Back in July
on Independence Day,
CNN tweeted out
quotes from various
Founding Fathers or important
people in American history
about freedom of the press
and related topics.
And one of them—and
this was widely seen
as a way to criticize
the current president—
so one of the quotes they tweeted
from Abraham Lincoln read
"let the people know the facts
and the country
will be free."
It turned out that the quote
was not accurate.
The real quote was "let them
know the truth
and the country is safe."
And the context was about how
Lincoln felt that people
had been misled about the
importance of preserving the Union,
but if they knew the
importance of preserving
the Union that they would
continue
to fight as opposed to give up
the fight
So the fake quote refers to facts,
and the real quote refers to truth.
And I think it's a perfect
conflation or
error that speaks to modern
journalism's problems.
Facts are easy to manipulate,
and truth
is much more difficult to
attain.
I think for many Americans
there is a growing realization
that the media have completely
abdicated
their responsibility, and
shown themselves hostile
to the values and ideas that
many Americans hold.
And they're not good even with
facts, much less truth.
So much of the population no
longer believes
the media should be treated
deferentially and given
the power to shape, much less
control public opinion.
It's actually not a great
situation because you need a
strong
media to have a functioning
civil society, so you can hold
government
officials accountable,
so that you can have ways
that people can talk with each
other across divides,
and that there can be trust
when facing serious dangers.
And that's not what we have
now.
Trust in the media has hit
historic lows,
and you could say that every
year for the last several
years.
Gallup reported in September
2016
that Americans' trust and
confidence in
any way for the media to
report the news fully,
accurately, and fairly had
dropped to its lowest
level in polling history, with
only 32 percent
saying they had any
trust in the media.
That was down 8 points over the
previous year,
and among Republicans the
situation was even worse,
with only 14 percent of them
having confidence.
This was before the election,
and since the election I'm not
sure if they've handled
things to really change this
trajectory.
