Naivete is a trait of the dim-witted, none of whom should be permitted to cross newsroom thresholds but whose ranks are increasing in those places, especially where hair spray is used more frequently than notebooks.
Intelligent people recognize the danger in believing only that which they wish to believe, and good journalists, who ought to be intelligent people, know the hazards of blind credulity. Fox News is seldom alleged to employ journalists, which explains why that organization faces a $1.6-billion lawsuit from Dominion over anchordolts allowing to go unvetted and unchecked others’ claims that the company used its voting machines to rig the 2020 presidential election.
Accusers lacked one principal component to support their assertions: proof. Fox’s collection of curs for the chump-in-chief lacked one principal component to challenge those assertions: brains.
This led to defamation, Dominion contends, which, by legal definition, means the things said about the company were false and Fox helped propagate these falsehoods through reckless disregard for fact, evidenced by network anchorstooges failing to challenge lies as they were uttered.
Defamation claims first must demonstrate that statements of objective fact are false. A subjective claim, an opinion that can neither be proved true nor false, cannot be considered defamatory. You say editors are knuckleheads. I disagree (at least as it relates to me). This isn’t defamatory. It’s subjective. It can’t be proved true or false.
However, if you identify an editor by name and declare he or she fabricated a story — a statement of objective fact potentially injurious to that editor’s reputation and, therefore, his or her livelihood — you must be able to prove it or risk a defamation claim.
Now that America has itself become a reality television show, and not a good one, if there is such a thing, concepts such as these are eroding. It is not a disease of the left or right but one of much of Western civilization. Humanity is devolving intellectually, leaving us to be governed by masses of mindless wraiths steadily less capable of distinguishing truth from talking points.
Journalism’s corrosion, shown not only in Fox’s fumbling but in the crumbling of the entirety of the news business, is not an ill itself but a symptom of the greater ill. For Dominion, its lawsuit is about recovering damages resulting from baseless attacks on its reputation by dupes for a dunce and the dopes who provided the platform. For the remainder of society, it is about re-establishing the primacy of facts over wanton distortion.
One case cannot accomplish this, but one can advance the possibility that the national mind might be pulled from the shallow space where social media has deposited it. Dominion’s case, like the one against conspiracy peddler Alex Jones, ought to remind journalists and those who play them on TV of the seriousness of their responsibilities and the necessity to ply their craft properly.
As is the case with any job, doing journalism well requires consistent application of good habits, adhering to principles not selectively but always. It means making the extra call to ensure a particular fact is correct, checking one more time to ensure a calculation is right, editing a story again to ensure something wasn’t missed. It means challenging what others say to ensure a fuller understanding of the given facts, even in cases in which one might concur with the sentiment the subject is expressing.
Getting it wrong is easy. Getting it right is work.
But journalists, real or faux, can’t fix what’s wrong in their business unless larger wrongs are righted. When society prefers its news as stagecraft, when people embrace cults of celebrity and choose parties or form allegiances in the same manner they root for sports teams on Saturdays or Sundays, when it isn’t truth that matters but winning, the result is the one we have: an era more Orwellian than anything the author imagined. Reality exists in the partisan mind and nowhere else.
So long as that remains the case, the steady societal disintegration of the past decade will continue leading us to dark places we can’t yet fathom. It isn’t a thing that can be reversed by any one of us, any group of us or by any party. The mass of us, not all but enough, must insist on pursuing objective facts and reason, and we must expect it from those who inform us.
If presenting not truth but only one side or another’s perversion of it continues to generate ratings and pageviews, television news networks and others will continue to respond to that reward. Journalism as once it was known will continue disappearing into that great void until it is gone for good.
Lee Wolverton is the vice president of news and executive editor of HD Media. He can be reached at 304-348-4802 or lwolverton@hdmediallc
