CATHY YOUNG IN THE HILL: ‘Fake news’ isn’t the problem — mainstream news with an agenda is.
However, most junk journalism does not take the form of outright “fake news” but of tendentious reporting that focuses on some facts while downplaying or omitting others. And here, the mainstream media are indeed often guilty of bias.
Take recent headlines announcing that the incoming Trump administration is planning to establish a “Muslim registry” or a “registry for Muslims,” wording which seems to imply that all Muslims in America, even citizens, would be required to register.
That impression was reinforced by a comment from Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, quoted in The Washington Post: “The day they create a Muslim registry is the day I register as a Muslim.”
Such a registry would certainly be shockingly un-American — not to mention unconstitutional. Yet a closer look at the articles under these headlines shows that this is not what’s being proposed.
Trump may revive a program that was in place from 2001 to 2011; according to The Washington Post, that system “required people from countries deemed ‘higher risk’ to undergo interrogations and fingerprinting upon arrival” and, in some cases, “to follow a parole-like system by periodically checking in with local authorities.”
Most of the countries identified as high-risk were majority-Muslim, and civil rights groups charged that the program targeted Muslims. But to call such a program a “Muslim registry” creates an essentially false impression — which is what many people were undoubtedly left with if they did not read the story carefully, or only saw the buzz about it in the social media.
Beyond this election and the controversial figure of Trump, the media have a very real tendency to fall for narratives that are seen as advancing a “good cause.”
The Rolling Stone article about the fictitious fraternity gang rape, treated as gospel by the rest of the media for ten days until a lone blogger and then a columnist for the libertarian magazine Reason finally pointed out some of its major and obvious problems (such as the fact that the alleged victim claimed to have been raped for hours while lying amidst shattered glass from a tabletop, yet was able to run out of the fraternity house afterward and did not require medical attention).
Indeed, the first New York Times report on the Rolling Stone story being questioned largely defended it.
First they establish the narrative. Then they do their best to squelch anything that might undermine it. But yeah, let’s worry about “fake news.”