Has anyone told the Mars rovers about this?

When I was a little kid, folks, many, many things were bad in the world. The Cold War was on and people were afraid of accidentally setting off World War Three, which they figured would last about half an hour and pretty much destroy the planet. All that practising for Armageddon made people paranoid, and some nitwits in Congress (there have always been nitwits in Congress, that's what it's there for, a nitwit sanctuary) kept looking for Communists everywhere. For some reason, the politicians seemed to believe that the Communists hung out in movie studios' writers' rooms. Go figure. Shouldn't they be spying on defence plants, or something?

The people around me suffered from materialism, cynicism, racism, and a host of other 'isms I've probably forgotten about. The president was a jolly, laid-back man who seemed to play golf a lot. There were a lot of rules about behaviour and there didn't seem to be enough room for everybody in those rules. A lot of people were getting left out of the postwar prosperity: minorities of all kinds, the disabled, people who were different from the majority. I was glad that as I grew up, movements came along to address these inequities – even if getting the message across was hard.

We had one advantage at that time: decent journalism. I didn't know it growing up, but that was unusual. Throughout most of the world and most of history – at least, the part where the printing press had been invented – journalism has mostly been a pretty shabby undertaking. It certainly hasn't been aimed at achieving unbiased accuracy.

Back in the 18th Century newspapers were of the crusading type. Also, everybody knew to buy the one that expressed the opinions they agreed with. In other words, they were partisan. The idea that the job of a newspaper was to report what happened, the way it happened, and leave the interpretation of events to the Op/Ed page, was an alien concept. They might do that somewhere in the solar system, but not on Earth.

Throughout the 19th Century it was common for newspapers to just make things up. Edgar Allen Poe got mad at one newspaper for printing a science fiction story of his as a news item. Even Ben Franklin, back in the 18th Century, had been guilty of hoaxes like that. Their attitude seems to have been that if you were dumb enough to fall for a hoax, you deserved to.

I don't call this good citizenship, myself.

Now it happened in the 1950s and 1960s in the US that we had an amazing lot of journalists. They'd started out covering the Second World War and they were dead set on accuracy and lack of bias in their reporting. That's because they'd seen first-hand how dangerous biased reporting could be. Turning news into propaganda was a specialty of those who'd created the nightmare these journalists sometimes risked life and limb to cover.

We kids grew up believing that you could trust these journalists. They had something quaint called integrity. We tended to take it for granted that the profession of journalism entailed that kind of integrity.

Boy, were we wrong.

It didn't last, this idea of neutral, unbiased news reporting. Pretty soon everybody went back to hyping their own points of view. Outrage sells more newspapers, gets more clicks on the computer. Some politician actually has a good idea for once? Don't examine it. Pick at imaginary flaws. 'Both-sides' every issue including the ones that don't have both sides. 'Cannibalism: crime or alternate lifestyle?'

You can go crazy trying to find a news source that will tell you what's going on rather than what they wish were going on. The selectiveness of reporting, the descriptors used, the gaps in the stories can make your head spin.

I'm not saying those old reporters were perfect. I know they had their blind spots. Too often they failed to see a story right under their noses. They were prejudiced in favour of the status quo sometimes, maybe most of the time. But they were careful with the facts. When a president was shot the news channel didn't report his death until they had verified the story 100%. Their desire to be first came in second to their determination to be right.

I wish we could get that sense of integrity back. It might help us combat all the misinformation out there.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

06.03.23 Front Page

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