How Do We Get a Press We Can Trust?

I think that George Will is making some good points in his latest Washington Post column but I found it a bit disjoint. The points he’s making, both of which I agree with, are that the present state of journalism is terrible and suppressing the press freedom of news outlets you don’t like will not solve the underlying problem.

He attributes the problem to consumers of news:

There is, however, no government cure for what is, fundamentally, a problem with today’s consumers of journalism — too few readers and viewers insistent on quality and resistant to irresponsibility.

while I think that the problem goes deeper than that to the confluence of loss of gatekeeper status by major media outlets and the emergence of media outlets aligned with political parties, rather as they are in the UK. I’ve already provided my solution for that. If we’re going to have a partisan press like the UK we should have libel laws like those in the UK. The problem then would be standing but that should be resolved explicitly in the legislation.

The problem is not limited to Fox News as the House members who want to conduct an investigation would have it:

On Feb. 22, two California Democrats, Reps. Anna G. Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, sent to AT&T and other entities letters declaring that “the right-wing media ecosystem” — they named Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network — has produced “our current polluted information environment.” The pollution is undeniable.

In response Mr. Will points out some egregious examples outside the “right-wing media ecosystem”:

So are progressives’ contributions to it, e.g., their obsession with 2016 “Russian collusion,” their ludicrously solemn and extensive interviewing of Stormy Daniels’s felonious lawyer, Michael Avenatti, and their beatification of New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) during the pandemic.

but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The problem didn’t start with Fox News et al. and it didn’t begin in the run-up to the 2016 campaign, gaining steam during Trump’s tenure as president. Dozens of examples could be cited, e.g. “if you like your healthcare plan you can keep it” which went from being fact-checked as true to being the lie of the year, and go back a century or more.

Keep in mind there’s more than one way for the press to slant the news including:

• What they report
• How they report it
• What they don’t report

That last is vitally important. Examples include FDR’s wheelchair and JFK’s sexual escapades while president.

It is blithe to suggest that people merely get their news from multiple sources with contrasting viewpoints and make their own judgments but that would require a commitment of time and energy most people are unwilling to make. We’ll never have the confidence in any journalist that we had in Walter Cronkite because the Internet just makes it too easy to do our own fact-checking and social media make it easy to make our criticisms public. I don’t see an easy workable solution to the problem of “fake news” other than the one I’ve proposed.