On real fake news

The newspaper I worked for hired a journalistic "hero," who had served a month in jail in Colorado for refusing to reveal a news source.  She had written about judicial corruption in Colorado and a judge sent her to jail when she wouldn't say who gave her the information or how she got it.  Her stance earned her national recognition and she was featured on the cover of Life magazine. 

She came to the Quad-Cities area to work for a newspaper in Davenport, Iowa.  After a short time, she left that paper-- at its request-- and came across the river to work on the Moline, Illinois, paper where I worked.  She was features editor and covered higher education.  That's where some problems with her showed up.

In her reporting, she showed a personal dislike for the president of the local community college.  Her reports implied that his staff members resented him and questioned his competence.  I knew a number of the faculty, and they said her contention was simply not true.  That circumstance was something that greatly perturbed other journalists on the newspaper staff.  She made things up but claimed they were the results of her investigations.  The editor was reluctant to restrain her because her stories sold newspapers; she was well regarded by many readers.  However, the area had a press club, and two of its members documented the falsehoods she made and wrote about them in the organization's newsletter.  Their purpose was to disassociate honest working journalists from a person who they thought did not meet the ethical and professional standards of a true journalist.  The same attitude prevailed at the newspaper I worked for.  The matter came to a head one day.

She ran a story that purported that illegal gambling activities were taking place throughout the countryside.  She included a photograph of a line of cars parked on the side of a country lane leading to a farmstead where she said men gathered to play high-stakes poker and craps.  I recognized the scene portrayed, as I was there.  The event was actually a workshop on grooming and handling cattle for show conducted by University of Illinois extension specialists for 4-H and Future Farmer members.  I covered the workshop on the farm page, but many readers read and believed the woman's story that gambling  was taking place there.  The owners of the farm requested that a retraction and correction be printed, but the reporter claimed that her story was true and that gamblers used the workshop contention to cover their gambling activities. 

The owners of the farm were prominent community leaders and had their lawyer call the editor to inform him that they intended to enter a defamation suit if the story was not corrected.  The editor came to the realization that the "investigative reporting" by the woman was largely made up.  He enforced a rule that she had to identify her sources either in her stories or at least to him so that he could verify the information.  The reporter rebuked the editor, saying that he was trying to gain access to news sources that she had developed.  Tension between the editor and her got intense, and was aggravated by the fact that her work was often slovenly.  The managing editor complained about the quality of her work, which detracted from the professional work produced by other staff members. Her work degraded the reputation of the newspaper, which was considered one of the most influential news sources in downstate Illinois.  Her effect on the newspaper was so discouraging that I decided it was time to change jobs.  I did not find any attractive openings in the news business.  That and the passage of a peacetime GI Bill resulted in the decision to go to graduate school.  However, I was just one of seven editorial staff members to leave the paper at that time.  Another factor was that the owners--the editor and the publisher--had decided to sell the paper, and none of the prospective buyers sponsored the kind of publications than hardcore journalists wanted to work for.  So, we left.

Many newspapers were not beacons of journalistic light.  Their editorial policies were shaped more to please the advertisers and serve the social and political interests of community leaders than to provide reliable factual information to a readership engaged in a democracy.  The journalists at the Moline paper thought that the made-up stories of that "star" journalist were a serious betrayal of the trust that serious journalists try to create in their readers.  Her work was fake news, because it was made up.  Trump applies the term to any news that displeases him, although it is usually carefully reported and factually accurate.

The internet has shattered the community news business.   Aberdeen, for example, does not have a full-fledged news organization operating in the community anymore.  When I moved here, there was a newspaper, two television news departments, and three radio stations with staffs reporting the local news.  All of that is gone.  Now there are only partial efforts at coverage by internet sources.  The economics of the news business has been destroyed and journalists have not found a way to re-establish thorough and consistent coverage.  Bad writing and false stories fill the internet pages.  Major news organizations are easily available on the internet, but local news reporting is sporadic at best.  Serious efforts get mixed in with the fakes, and readers are bewildered by trying to distinguish the real from the fake.

Real journalists need to organize and clarify their efforts so that readers and watchers know who they can depend on for real news.