Fueling our division

“And that’s the way it is.”
For years, that’s how Walter Cronkite signed off from his nightly news broadcast on CBS. And for most of America, that was the gold standard, and with good reason. Standing behind Cronkite, or NBC’s John Chancellor, or ABC’s Peter Jennings, was a vast news organization with reporters located around the world and editors and producers working to ensure that their nightly news broadcasts were accurate and fairly presented.
And that was just the television news. Back then, most daily newspapers in major cities had hundreds of reporters working their beats, with old-school editors and fact-checkers doing their best to keep their readers accurately informed. When it came to the news, facts were facts, and opinions were served up, appropriately, on the editorial page.
When the newspaper or nightly news broadcast reported the news, Americans could feel confident that they were receiving the closest approximation to the truth that was humanly possible — that the news was really telling us the way it was.
We all had our opinions on the news of the day, but we expressed our views from an incredibly important foundation critical to the health of a nation: a shared reality.
It’s the loss of that shared reality that has America seemingly flying apart.
Most of us remember that sense of optimism that most of us felt in the 1990s, as the Cold War took a breather and the rise of the worldwide web seemed to promise a new age of universal access to information that could bring the world together more than ever before, creating the space for the expansion of democratic principles and international goodwill.
As we have seen, unfortunately, it has not worked out that way. While the web has certainly offered the world a greater variety of voices, it has done so without the traditional checks that used to keep the bad data out of the system.
The traditional media has gatekeepers, legions of editors, producers, and fact-checkers who made sure that the information they disseminated was accurate and reported in good faith. Unfortunately, far too much of the “information” disseminated on the web today is malicious disinformation, distributed by bad actors or others who’ve fallen down any of a myriad of rabbit holes into Alice-in-Wonderland worlds utterly divorced from reality. And due to the troubling nature of social media, whose algorithms seem to elevate some of the worst actors, those who seek to fill our feeds with conspiracy theories, erroneous political or health claims, and other bad information can lead us astray in a hundred different ways.
Some politicians have learned they can benefit from reinforcing this bad information, as a way of motivating their supporters, caring little about the longer-term implications for the health of the country.
Recent polling has revealed that most Americans now get their “news” from social media posts or YouTube, where they can find a vast sea of so-called influencers. Some voices online do work hard to present factual information, but in many cases these sites offer alternative facts designed mostly to enrage for a political purpose. As was recently revealed, some of these, particularly on the right, were being paid (perhaps unwittingly) by Russian entities, to spread their messages, designed to further erode our sense of ourselves as a nation.
Many of these influencers have no concept of journalistic integrity and clearly don’t care that they may be spreading propaganda masquerading as some kind of insider knowledge. For many, the more extreme their message, the more followers they attract. Whether its bogus claims of stolen elections, underground pedophilia rings in the non-existent basement of a pizzeria, immigrants eating cats and dogs, or QAnon, they all feed the notion that only they offer truth, while the traditional media lies to us to cover it all up.
It’s a message that allows for easy demonization of those who disagree and it’s incredibly destructive to our society as well as our ability to sustain ourselves as a democratic nation.
And it all rests on the preposterous notion that professional journalists, backed by editors and other support staff, and whose reputations can literally be destroyed by a single erroneous report, are the ones distributing falsehoods, while the hot-headed bloggers ranting on a foundation of nonsense, are the only ones we can trust.
As Walter Cronkite might have put it back in the 1970s, that is definitely not the way it is.