Newspapers have multiple obligations to the communities they serve, including an obligation to avoid the spread of misinformation. And that is why the Timberjay, unlike some other area newspapers, makes a concerted effort to fact check our news stories, editorials, and claims made in letters to the editor.
It was Daniel Patrick Moynihan who coined the phrase “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Here at the Timberjay, we don’t subscribe to the notion of “alternative facts” as put forward by former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway, who famously coined the phrase when challenged about the many falsehoods disseminated by the Trump White House.
Facts are facts, and alternative facts are lies told to mislead the public. And they are as destructive when they appear in a letter to the editor as they are in a social media post or a White House press briefing. We welcome letters with a wide range of opinions here, but when writers make fact claims that are false, unsubstantiated, or simply nonsensical, they will not appear in our pages.
In the most recent example, a letter writer claimed, without any evidence, that protesters at the recent “No Kings” rally in Ely were bused in.
We had two reporters at the event and saw no buses and talked to many of the protesters who were overwhelmingly local residents.
Those few who weren’t local happened to be staying in the area and decided to take part in the Ely event because they couldn’t make ones closer to home.
Besides our on-the-ground reporting, basic logic exposes the claim as fiction. There were similar protests in most nearby communities in our region, and at 2,700 other locations around the country.
Why would anyone choose to travel, literally to the end of the road, if they had many other places to protest much closer to home? It was a nonsensical claim.
Finally, we contacted the letter writer for documentation of his claim and received no response. We ultimately edited the claim from the letter that actually ran.
This same letter writer also claimed that attacks against federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were up 1,000 percent.
While that’s a claim made by the Trump administration, actual cases of attacks on ICE officials are up only about 25 percent based on media reviews of federal complaints filed in court. Remember, if someone truly attacks a federal officer, they’re going to be prosecuted. If assaults were up anywhere close to 1,000 percent, the courts would be full of such cases. The Trump administration, as usual, has failed to provide any substantiation for its claims when questioned by reporters. It’s another “the immigrants are eating our pets” kind of story, one that survives based on repetition rather than veracity.
We know that some newspapers don’t edit such obvious falsehoods from letters to the editor, telling themselves that they’re just granting letter writers their First Amendment freedoms. In our book, that’s a lazy man’s cop-out.
Professional news media have an obligation here, to use the editor’s pen on everything that comes through the door to ensure that bad actors aren’t able to use their publication or broadcast to disseminate falsehoods. It’s what separates quality newspapers or other credible news sources from so much of social media, where the lack of fact checking has turned such online sites into cesspools of disinformation, much of it generated by foreign bots working to undermine our democracy. Sadly, they appear to be succeeding.
While there’s not much we can do about foreign bots, we can all have an impact closer to home.
We urge residents throughout our area to demand better from their local news.
When you read or see news stories, editorials, or letters to the editor that make dubious, unverified, or illogical claims, ask your local editor whether they verified the claims and, if not, why they’re so casually allowing questionable information into the pages of their newspaper.
If their answers aren’t satisfactory, consider whether their product is worth the price of a subscription.
It comes down to accountability, and it’s a never-ending job in a democratic system. Newspapers in particular play a critical role in maintaining an informed electorate. When they fall short, and allow misinformation to creep onto their pages, they’re undermining that important mission.
The public should demand better.