Journalists in the mainstream media often sound as though they have no idea why anybody would entertain skepticism about the news media. The term “media bias” is, to them, a ruse. Complaints about “fake news” are evidence of stupidity or delusion.
That attitude is, of course, the surest way to give those complaints credibility.
It used to be that journalists would tell you the news, not make it, and certainly not demonstrate it for you. This week we entered the exhibition phase of the New York Times’s fake news division. Consider an item in the technology section of the paper’s Sunday, April 22 edition.
The piece, by tech reporter Nellie Bowles and headlined “Emergent Force at Facebook,” profiles Facebook’s director of news partnerships, the sometime news anchor Campbell Brown. It’s Brown’s chief responsibility, we learn, to identify and suppress deliberately misleading stories—what used to be termed “fake news” until Donald Trump applied the term to mainstream news outlets generally.
Brown, we learn from the Times, wants to start Facebook-specific news shows featuring mainstream news anchors. “Once those shows get started,” Bowles explains, “Ms. Brown wants to use Facebook’s existing Watch product—a service introduced in 2017 as a premium product with more curation that has nonetheless been flooded with far-right conspiracy programming like ‘Palestinians Pay $400 Million Pensions for Terrorist Families’—to be a breaking news destination.”
One small problem: The pensions-for-families-of-terrorists story is 100 percent true.
It took real talent to write a story about fake news in which easily verifiable facts are termed “far-right conspiracy programming,” but the Times managed to do it. To its credit, the newspaper issued a straightforward correction: “An earlier version of this article erroneously included a reference to Palestinian actions as an example of the sort of far-right conspiracy stories that have plagued Facebook. In fact, Palestinian officials have acknowledged providing payments to the families of Palestinians killed while carrying out attacks on Israelis or convicted of terrorist acts and imprisoned in Israel; that is not a conspiracy theory.”
We seem to remember the Times running a full-page ad heralding its own commitment to truth. “The truth,” announced the ad, “is more important now than ever.” Indeed.
