Journalism and “Face-Checking” in the United States

As college students studying journalism, our course of study begs the fundamental question; What is the role of journalism in the United States? We as Americans have an inalienable right to free speech that nowhere else in the world has. Britains are not free to criticize the royals, which Prince Henry recently dubbed the First Amendment as “bonkers” (SkyNews).

Furthermore, what is “fake news” and what should our role be in “fact-checking”? And is it our job to make definitive statements as to what is true and what isn’t? Is it our job to censor or throttle information that the public has a right to? Is that reporting? When information comes out that proves “false information” correct, how does that make our constituents feel?

A 2018 Gallup poll found that “Republicans have typically placed less trust in the media than independents and especially Democrats, but the gap between Republicans and Democrats has grown. The current is among the largest to date, along with last year’s 58-point gap” (Jones).

A more recent study found that “The United States ranks last in media trust — at 29% — among 92,000 news consumers surveyed in 46 countries”. Post-COVID-19, “some improvement in [media] trust [was found] in nearly all the countries surveyed … but not in the U.S. where the low rating was flat year to year” (Reuters).

What about new platforms? If conservatives are so upset that Twitter and Facebook are removing their content, if it is really that dangerous to ask questions of our government that the media does not, they should just make their own platforms, right?

Right-leaning citizens, or those seeking access to dissenting opinions, quickly took to Parlour. The app was then removed from the Apple app store, and the website was then deleted from the internet entirely. Are we as journalists proud that the people have been technologically ousted from this new public square? Why is our excuse for this that it was helping spread “misinformation”?

One might ask what the standards are for such a profession that seems to have such a pivotal role in American society. If journalists are the voice of the governed, and the watchful eye that holds power to account, how can we be sure that the media themselves are being held to account?

Yes, we have journalistic standards more broadly and more specifically per outlet, but if we are the ones making the rules, it seems they are left for us to break as we please. Jeffrey Toobin being welcomed back to CNN with open arms after a certain zoom meeting incident went with little outcry from other journalists. What is the standard of professionalism, then?

Despite our best efforts, or how many times we tell the American people it is not so, there are no true standards in journalism. When one party almost unilaterally controls the mainstream narrative and removes dissenting voices from the stream of public discourse in the media, we are no longer the voice of the people. We are merely bolstering our own.

We build our own partisan “methods” or “practices” that give little room for critical thought in the public square, most of which is digital. Any criticism of the media partisanship is quickly dismissed as “misinformation”, therefore it’s okay if Facebook or Twitter removes it from the internet.

Make no mistake, the media corporations themselves are wholly responsible for the intellectual and journalistic crime of lies of omission. With the viewership they hold, who are supposed to be the well-informed audience that makes up our society as well as voting bases, what they choose not to report on is probably the most damaging of them all.

In a study performed by the Polling Company that was conducted in seven swing states, 45.1% of Biden voters said that they were unaware of his financial troubles with his son Hunter. Other stories about Biden that the study mentioned was the Tara Reid sexual allegations, and other issues.

Regarding the New York Post story on Hunter Biden that was censored by Facebook and Twitter ahead of the election, 9.4% of respondents said that full awareness of the story would have led them to either not vote for Biden or vote for another candidate, which would have flipped all six of the swing states he won to Trump.

Fact-checking, then, is the mere act of criticism for such “journalistic” practices. This often happens when a dissenting party or group might have something else to add to the story that better informs the American people.

The media now has a massive capacity to effectuate who gets elected, which then decides which policies we will enact in the next four years, and so on. I am not so optimistic that if we found Donald Trump Jr.s’ laptop with certain financial information on it that it would have been kept from the American public ahead of the election, as information as such should never be withheld from the American public.

Though section 230 legislation has not yet caught up to the massive power concentrations in our news media, eventually it will. The founding fathers were very skeptical of consecrations of power, and our country was built to prevent 51% from tyrannizing and controlling the other 49% and giving the country policy whiplash in the back and forth every four years.

But news media and big technology corporations are currently exempt from being held accountable for misleading their constituents and therefore altering the course of history. If people are consistently given one-sided information and facts omitted, the real power for the people to choose who they want is taken from them.