By Norman Baggs, Gainesville, Ga. | When I started in the newspaper business 40-plus years ago, I never imagined that before my career was done there would be a national dialogue on how to keep a gullible public from being misinformed by the proliferation of “fake news.”
Baggs
Looking back, it’s really pretty easy to see how we got where we are today. The advent of cable television gave birth to a whole new source of information. CNN paved the way for the 24-hour news blitzkrieg that anyone under the age of 30 now thinks has always been the norm.
Others jumped on the 24-hour bandwagon as cable television options expanded, and the constant need for higher volumes of information inventory resulted in increasingly frequent departures away from traditional reporting. There was a shift to analysis, perspective and opinion from a bevy of sometimes self-proclaimed experts and pundits.
Before long it was hard to separate the reporting from the pontificating. And as news gave way to opinion and “infotainment,” consumers formed allegiances to the networks that most often catered to their personal points of view.
It became the norm that major national news stories would be presented in different ways depending on the network, with the “slant” overwhelming the facts and the entertainment value of the presentation more important than the details. Eventually news consumers became divided, with “liberals” faithfully following certain television networks, “conservatives” following others.
Soon consumers had segregated the delivery systems so that, more often than not, they were getting the news they wanted to hear presented in conjunction with opinions and perspectives with which they most often agreed. Objectivity, long a mainstay of the most traditional of news reporting, gave way at the national level to interpretation, analysis and perspective.
Then came social media, a delivery system technologically designed to tap into the personal preferences of its users. With social media, news consumers no longer had to choose the news sources that most reflected their personal opinions; those choices were made for them by algorithms, which assured the chasm of objective neutrality in news reporting became even wider.
With social media delivering ready-made audience of people hungry for news that confirmed their beliefs about the world, it was easy for the unscrupulous to launch websites catering to those millions who were more than willing to click on headlines that bolstered their perspectives.
Fiction presented as news has become the unfortunate end result. People believe what they read because they want to, repeat it because they can’t imagine it isn’t true, and defend it because, well, “It’s on the internet so it’s got to be true, right?”
We laugh at some of the things presented as news and convince ourselves that no one would really believe those stories, but they do. And what’s sadder is that, as a result, there is increasing evidence consumers no longer know how to evaluate the sources from which they get their information.
You need look no farther than the recently completed presidential campaign to understand how scary the reality of the nation’s news ignorance has become. How many voters do you think made up their minds on how to cast their ballots after reading fiction presented as news and believing it?
Norman Baggs is the general manager of The Times in Gainesville, Ga. You may e-mail him at nbaggs@gainesvilletimes.com.
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