SPOTLIGHT: Media skepticism appears to be widespread.

BIG PICTURE: Producing accurate and complete news stories has always been challenging. Many facts aren’t available or apparent, especially when a story is first breaking. News organizations value speed, so there’s often a limit on how much background research can be done.

As children we’re encouraged to view something printed in the newspaper as the gospel truth. In reality, it’s only the “first rough draft of history.” It’s neither definitive nor the whole story.

Journalists have always been fallible human beings, with biases and blind spots. But much of the news-consuming public continues to be unsophisticated. For example, many aren’t clear on the difference between a straight up news article, a columnist’s analysis/opinion, and an editorial reflecting a newspaper’s official position.

Whether we call it the mainstream media or the legacy media, skepticism about the veracity of news reports now appears to be widespread. In my view, this a healthy development. Skepticism is always warranted. The admonition to ‘Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see,’ has always been rather good advice.

Nevertheless, it’s a depressing time to be a journalist. We all used to imagine that the covers of Time magazine and The Economist told the truth. That National Geographic, Oxford University Press, and the New York Academy of Sciences Magazine were reliable sources of information. That publicly funded broadcasters were reasonably evenhanded. This is no longer the case.

The Internet is awash in memes that reflect and fuel media skepticism. Here’s a sample:

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LINKS:

• Washington Post, Time magazine’s major mistake on the crying-girl cover
• Compare the headlines on the websites at the Independent and CNN to the report here. The text of the first two stories were edited after the fact. They now admit Donald Trump was merely following the lead of the Japanese Prime Minister while feeding fish during a state visit. But the headlines continue to mislead the public nine months later. These headlines imply a faux pas that never happened.
• My previous commentary: Polar Bear Dies, National Geographic Lies
• Anthropocene: The Media’s Fake Geological Epoch
• Oxford University Spreads Fake News
• The Nobel Lie That Just Won’t die
• Fake News: Not New and Not Rare

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