MAINSTREAM NEWS MEDIA

According to Gallup, American’s confidence in newspapers and television news is at an all-time low. There is reason to be suspicious of news media. They don’t always get things right.

For example, I recall a news article about an American soldier. The article said he was a first sergeant. Then it referred to his platoon. Wait a minute. An infantry company has four platoons. But the first sergeant is not attached to a platoon. He is part of the company headquarters. A follow-up article referred to the man as a sergeant first class. Sergeant first class is a military rank. First sergeant is a position in a military company.

Another example that comes to mind is the presidential election of 2004. Two months before the election Sixty Minutes aired a story that made a false statement about George W Bush’s service in the Texas Nation Guard. The story was based on documents to Sixty Minutes had received. It turned out that the documents were forged. When the forgery was discovered, Dan Rather said that if he had known that, he would not have gone ahead with the story.

So journalists, like the rest of us, are imperfect human beings. They make mistakes sometimes. But that is not the end of it. They have means in place to minimize errors. News writers work with editors so that some of these mistakes can be caught and corrected before the story goes to print or on the air or online. Some mistakes still get through. When errors are caught after the item has been released to the public, responsible journalists make corrections. The news item about the man they identified as first sergeant was really a sergeant first class. Sixty Minutes admitted that they had been conned and corrected itself.

Sure we might sometimes get an incorrect story from the mainstream media, but we know that the media makes an effort to minimize false stories. And if they sometimes fail, the media will make an effort to correct their errors. With false media, on the other hand, we know that they are deliberately trying to sell stories that they know to be false. At the very least we have to be skeptical of any “news” put forth by known disseminators of untrue stories.

Donald Trump, for example, lied as often as he told the truth. The Washington Post kept track of the false or misleading statements he made while he was in office. In four years he told 30,537 lies.

30,537 lies!

The President of the United States!

After that performance, why would anyone believe anything he said? Another notorious prevaricator is Alex Jones. At Sandy Hook Elementary School Adam Lanza murdered twenty children and one teacher. The worst thing a parent can face is the loss of a child at any age. (Believe me, I know.) How much worse it must have been for these people to lose their innocent children in such a senseless event. Yet Jones claimed the whole thing was a hoax, staged to motivate limitations on the ownership of fire arms. For adding more pain to the pain of their loss, Jones has been ordered to pay $473 million to the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims.

These are only two of the most notorious fabricators. There are many more, including several “new” commentator qt Fox News, QAnon, and many of the MAGA promoters.

Sure, the Mainstream news is not perfect. They sometimes get things wrong. But the most egregious of the con artists are so often false that it would be a mistake to believe any of the garbage they spew unless it is confirmed by a reliable source.

I don’t know what motivates some people to make these false statements. Much of it seems to be greed. They tell these lies for political or financial advantage. That seems to be the in the two men we have cited. Others may be deluded themselves. Still others might be suffering from psychological problems that makes them see the world upside down. Whatever their moral, intellectual or psychological weakness, we need to avoid seeing the world through their flawed vision.

We rely on information we get to make decisions about our lives. We owe it to ourselves to make decisions based reliable information.

ACCURATE INFORMATION

After the development of the personal computer, a need arose to train people on how to use these new gadgets. Schools met this need by offering classes to people who wanted to learn how to use computers for such things as word processing and email. Since that time, computer capabilities have grown infinitely. With the development of the internet, people are able to look up information on virtually anyone or anything.

With the development of the iPhone in 2007, information available through search engines has become even easier. In developed countries almost everyone, including children, has access to all the information that is available on the internet. Even in less developed countries cell phone use is widespread.

The problem is: much of the available information is false. A major example of this is the lies about Covid 19 that have been spread over the internet. Because of these lies, large numbers of people have refused to get vaccinated against this deadly disease, and many have died because of this refusal. Another Big Lie that has been disseminated is the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Because so many people believed that lie, thousands of believers ascended to the Capitol on January 6, 2020, and tried to overthrow the presidential election. People died from this insurrection.

Two generations ago the schools answered a need by teaching people how to use these new devices. The challenge now is to educate people so they will not be taken in by the next lies that are spread over the internet.

People need to develop a skepticism about what they read over the internet and indeed about any source of information. They need to evaluate sources of information and recognize that news from QAnon is not as valid as news from the New York Times. It is not a matter of politics. Liz Cheney is not the only conservative Republican that recognizes that “facts” believed by the MAGA crowd are probably not factual.

People have died because they believed false information about Covid 19. We could lose our democracy if too many people believe the lies that come from the MAGA crowd and their like.

Schools need to rise to the task again. People need to be educated so they will not fall for the lies that are spread over the internet. They need to learn how to evaluate information sources. Lives and American democracy are at stake.

Handbook for Humanists

About forty years ago I wrote a series of articles dealing with ethical issues, like the following:

What does it mean to be free? Can you really be free if you have a distorted view of reality?

Martin Luther King, Jr., among others, taught us that some laws are unjust. Are we obligated to follow unjust laws? If everyone is entitled to disobey laws that he considers unjust, will the result be chaos? How do we decide if a law is just or not?

How do logic and intuition play together to help us discover truth? And how do we find the best decision in morally ambiguous questions?

I never tried to publish these writings, but recently I decided to have copies made for my children and grandchildren in a book I am calling it Handbook for Humanists. If you know of someone who might like to read this, it is available on Amazon. The paperback is $7.95, the kindle is $2.99.

LIES

Coronavirus vaccines are capable of altering a person's DNA

- The vaccines contain microchips that allow people to be tracked

- The vaccines contain lung tissue from aborted fetuses

- The vaccines are capable of causing infertility

All of these statements are false, yet a survey showed that 20% of Americans believed at least one of them.

28% of Americans believe that harmful effects of the corona virus vaccine are being deliberately hidden from the public. A survey taken by the University of Oxford revealed that more than a fifth believed that the corona virus crisis is a hoax. 60% of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.

17 % of Americans believe that “a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics.” Belief in these false statements is damaging to all of us. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died, many of them needlessly because so many people, relying on misinformation, refused to follow common-sense advice such as masking, keeping a safe distance, and getting a vaccination.

Although numerous studies showed the 2020 election to be free and fair, millions of Americans believed instead that it was somehow stolen. Hundreds of them, many of them armed, assembled in Washington, D C, on January 6 to try to prevent the Congress from doing its constitutional duty of certifying the election.

The government of the United States is finding it more difficult to function because of the animosity between the two political parties. Much of this hostility has grown out of lies about the supposedly stolen election.

Misinformation, particularly about politics, has always been with us. In 1994 the Weekly World News reported that 12 United States senators, including William Cohen of Maine, were aliens from outer space. Cohen just laughed it off, because who would believe such an outrageous story? That was then, but today outrageous stories are a daily fare.

What has changed? Many elements contributed to the change, but two have been particularly powerful. One is the former President of the United States. The Washington Post kept track of the lies and misleading statements that Donald Trump made in office. It was 16,241. The President of the United States! 16,241 lies in office! How can anyone believe anything that man says?

The second big contributor to the spread of misinformation has been the social media, particular Facebook. 36% of Americans regularly access Facebook for news. Facebook! Not the local newspaper like the Boston Globe! 71% get at least some of their news from Facebook. Papers like the Globe, The New York Times or the Chicago Tribune have editors who check news sources for accuracy. Facebook has no one to check on articles written or posted by your crazy uncle. Facebook is not a news source. It is a platform where anyone can post pretty much anything they want. Why would any sane person believe that what he read on Facebook is news? Misinformation experts see a connection between reliance on social media for news and a belief in false ideas about COVID-19. So it is not just the outrageous liars like QANON and Alex Jones who spread misinformation. It is also common everyday people who spread conspiracy theories through the social media.

According to the French Reboot Foundation, conspiracy theories help explain complicated events where the truth may be too hard to accept. Those who believe conspiracy theories are more likely to accept misinformation, particularly if it seems to confirm what they already believe. Numerous studies have shown that conservatives are far more susceptible to political misinformation than are liberals. As we look at issues involved in misinformation, we can see that almost all of them reflect a conservative point of view. Older people also are susceptible to misinformation. Being an older person myself, I am not sure why that is so. Perhaps it is because until recently traditional news sources were pretty reliable, unlike QANON or Facebook.

What can be done about this? Fake news hurts people, and people who are hurt can sue. One of Alex Jones’s most outrageous lies was that statement that the shootings of 20 children and 6 teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax. Ten families sued Jones. The court ruled against him. People who spread harmful misinformation need to be held accountable.

Arizona State University offers some guidelines that come help protect us from fake news.

1. Pay attention to where your news is coming from.

“If it's coming through your Twitter, Facebook or Instagram feed, don't think of it as information from those platforms, because it’s not,” said Scott Ruston, a researcher in ASU’s Global Security Initiative. "Ask yourself, 'Who is this coming from and what is the background?' If the article you read makes accusations, ask yourself, 'Who does this benefit? What’s the underlying source material?' For example, the U.S. Department of State recently identified disinformation campaigns about the coronavirus in Europe," Ruston said. In those cases, strident claims about dangers to residents were made in order to undermine the government.

2. If you get information from social media, check the original source.

“When someone asks you where you heard something, if your first inclination is to say Twitter, you need to stop and check because Twitter itself tells you nothing,” said Kristy Roschke, co-director of the News CoLab in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“Twitter gives people a feed of people who will tell you things," she said. "Ask questions like, ‘What's the actual post?’ ‘What's the thing that's telling you this piece of information?’ ‘Who is that person?’ 'Is it a media organization you've never heard of before?’ "You can find all of that information in a Twitter profile. There's basic information you can find with a millisecond of extra effort. People who have credibility generally put information in their bios to bolster their credibility.”

3. Within news articles, examine the sources and how they are included.

“Look for how sources are treated and referenced,” Ruston said. “Journalists that work for traditional news outlets like AZCentral, CNN and the New York Times have a set of professional ethics guidelines and will assert their sources. The best is when the sources are named, the next best is when the names have been concealed for the protection of the source. However, it’s appropriate to be skeptical of articles that depend solely on unattributed sources without any kind of corroboration.”

4. Read beyond the headline.

“It's important to read the story fully," Ruston said. "Very often, headlines are misleading and are not there to inform you. The purpose of the headline is to get you to click on the link or to buy the newspaper, or to tune in if you're channel surfing.”

5. Get your news from a variety of sources.

People should check with additional news sources to confirm information they feel strongly about. “If you read something and if your reaction is any sort of extreme emotion, outrage or unmitigated joy, that’s a clear indicator that you should definitely read more deeply,” Ruston said. “Many of the disinformation examples we’ve come across in our research are designed not to inform but rather to activate a strong anger or fear response.”

6. When you see your friends and family share misinformation, correct them.

“Always be kind when helping people identify misinformation. Don't insult people's intelligence," Roschke said. “Don't repeat lies, because when you emphasize the thing that they got wrong, they're actually cognitively more likely to remember the thing they got wrong. You want to provide them with new information that comes from a source as reputable as possible.”

7. Find out what other information is out there.

“I really believe in expertise, which is why I really like NPR as a news source because there is deep expertise both from perspective of journalistic integrity and in selection of credible sources,” said Nadya Bliss, executive director of the Global Security Initiative. “I've actually done this where somebody will tweet something and I would think, ‘That's interesting, I wonder if it's true.’ Then, I will go separately into a Google search and pull up the news articles on it and see what's written about that topic.”

WHAT CAN YOU BELIEVE?

Some people think that we should not tax the ultra-wealthy or business very much because to do so would cause enterprises and enterprisers to have less motivation to succeed, and it would have a negative effect on business in the country. I do not agree with that position, but I do not think it is irrational or crazy.

I say this because I consider many ideas of conservative Republicans are indeed irrational and crazy. It is not necessarily irrational to make decisions based on misinformation. Every decision we make is based on what information we have, and we do not always have the best information possible. We can’t always get the best information, and we have to make choices based on the data we have.

However, any choice we make based on false data is not going to have the best result. And if we make a decision based on false data when the real data is readily available is indeed irrational.

Well-known extreme right-wing sources such as QANON and Alex Jones are not the only ones who spread misinformation. Online publication such as Natural News contribute to outright lies and distortion of truth that gets spread over the internet. On August 10 Natural News stated that the governor of Tennessee has issued an executive order authorizing the National Guard to carry out medical kidnappings. According to them, the guard could break into people’s homes, kidnap them at gunpoint, and take them to covid internment camps.

If this were true, it would be shocking, but of course it was not true. What the executive order actually did was authorize the guard to help in the covid emergency by such things as diagnostic testing, nursing, and ambulance services.

The story did not originate with Natural News. It had been posted on Instagram, but it was a satire. Natural News, not realizing that it was tongue in cheek, took the satire as fact and ran with it.

Here are links to two more articles from that source of “news.”

Biden wants to criminalize crossing state lines while “unvaccinated” - NaturalNews.com

Feds declare anti-vaxxers are “terrorists,” unveil 90-day plan to wage false flag violence and blame it on “anti-lockdown extremists” - NaturalNews.com

The social media also spreads false stories. One such story stated that airline flights were backed up across the country because pilots and crew were walking off flights and refusing to take mandated vaccines. In fact, the flight delays were caused by weather.

Another story stated that the Canadian province of Alberta had lifted Covid-19 restrictions because health officials had provided no evidence that the virus exists. In fact, the restrictions were lifted because predetermined goals had been met.

If you challenge anyone who believes wild tales like these, they will say you have been fooled by the mainstream media. But I ask you: What is more believable: sources like the New York Times or sources like Natural News?

A Bitter Pill

Politicians are not known for honesty. However, in recent years political lying has sunk to new lows. The 45th President promoted over 20,000 bits of information during his term in office. The result has left the country in a precarious position.

A Bitter Pill on kindle

A Bitter Pill to Swallow

With few exceptions, politicians have not been known for their dedication to the truth. However, in the last half a dozen years, political lying has reached new depths. The Washington Post in tracking the 45th president found that during his term in office he made over 30,000 false or misleading statements. That has to be a record. Not only did he fill the air with his lies, but for the most part members of his party went along with him.

Presumably most members of his party knew that the president’s statements were not exactly the truth, but they feared that if they spoke out, the president would use his power with his followers to end the political careers of anyone who opposed him.

The result, in my opinion, has left the country in a precarious position. Ac-tions have been taken to placate one man rather than the good of the country. Politi-cians, particularly at the state level, have whittled away at the principles of democ-racy. I am not particularly given worry, but I worry, for the first time in my life, that democracy could be lost.

For the past year I have been writing in The Alternative about events that seem to endanger democracy in our country. I have put together these postings in a little book that I am calling A Bitter Pill to Swallow.

I am now preparing A BITTER PILL TO SWALLOW as a kindle book. I hope to have ready soon.