Along with the standard kitchen table concerns — health insurance, jobs, taxes — Rep. Mike Johnson’s, R-La., constituents have something different at the forefront of their minds.
According to Johnson, “one of the most frequent questions” he gets at town halls these days is “What is an objective source of news?” — specifically when it comes to television.
“And I say there really isn’t one,” Johnson explained in a Wednesday editorial board interview with the Washington Examiner, “because whatever you’re watching on TV is slanted one way or the other. So far as I can tell, on television anyway, there’s no objective source of news like there might have been back in the good old days or something.”
“Everything has a spin on it, and that is an unfortunate development that we’ve come to in the country because the other thing that’s presupposed in a constitutional republic is an informed and engaged electorate. And if the electorate is not informed, and they’re engaged without being informed, that’s dangerous,” he said. “But we’re losing some element of both.”
[Also read: Google News is heavily biased – but it’s not rigged]
It seems significant that so many voters have questions about the media that it’s become one of the top inquiries Johnson hears at town halls, amid all the pressing problems facing families; confronted with the opportunity to ask their congressional representative a question, they just want to know where they can find accurate sources of news. That’s a sad comment on the state of the media.
It’s a question with no easy answers, as Johnson agreed. This week, Facebook drew the ire of the Left for flagging a ThinkProgress piece by noting a The Weekly Standard fact check determined it was untrue. (The Weekly Standard is a sister publication of the Washington Examiner.) My colleague Becket Adams has more on that here.
The false ThinkProgress piece had been shared thousands of times, and as powerful as Facebook is, the subsequent fact check can’t possibly undue the damage already done. We’re well over a decade into the proliferation of online news sources — and its collision with the rise of social media — but the consequences of that confluence are starting to wreak a scary impact on our ability to agree on what constitutes objectivity, or even to agree on a common set of facts as a society.
On its own, Johnson’s anecdotal evidence underscores how intense distrust and discontent with the media is outside the Acela Corridor, where journalists still pat themselves on the back. There may not be a conservative regulatory solution to the problems in the press, but the matter is clearly evolving into a major priority for voters.
