News News: The Faked and the Baked

 

There’s the faked news.  And there’s the baked news.

 The plethora of fake news and the abundance of misinformation as a primary problem in this society are well known phenomena.  Much of it is dispatched through social media, but web sites and publications masquerading as news outlets contribute mightily.

 Aspects of the Internet make these easier to promulgate, and more seductive, as mentioned here before. But the fundamental reason misinformation and fake news exist is that people believe it.  Why do they believe it? Partly because they want to or need to (and their social relationships and identities depend on them believing it.)  And then there’s the basic formula described generations ago that enables all kinds of scams: there’s a sucker born every minute. 

 It’s an education problem, too.  Too many people don’t know how to judge the information flooding into their phones and their online lives.  They aren’t educated in how to judge credibility, and they don’t know enough about the subject matter to spot inaccuracies.  As Katherine Hall Jamison points out, with civics no longer taught in many schools, people don’t understand the roles or functions of the branches of government.  There’s also a kind of automatic dismissing of any authority that’s part of the anger and resentment.  Add to that a lack of awareness of the power of algorithms in creating the appearance of massive agreement and therefore credibility, creating an emotional tide that breaks through ordinary skepticism and creates cults of mutually reinforcing true believers in outlandishly false narratives. 

 Additionally however, the current media environment has been partly prepared by changes over recent decades in how news is reported in traditional news outlets. 

 Around seventh grade I learned the fundamentals of news writing: the inverted pyramid of who, what, when and where, with the basic story in the first paragraph and contributing detail in order of importance in the paragraphs after it.  And the front page news stories I was reading in the Greensburg Evening Tribune pretty much adhered to that formula.  The bad old days of biased news dictated by political interests and ownership were supposedly over, because there were now Standards.

 That was in the mid 1950s.  But by the early 1990s, when I was trying—unsuccessfully as it turned out—to teach a course in news writing, I had problems finding real world news stories that matched the standards I was teaching.  And it wasn’t just Richard Scaife’s right wing 1980s fake news pioneer, that same Greensburg Tribune-Review.  I noted in particular coverage of a speech by then President Clinton in the New York Times.  There was a front page news story, and a piece labeled as news commentary also on the front page.  Their first paragraphs were nearly identical.  As wholes, the pieces were very similar.

 The news story judged the speech, and by 1950s standards, failed to report it.  A story that adhered to the once-professional and now academic guidelines would have selected the most important statements to quote in the first paragraph, while including the who, when and where. The next paragraphs would have quoted more from the speech, and eventually maybe quoted reactions of prominent people to the speech.

 But the 1990s story quoted very little, and pontificated on the meaning and the failure of the speech.  As did the commentary.  It was quite an eye-opening combination.  In this case the news wasn’t exactly faked, but it was baked. 

 I can just about date the dwindling of the old standards, when the inertia and laziness that accompanied them became more obvious. Cognitive dissonance arose in the 1960s, when, as usual, the official pronouncements concerning the Vietnam war were dutifully reported as news.  Unfortunately, as news providers slowly accepted, these statements clashed with the realities that on-the-ground reporters saw. Others pointed as well to historical distortions and buried ideological assumptions.

  Newspapers were just about dumbfounded for awhile.  They were used to treating official pronouncements, not only as news, but as the only news. They really could not figure out what to do when officials, including President Johnson, regularly lied.  (The media was a little quicker to adjust to Trump but it did take awhile.  Still, I marveled at the reporting in his last year, when stories were very blunt about this President of the United States being a serial liar.)

 The flummoxed—and fearful—established press was slow to adapt.  That provided the space for a new type of newspaper, known today as the alternative press.  These newspapers—usually weeklies, tabloid format, often given away—combined the countercultural spirit of the underground press with the journalistic standards of the established press but adapted to this new situation as well as a younger readership..  (It was for this reason that an early article on alternative newspapers in the New Yorker --I’m pretty sure it was by Calvin Trillin-- referred to them as “sea-level” publications.)

 I was a writer and editor for several of them, beginning with the Boston Phoenix.  We adopted aspects of another trend of the time, the so-called New Journalism that used storytelling techniques borrowed from literary forms, to our reporting as well.  Apart from our cultural criticism, we published news according to those established standard.  Our tone could be excessive, but basically we just included more facts, more voices, and a broader area of subject matter than simply quoting officials and the official line.  Apart from doing stories the established papers were afraid of, or didn’t know anything about.  At best, these papers were true alternatives: adding other voices, more information, because while the official pronouncements were news, they were not the only news. 

 By the mid-1970s the sea-level papers nudged the dailies to more contemporary cultural coverage (often hiring our critics) and a bit more skepticism in news coverage, although it was the Pentagon Papers and Watergate that really institutionalized the change.

 But if the 60s and 70s saw point of view, analysis and opinion creeping into news, all of that became turbocharged by the nearly simultaneous rise of cable TV news and social media.  The news was already starting to become pastries; sweet TV soundbites led easily to bite-sized stories in USA Today and People magazine.  As news media were absorbed into cost-conscious conglomerates, the number of reporters began to dwindle, a trend that turned into a stampede when the Internet hit.  The news bureaus and reporters that TV networks and newspapers used to have all over the country and in at least the western world are mostly gone.  Local news reporting barely exists.  The vacuum of reporting has to be filled with something, and that’s usually the hot air of patter and opinion.

So today the news that isn’t faked is usually baked.  It is formed into little cakes for us to consume.  Just about every headline these days includes the words “here’s why,” or “here’s how.”  We’re told what the five or seven or three “takeaways” are.  We’re told what stuff means rather than presented with the stuff itself.

 Then there are the stories that purport to tell us “why we like X” or “why we can’t stop watching Y.”  But this is not the old-fashioned editorial we, meaning the writer representing the publication.  No—it is “we” the readers, presumed to be one with the writer’s tastes and opinions.  Just one big happy social media mob (or perhaps the demographic group the outlet lusts to capture.)

 Network television news reflects the changes.  Networks evening news probably does more stories that it used to, but in briefer and more superficial form.  When they saw themselves as a public service, they risked boring visuals to detail, for example, a presidential proposal, at least in bullet points.  Now its quick visuals and blather.  On the day President Biden proposed his jobs bill, the infrastructure package, the story ran just about last on one evening broadcast, as repetitive generic visuals accompanied by lots of puns on the “road” to passage, or “building bridges” in Congress.   The Sunday interview shows used to be commentary on the news reported during the week.   Now every day is Sunday, with its panels of pundits shaking and baking, bloviating on what was never actually reported.

 As for political point of view in reporting, I make no false equivalence.  The so-called left wing media can be excessive and downright hysterical, but by and large, the hosts for, say, MSNBC, do not distort facts or lie.  Right wing media, including FOX, lies and distorts all the time.  It’s their main business.

 While faked news is a serious problem, baked news is at least annoying, and potentially a problem.  When news media report at least some of what official say (before rushing to the reactions), this reporting requires the same skills to evaluate as it as it used to: you have to know who is talking, how credible they are, what their self-interest is.  That’s our job as readers, our part of this relationship, and it means we are the arbiters of the news.  Baked news takes over that role, and I tend to resent it.  Moreover, it confuses things.  I may read opinions, marked as such. They can be valuable if I am also presented with what they are opining about.  A cacophony of nothing but opinions makes it easier for distortions to take hold, and easier for readers to give up trying to figure out the truth.

In the real world, how straight news was reported had its weaknesses.  In The Boys on the Bus, his brilliant book on the national press covering the 1972 McGovern campaign, Timothy Crouse described how reporters, terrified that they would miss the story other newspapers got out of the day's events, would see what the lead AP reporter filed and then write their stories to match.  If they all selected the same story to write, nobody would get in trouble with their editors for missing what other papers published.  He called it Pack Journalism.  This conformity is dangerous enough in reporting.  But these days, spin and opinions travel like wildfires through the day's news cycle, so there is a conventional wisdom based mostly on repeating what everyone else is saying.  Each cable channel has already arrived at its position by afternoon, and there's little unbaked information left for the citizen--sorry, the consumer-- to assess.    

 For though the cake may be delicious it may also be poisonous.  And don’t let all those links in Internet stories fool you into thinking it must be credible.  I read a piece recently in which the writer summarized an article in support of his position and helpfully provided the link. When I followed that link I found that, lo and behold, the article did not say what he said it said.  But at least I had the information to check.

 Part of baked news is the rise of pundits, the yeast in the mix.  Apparently since officials are either cynical hypocrites or merely mouthing soundbites they pay others to write for them (or both), the real news comes from pundits.  That’s becoming excessive.  Apart from their often inflated professional credentials, there’s too much we don’t know about where their opinions and analysis is coming from.  There are likely all kinds of conflicts of interest we don’t know about.  We have to judge what they say with the same standards as we should judge pronouncements by officials and other anointed authorities.

 Some baked news is better than others.  Rachel Maddow does what alternative press or magazines used to: provide a narrative framework, often historical, and link things into a pattern.  Sure, she repeats the same point about five times in a row, but she’s doing more than offering an opinion—she’s laying out a pattern for us to judge, or just enjoy.

  And that’s part of what’s going on with news: more than ever, it’s become entertainment.  That cannot at this point be called news to anybody, but it’s worth remembering.  They don’t call them shows for nothing.  Even newspapers don’t compete for readers primarily by obtaining “scoops” or ferreting out news nobody else gets.  They get you to eat their pastries.  And they are so addictive.