I take “Fake News” personally — and so should you

Everyone makes mistakes. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, business executives, coaches, police officers, preachers, umpires. That includes people like me, who for more than 40 years reported, wrote, and edited the news.

Not everyone has to own up to their errors. When journalists who work for what has come to be called, derisively, the “mainstream media” make mistakes, we are required to publish a timely, straightforward correction. It is an essential part of our culture. As a young reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s Dallas bureau, I lived in fear of getting a strikemark in “the book”, a notebook that recorded our errors for the year. Should four of those marks with a fifth diagonal mark appear across from my name, I understood that I would be asked to seek employment elsewhere.

A lot has changed in the business of journalism since then, but the prevailing culture in the fact-based media remains: get it right. Or be prepared to correct it.

Back then, if most newspapers and broadcast networks reported something — a crime, a natural disaster, a verdict, an election result — society accepted that it had actually happened. Which isn’t to say there’s anything new about politicians attacking the media for reporting on their misdeeds. In the mid-1950’s, we had one governor in Georgia, Marvin Griffin, who was always being investigated for corruption. He coined the phrase “Lyin’ Atlanta Newspapers” as his stock rebuttal, and it stuck for decades. Fake News.

What’s happening in America today is altogether different, but also not new. A former President continues to claim the election he lost — a loss confirmed by his own Attorney General, numerous state officials and judges of his own party—was stolen. To the Former Guy’s diehard believers it matters little that the accountable news media continues to expose the Big Lie for what it is. They are buttressed in their outrage by a parallel universe of alternative media, which very much includes the popular prime time commentators on Fox News, but also Breitbart, OAN, Newsmax, and various talk radio hosts. In this world, the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol was not an insurrection aimed at overturning the constitutional certification of the presidential election. It may have been a “false flag” operation, or just like any other tour of the Capitol.

All this comes straight from the totalitarian handbook. The promotion of disinformation to break down democratic rule is well captured in the writings of George Orwell, or political theorist Hannah Arendt’s 1951 “Origins of Totalitarianism.” It worked on the Right and the Left, in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

In the former guy’s case, it began with seemingly trivial falsehoods. He had the biggest inaugural crowd in history, and was willing to suppress U.S. Park Service photos to prove it. Hurricane Doria threatened Alabama, and he proved it by altering a National Weather Service Map with a Sharpie

What we’re seeing now is far more sinister. The concept is simple. Repeat fantastic lies until a mass of citizens throw up their hands and say “with so much fake news, I don’t know what to believe.” And so they believe only you — from Covid-19 will “magically disappear” to my loss was the “greatest electoral fraud in history.”

At the end of a year’s extreme social isolation, I’ve been reflecting on what I want to do as I re-enter the world, and with whom I want to do it. Previously I never used political affiliation as a qualifying filter for a social relationship. I enjoyed spirited political give-and-take over a meal. Long ago my shell grew hard for deflecting anger at “the media.”

Until now. I simply no longer have the stomach for engaging with anyone still claiming they “don’t know who to believe.” My new “not welcome here” stance isn’t only rooted in what I regard as an immediate serious threat to this country’s constitutional democracy.

Consider: How would you react to a vitriolic public movement aimed at convincing your fellow citizens that every doctor is a quack, every lawyer is a shyster, every cop is a sadist, every teacher is a predator, every ref is in the bag, every business executive is a greedy crook? If you had devoted your life to the honest pursuit of any of those jobs, you too might take it personally.

Well, I’m finally taking personally the crusade to dismiss the reporting of fact as fake. And you should too. It’s about the truth. You can’t pretend to care about the truth and still embrace any of the politicians or pundits who continue to enable the Big Liar. Not at my dinner table.

Contributing columnist John Huey is former Editor-in-Chief of Time Inc. and has worked as a journalist for almost 50 years.