From 2021:
"Despite all the recent attention, however, questions about the veracity of the information provided by the media have been around for as long as there have been printed news sheets. The Yellow Journalism era of the late 19th century, marked by aggressive competition between William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, offered readers plenty of highly questionable stories and over-wrought scandals. Later, the tabloid era delivered detailed “coverage” of Bigfoot, alien babies and bizarre celebrity revelations to anyone standing in the grocery checkout aisle...
“If we define fake news as reporting things that are clearly not true, then to me it doesn’t seem to be a big problem.”
According to Haskell, however, there’s a second kind of informational trickery that ought to be attracting far more attention than reptilian conspiracy theories: “What we should really be talking about is the current explosion of media bias – when mainstream media organizations report on factual events in ways that make them unrecognizable. And that is a huge problem.”
Most of the reporting on Trump, Haskell observes, was deeply influenced by the opinions of the journalists covering him, overwhelming any effort to objectively report or disinterestedly assess his actions. The same goes for claims from the left-wing press that Conservative politicians in Canada are engaging in conspiracy theories when they claim the Justin Trudeau government is taking advantage of the pandemic to promote a radical “Great Reset” agenda. Accusing people with whom one disagrees of engaging in conspiracy theories has become a subset of the fake news phenomenon, a conversation-stopping technique based on the imputation that the opponent is mongering fake news.
SPOT is a mnemonic for a four-step method meant to enable readers to uncover unreliable news stories:
- Is this a credible Source?
- Is the Perspective biased?
- Are Other sources reporting the same story?
- Is the story Timely?
C2C Journal put these four criteria to the test with a pair of experts in the field. Lydia Miljan is a political science professor at the University of Windsor and a close observer of Canada’s journalism industry. She believes the first question – is the source credible – “seems to be more about protecting the market share [of legacy media] than assessing the veracity of any particular article.” Many of the legacy newspaper industry’s current financial woes can be traced to the proliferation of new online outlets that are nimbler, have lower overhead costs and can cater more directly to the particular interests of reader and viewer segments. Given these competitive pressures, any claim new news sources are somehow less credible than the mainstream press, Miljan suggests, should be seen as a rather transparent effort at self-preservation.
In today’s endless universe of media sources, Miljan notes that credibility is “not necessarily to be found in the source of an article, but in the merits of what is being said in that article.” The ability of digital news sources to embed evidence directly in stories via hotlinks, for example, allows even small upstart outlets to back up their assertions and prove their points without having to lean on a hundred-year-old masthead to bolster their authority. Brand names and a long reputation were once necessary to establish the reliability of news providers; that’s no longer the case, says Miljan. Proof is what matters now.
The second SPOT rule, whether an article is biased, seems equally redundant, observes media professor Haskell. “This question might have made some sense back in the 1990s when objectivity was still the gold standard of journalism,” he observes. “But today that has been rejected by a plurality of journalists, who now uphold advocacy as their highest ideal.”
Newspapers today revel in their crusading nature. The Toronto Star, for example, is currently engaged in a noisy and unrelenting campaign against the for-profit nursing home sector, a stance that fits within the social justice-themed Atkinson Principles the Star adheres to. There is nothing wrong with a media outlet adopting a strong point of view. A great proportion of journalism necessarily involves some degree of bias. Many European papers, for example, historically aligned themselves openly with one of their country’s major political parties. (Some North American papers did so as well.) But those political allegiances were worn openly, and there typically were competing papers supporting the other parties. That is no longer the case. As Haskell notes, the SPOT campaign “seems to suggest there are some media outlets that aren’t presenting a biased perspective. And that’s a lie. It’s all biased to some degree.”
And sometimes the bias in question is based on inherent self-interest... The industry’s preferred solution is to have Ottawa make Google and Facebook pay newspapers for allowing users to share and comment on their stories...
Media firms are using what remains of their public influence to advocate policies explicitly meant to benefit their own interests. The opposing view, that the newspapers actually encourage readers to share their stories on social media in hopes of reaching more eyeballs (helpfully providing links to facilitate sharing) and that they should probably be paying Facebook and Google for this valuable promotional service, is rarely heard. It seems a rather obvious case of bias, if not a conflict of interest...
Miljan’s own ground-breaking research demonstrated that most journalists in Canada are substantially more left-leaning in their political views than the Canadian public they serve. This predisposition, she says, “Has an effect on how the news is reported, as well as what stories the media chooses to report.” It is, Miljan agrees, wholly inappropriate to suggest legacy media outlets are somehow free from bias while others are steeped in it.
One way for the individual to circumvent or at least ameliorate inherent media bias, notes Haskell, is to peruse a wide variety of media sources. “If everyone read both left and right-wing political views, we’d eventually come to some semblance of what the real facts are,” he ventures hopefully. Curiously, reading widely is not one of the four SPOT Fake News rules.
Next comes Rule 3, the oddest claim of the SPOT system: are other sources reporting the same story? It was once the greatest dream of any journalist to break a story no one else had, or say something no one else was saying. This ranged from being the first reporter to find out that, say, the recent death of a prominent local citizen has been upgraded to a murder investigation, all the way to uncovering deeply buried facts that influence the course of global affairs. The best writers and broadcasters lived for such opportunities. Their key motivation being to uncover the truth others had missed.
Here we include such legendary scoops as the Pentagon Papers and Watergate (plus many subsequent “gate” issues) in the United States, and Canada’s own Adscam scandal. While many scoops are a team effort, often the most memorable work is done by individuals determinedly pushing against the grain. One recent and tragic instance is that of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the independent Maltese journalist whose fearless exposés on corruption within her country’s political class led to her death in a car-bombing in 2017.
“I find that problematic,” says Miljan of SPOT’s Rule 3, as it suggests readers should be suspicious of all forms of enterprising journalism listed above. Citing her own research, she observes that “we know the product from the commercial media is all very much the same. They provide a homogenous concentration of accepted opinion.”
Being different was once the hallmark of great journalism. Now it is being redefined as a reason to be suspicious it might be fake news. (Galizia’s blogging would have presumably “failed” several SPOT Fake News rules.) This is not only self-serving, in that it suggests whatever the vast array of corporate mainstream media has to say is the only material worth reading, it threatens an end to the bravado and genuine public service of individualistic news reporting...
Many of the most memorable and deliberate examples of fake news – defined as reporting on things that never happened – have come from the legacy media. Here we include the fabulist flourishes of disgraced New York Times reporter Jayson Blair and The New Republic’s Stephen Glass, as well as the 1981 Pulitzer Prize won (and then returned) by Washington Post writer Janet Cooke for inventing a heart-breaking tale of a young heroin addict. Going back farther, there’s also Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ credulous Moscow correspondent from the 1920s and 1930s, who gave Stalinist propaganda the appearance of fact by reporting everything the Soviet Union’s Communist apparatchiks told him. Duranty also ignored, or failed to inquire into, the horrific death toll arising from Stalin’s various purges, land seizures, mass executions, and famines...
Despite the current panic being raised by government and the media industry over fake news, however, evidence suggests the public is quite capable of sorting out the facts all on its own. Earlier this month, for example, Statistics Canada released its own study on fake news in response to worries that Canadians were being fed bad intel about the coronavirus online. The survey Misinformation During the COVID-19 Pandemic found that 96 percent of Canadian adults who used the internet had spotted Covid-19 information they deemed to be “misleading, false or inaccurate.” ...
The real and more daunting battle over fake news is far more political than epistemological or technological...
“There is increasing social pressure not to break from established narratives,” observes Haskell. A case in point, he says, is the current conventional wisdom that Canada is an inherently and systemically racist country – a claim we have apparently imported from the U.S. When National Post columnist Rex Murphy devoted a column last summer to his view that Canada is not a country marked by systemic racism, he was not merely attacked by ideological opponents. Murphy’s words set off an internal revolt among the paper’s younger journalists, many of whom apparently believe that Canada is not only seething with racism, but that nobody should be allowed to argue otherwise. They demanded that their colleague be reprimanded or removed, as has been the case with many heterodox writers and editors at other publications. In the end, the Post appended a notice to the offending column stating that its appearance involved “a failure in the normal editing oversight”.
The intensity of current ideological fervour extends far beyond the media, however. Any deviation from certain official messages has become a firing offence in many organizations. Recall when RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki last summer gave The Globe and Mail her honest opinion about systemic racism in the police force. “I really struggle with the term ‘systemic racism’,” she said. “If systemic racism is meaning that racism is entrenched in our policies and procedures, I would say that we don’t have systemic racism.” Having said what she believed, rather than what she was supposed to say, Lucki was immediately attacked on all sides. It seems likely she would have lost her job had she not promptly recanted everything in favour of the required narrative of pervasive racism...
Instead of pushing back against ideological and political conformity, the mainstream media often play an enthusiastic role in enforcing it. This increasing tendency was recently brought into sharp focus by celebrated investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald...
Greenwald’s career arc lays bare his industry’s demands of conformity. Writing for The Guardian in 2013 he won a Pulitzer Prize and was widely lauded for his role in bringing to light Edward Snowden’s leaks about global government surveillance. Subsequent investigations into animal welfare issues and criticisms of Israel further elevated Greenwald’s standing among the proper-thinking crowd.
But when he decided to debunk Trump-Putin conspiracy theories, Greenwald suddenly became a heretic, earning a hit piece in New York Magazine. His ousting from polite company was completed when he refused to stop investigating the business dealings of U.S. President Joe Biden’s son Hunter during the recent U.S. presidential election. It was his pursuit of this story that caused Greenwald to suddenly resign from The Intercept, an investigative news outlet he had helped found, due to the “extraordinary experience of being censored by my own news outlet.” He is now a wholly independent writer on Substack.
The lesson from the Greenwald Affair: corporately-funded investigative journalism is acceptable only so long as it focuses on targets on the political right. Reporters who aim their uncomfortable questions at the wrong targets can quickly find themselves packing up their desks. That may not in itself be fake news. But it creates a world in which the news becomes one-sided and unreliable.
If there’s one thing SPOT Fake News gets right, it’s where the solution to concerns about the quality of news sources is to be found. It’s not with the producers of the news – however celebrated or esteemed those writers, editors or on-air personalities may be. They will always be subject to their own personal biases. Neither is it a problem that can be solved by the corporate end of the news business, which is laden with its own agendas. Nor through any sort of government interference, including the New York Times’ bizarre suggestion earlier this month that the U.S. needs a government-appointed “reality czar”.
Ultimately, the only credible solution to fake news lies with the public at large."The National Post affair doesn't stop left wingers slandering them and hating on them, naturally.
