“Accuracy. Accuracy. Accuracy” – Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the New York World and St. Louis Post Dispatch, late 19th century.
I just heard someone criticize the news media for telling lies about the safety of elections in the United States. It seems to be a common opinion these days.
What bothers me is that it shows a lack of understanding of what newspapers and electronic news organizations are about, with the exception of Fox News and MSNBC which seem more interested in opinion and propaganda than reality.
Many believe news organizations should only be telling the truth. The problem with that is: Whose truth?
That may sound ridiculous, but just consider the difference of what people believe is the truth about the 2020 presidential election. Despite what secretaries of state in every state have said the election was fair and honest, despite the fact the Trump administration’s top cyber security expert said it was safe and fair (he was fired for saying that) and despite the fact that Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, found no evidence of massive fraud, Trump and his followers maintain the election was stolen. That, for them, is the truth, no matter how delusional that may be. Some members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate still believe in that.
What is a news organization do? Ignore what millions of Americans are saying and believe? Or report it?
If it is reported, apparently some people will accuse that organization of spreading lies.
If it does not report it, the news organization will be accused of ignoring what a large number of Americans believe.
It is an old debate in newsrooms: If you know something is not true, should it not be reported no matter how many believe it?
I always come down, as do most journalists I know, on the side of reporting it. By the way, I’m a retired newspaper editor and was at one time a reporter and columnist.
The only real question is how do you report it. Responsible news organizations, for instance, will report the claim and either say it has been disproven or not proven or could not be confirmed. The claims that the election was stolen normally includes the warning that those claims have been disproven or are false.
The goal is to let readers or viewers know what is going on, who is saying what and letting the readers decide for themselves. It is not a news organization’s role to tell people how to think or even what to think, just to provide information.
That brings me to Pultizer’s quote about accuracy. Reporters and editors don’t know what the truth is. They are not usually present when something happens, and even if they were, they can only see so much and talk to so many people.
By concentrating on accuracy, the goal because to capture what is being said by all people. Not to color or distort, but to accurately report what they say and what they saw.
Was OJ Simpson guilty of murder? A jury found him not guilty. Notice, the verdict is not innocent because that was not proven at the trial. What the jury decided was the state had not proven his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
The responsibility of news organizations was simply to report about the evidence and jury’s verdict, not to decide the truth.
Is Donald Trump guilty of interfering with the 2020 election and the peaceful transition of power? It is not the news media’s responsibility to rule on that. That is for the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
Was the 2020 election stolen? That is not for the news media to decide, just to report on the competing claims and the facts surrounding them, such as the nearly universal failure in court to prove claims that it was. (One case of voter fraud succeeded in a Pennsylvania court but the number of votes was so small that it would not change the outcome.)
So before blaming the news media for reporting something, take a breath and remember that its job is to report events, not to pass judgment on them.
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