S H A M b l o g

From time to time since February 2008, when my long article on journalism and the news media first appeared in the online version of Skeptic * , people have asked me for more specifics on what I regard as the building blocks of valid, serious-minded news coverage. This is going to be a lengthy post, so I'll dive right in without further preamble. The News must be apolitical. This line of thought reached critical mass in 2001 with the controversy over Bernie Goldberg and his muck-raking book, Bias ** , which savaged the mainstream media for its strong (and unapologetic) left ward tilt. It's a familiar argument by now and there's no need to go into it at any great length. I think we'd get a fairly universal buy-in—at least in principle—on the idea that the News should never have a specific political agenda, Left or Right. That consensus is likely to crumble a bit when you g et to a more pointed discussion of implementation. For example, we'd have no trouble finding...

I've taken three lengthy Uber trips in the past month. All of the drivers got around to asking what I did for a living. When I replied, “I teach journalism,” two of the three exclaimed, “Ahh, fake news! ” It took the third driver a few extra lines of conversation, but she eventually got there too. For those of us engaged in showing young people how the media are supposed to work, there is no escaping the sturm und drang over fake news. Needless to say, the term has itself acquired a patina of inauthenticity, given its most celebrated user's tendency to invoke it to mean, “This news makes me look bad...ergo it's fake.” (Though I doubt that Trump uses, or even knows, the word ergo .) In fairness, however, those of us who deal in the foundations of journalism understand that the fake-news meme cannot be dismissed simply as red meat that a pathologically insecure president tosses into his supporters' den with discomfiting regularity. Actually, fakery is endemic to the ge...