Lies, damned lies and journalism

 by Patrick Richardson

I’ve been a journalist all of my adult life. Frankly, when I pass I’ll probably be sticking a recorder in the face of the Almighty and asking him if he doesn’t think he should give up this whole “universe thing” as a bad job and start over.

So I know whereof I speak when I say the media LIES to you. I, personally, like Fox News, and think their straight reporting (as opposed to their opinion shows) is pretty solid. Bret Baer and Chris Wallace in particular ask everyone tough questions and are men for whom I have a lot of respect. I think Fox is better on that end than most of the rest.

But.

That’s damning with faint praise.

They’re just as all-in on “Corona Virus will kill us all” as everybody else, and for the same reason — ratings. And like everyone else they’re using numbers to lie to you. Such as a graphic a former pastor of mine posted that made it look like Missouri and New York had similar case rates — which is not true, but they do both have more than 2,500 cases and got lumped together.

This is how it’s done folks, they lie with the truth. (Yes, yes, outlets have gotten caught making stuff up out of whole cloth, but that’s actually rarer than you think.)

An example, if you will. Last week Governor Laura Kelly used a 40% jump in cases in Kansas to justify essentially shutting down churches for Easter. But the devil, as it often is, was in the details. Forty percent SOUNDS scary, but in absolute numbers? Bit over 100.

Not nearly as scary right? But the Topeka Capital-Journal runs an egregiously bad hedline screaming that Republicans were fighting the governor over the order as cases spiked 40%. Oh sure they reported the actual number but it was buried several grafs down with the 40% figure waaaaay up at the top. (And no, I don’t want to argue whether she was right to do it or not, that’s a different discussion and not the point here.)

Every journalist knows how to do this. Those of who take our ethics seriously avoid it. We all have our biases and we do try to be cognizant of those, but we DO try to avoid shaping the story to fit the message we want to send.

This is how they manipulate public opinion. It’s not outright lies, but which stories they choose to tell, the way they choose to tell them, where information is placed in the story, and what words are used in the hedlines.

In most of the Irish legends of the Sidhe courts, the Fae could not LIE to you, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t DECEIVE you by the way they told the truth.

So keep that in mind when you read stories in the national press (local press is actually generally much better. Those of us who really want to make a difference and take our jobs seriously tend to gravitate to community journalism, not the national outlets) that there’s a very good chance you’re being lied to with the truth.

We can tell you what we know, or think we know, be we ever so honest, we’ll still get it wrong.

So sure, read any outlet you like. But keep your critical thinking cap on. Question, be skeptical. Do your own research.

And if we got it wrong? By all means call us on it.

The problem with the national media at this point is that there is zero accountability.

When I was a small town newspaper editor, I knew most of my sources personally. The mucky-mucks in most of the cities where I was an editor had my cellphone number.

I screwed something up they knew exactly how to get hold of me and weren’t shy about doing so. Now sometimes that was just “we don’t like your coverage” and that usually got pretty short shrift, but if we got it wrong we corrected it.

Try doing that with Jim Acosta or even Bret Baer for that matter.

https://stoppinginflyovercountry.com/2020/04/17/lies-damned-lies-and-journalism