individuals which had been also
protesting, which the student group had also been dealing with, and claims
continue that Nathan Phillips approached the confrontation of these two groups
in order to try and diffuse it. This was also picked up from the initial
Twitter post, and spread virally through social and news media. More video was
released from different angles, as well as statements from the two main players
in the video – Nathan Phillips, and the smug-looking student face-to-face with
him, Nick Sandmann.
Consider this – breaking news is breaking the news.
While the newer news outlet, Buzzfeed, may have jumped the
gun a bit to try and break a story, it isn’t the first time any media service
has made this mistake – and it won’t be the last. There was a well-known
network news anchor who depended upon his team of producers – Dan Rather. The CBS
News team thought they were breaking the story about George W. Bush’s
questionable service in the Air National Guard, but it came down to a lot of hearsay
and no confirmable facts. Even now, respectable, mainstream media outlets, are
trying to out-do each other and the plethora of online news startups (or “upstarts”
as some think of these non-standard news sources). Even social media is a
challenge to those traditional sources, since anyone with a smartphone and a
Twitter account can post from the scene of any event, beating those “legitimate”
journalists from getting the scoop.
As part of the business, news services want to be the first
to every story. This is how they get the ratings, which then gets the
advertisers, and that’s what pays the bills in most traditional media models.
The “always on” capability of the general public – what I refer to as hyperconnectivity – defeats a lot of the
efforts of the news outlets to be that “breaking news” source. More often, even
the newer, hyperlocal news sites, still find their latest stories from social
media, and then rush to get the details before a competitor can get the story
out.
Because of this, the cry of “fake news” is becoming common. While
there are certainly questionable sources out there – those created with a deep
bias for or against a certain person or cause – not all news outlets are
actually fake. However, even the legitimate news from traditional services or
internet-based sites can suffer because they are lumped into the generalized
grouping of “news” – even the most stalwart and trusted media companies of the
past suffer from the accusation of falsifying their reports, misrepresenting
the facts, and only trying to sensationalize one side of a story.
While it is up to news agencies to ultimately “get the facts
right” in their reporting, the public needs to remember there are basically
three sides to a story; two of them are based upon the opinions of the opposing
sides, the third is the truth between them. Sometimes it isn’t worth it to be
first on the scene, but instead to be thorough and get all the facts to present
a well-researched article for the readers and viewers to form their own
opinion. Too much sensationalizing and polarizing of the story is part of the
reason there is such controversy in this country now.
Get the facts – all of them – and then consider this…
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