“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” —Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The Times is not alone. In the past few months, CNN and MSNBC ratings cratered by half, a catastrophic plunge in viewership unequaled in 30 years. This past fall, the Washington Post reported a loss of a quarter of a million subscribers, and then another 75,000 at the end of last month. It seems that everywhere you look, people are switching off the news media and electing to watch cooking shows instead.
What’s going on? Well, if you can no longer trust your plumber to do quality work, you stop calling him up to fix your faucet. The same goes for your news source.
That path leads straight into the voracious jaws of social media algorithms designed to get you to stay and click, stay and click.
According to the most recent Gallup Poll, less than a third of Americans trust the mass media, an all-time low.
At the same time, according to the latest Pew Research study, a majority of Americans still believe a free press is vital to society.
So our attitude toward the press is similar to how we feel about that robo-voice that croons, “Your call is very important to us,” as you wait and wait for a live person—you suspect it’s lying, but you stay on the line anyway.
What happened? From whence comes our two-thirds majority mistrust?
Something changed. Your grandma’s three-network mid-20th-century Walter Cronkite–style news is long dead and buried. Broadcasters back in the day respected standards of truth-telling and fact-checking. If they didn’t, their license was pulled by the FCC.
All that went out the window with the internet. Now anyone with a keyboard and a connection has a soapbox, and the profiting platforms feel no obligation to sift fact from fantasy.
The resulting free-for-all brawl of noise-as-news leaves the citizen confused and adrift. So he reaches for something familiar, something he can take comfort in—something, in short, he agrees with. Author and First Amendment scholar Steven T. Collis describes the phenomenon in his recently published book, Habits of a Peacemaker. “We are too often in too much of a hurry to truly process all the news with which we are bombarded online. So we tend to make decisions with our intuition and gut, instead of by processing information to see if it’s accurate,” he wrote. “Too often, we seek information with a goal of finding information that will confirm the conclusions we have already reached.”
That path leads straight into the voracious jaws of social media algorithms designed to get you to stay and click, stay and click. And those pulling the cyberspace strings don’t give a hoot if your opinions end up having the depth and scope of a bumper sticker slogan—especially if they can use it to increase profit.
Another solution is to tune out the news entirely, as increasing numbers of us are doing. The phenomenon, known as “news fatigue,” has spread like a pestilence. In 2016, 51 percent of us said we follow the news closely. Today, that figure has declined to 38 percent.
But an informed populace is vital to democracy. So if barely one-third of us are even paying attention, where will that lead our country and the world in five years or 10 or a generation from now?
Better to stay up-to-date on what is happening in our world, but be smart about it. Fortunately, Cornell University recently issued guidelines anyone can follow to effectively weed out the dross from the truth in a media designed to divide rather than inform. These include:
- Check the source and the author. This writer was once urged by three friends to watch a YouTube video that spells out, in no uncertain terms, the terrible [fill in the blank] behind all the positively awful [fill in the blank]! A three-minute check on the video’s creator revealed that his only other claim to fame was a one-hour glorification of hallucinogenic drugs. Sorry, not interested.
- Be curious and actively investigate what you read and hear. If the story is accurate, it will contain verifiable facts and statistics. It won’t, for example, collapse something that happened to one person in 1993 with something that happened to two people in 1998 and then turn that into 500,000,000 doomed men, women and children in 2025.
- Recognize your own emotional triggers and try to rise above them. If something you read triggers an over-the-top reaction and you want to go out and hit someone, don’t give the algorithms a win by doing it. Collis advises that the mere recognition that a button has been pushed is often sufficient to enable one to rise above the emotion and bias and just look at the facts.
- And if I may add one more: Realize there’s more to life. Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard put it well years ago when he advised, “Don’t read the newspapers for two weeks and see if you don’t feel better.”
Ungluing yourself from your screen and giving the world a second chance every so often doesn’t mean you have news fatigue. It means you’re living an existence that isn’t continually assaulted by the rantings and resentments of strangers. Every once in a while, breathe, take a walk, have friends over—with the proviso that, if they want to sample your brownies, they’re to leave their politics and angst outside the door.
Winston Churchill wrote, “Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.”
Those who seek to live with the truth might be—like truth—resented and derided, with their motives distorted by people of ill will. But in the end, truth is the armor that protects one after the lies and liars are swept away.
Truth is our strength.
It’s worth the work.
