National and world news was of minor importance in the small Midwestern town where I grew up. Television did not arrive until I was in junior high. Its purpose was considered entertainment - not to inform people about what was happening in the country or beyond.
We did have a weekly newspaper to tell us about engagements and weddings, deaths and funerals, hog futures, and "who poured" when the ladies got together to chat about town goings-on. They knew most of what would be in the paper before it arrived!
The Saturday movie matinee had news-briefs, but we young people could care less. We had come for the feature film. What might be happening in the rest of the country or Europe had little relevance to us or our parents. After all, soldiers had come home from WWII and, after some tension with their wives, who had been in charge during their absence, they had re-asserted their position as heads of household.
If you had asked anyone if news that did filter through was true, you would be met by a puzzled stare. What do you mean by true? What motivation would any journalist have for reporting news that was not true? Of course there were editorials, but you knew up-front that an editorial was one person's opinion and that was not news. Photographic journalism adhered to a strict code of non-altered photos - no photoshop editorializing! What you saw was exactly what happened.
Today we are awash in news. Comparing television's PBS news with Fox news (or any other network) is one way to sort out opinions from reporting of actual events. There is so much news, sometimes we feel battered by things we do not want to hear - over and over again. Coping skills range from ignoring most of the news to reading only summaries written by trusted journalists to making the evening news a part of life's daily ritual - or ignoring the news altogether.
It is the term fake news that is troubling. Mistrust in the media is high. Some of the current President's supporters believe that anything negative about the President is automatically untrue. As if he is a perfect person with their best interests at the center of his policy-making. Equally adamant are those who believe the President consistently lies and they see no good in anything that comes out of his mouth or his Twitter.
The result: we have no public or private arena for useful discussion of critical issues.
Our great country is in serious trouble. Fake news does exist. It twists reality beyond recognition. Patterns of once buried racism, fears about people who are "different" or have another religion, bullying and violence, a desire to exclude from our country anyone who is not like us, and deep frustration with anything political - make responsible journalism difficult.
Yet there are are many good and decent people who hold doors for each other, drive responsibly, and who do not believe a gun is the solution.
We talk about opioid addiction - a very real problem. But we live with an equally worse addiction to power. As our country was being formed, government was created with checks and balances. Today that structure is being challenged by very smart people whose first priority is "me first."
We have survived much as a country. Even if we are weary of questioning the validity of honest journalism, technology makes it possible to give us options never before imagined. Like kids with their cell phones, we need to be wise.
In one of the books I co-authored with my husband, there is a photograph I took high in the Peruvian Andes. In the foreground of the original photo were some very mangy sheep, as only sheep can be in the spring. These sheep detracted from the photo so I photo-shopped them out. My dear husband was aghast. "you can't do that!" I said that "yes I can and I have." The point of including the photo was not that sheep were shedding their winter wool, but the vista of distant mountains and colored clothes drying on rocks in the foreground.
Was it fake news to exile these sheep? No! If we allowed everything before us to enter into our vision, we would quietly become dysfunctional and then go mad. The human capacity to screen input is an essential quality. However, moral honesty to do so is equally essential. We need to hone our honesty with great care, not generate self-serving lies and illusions. When we were in Kenya we drove along the edge of a huge slum. To have blinded ourselves to this extreme poverty or to have made ignorant remarks about why people lived this way would have been immoral.
We need that moral honesty in what we observe. Then we can bring together our different opinions and redeem our country with much needed conversations.
