As I’m getting on in my middle-aged years, it seems that I’m more frequently encountering Boomers, Gen-Xers, and even some Millennials who criticize the frenetic flow of information on social media and the apparent bias in corporate news networks. They typically lament the loss of the good ol’ days when the news wasn’t partisan, and “the news was just the news.”
What bothers me most about this trend isn’t that it’s just patently untrue, though it is. It’s that I hear this nonsense among polite company so often, and with people nodding along in agreement without really thinking about the notion, that I often don’t have the opportunity to explain how silly that notion really is without making a scene because nearly everyone seems to buy into this nonsensical reimagining of American history nowadays.
Back in the days these people reference, before social media and wall-to-wall reporting of cable news networks, there were generally three big networks. The story goes that the talking heads of ABC, CBS, and NBC were just reporting the news without any bias. The venerable Walter Cronkite wasn’t pitching a political angle, they posit. He was just telling you the news of the day.
says Arthur Herman at National Review. The Big Lie, as Josef Goebbels referred to it, was the “deliberate misrepresentation of facts and reality in order to achieve a political objective.” That perfectly describes the commitment of America’s major news networks in early 1968.
In late 1967, “the Communist cause in the Vietnam War was in deep trouble,” Herman writes. American military pressure was weakening the Viet Cong, and the North Vietnamese army (NVA) was forced to more directly participate in the war and suffering “deadly repulses.” Desperate and demoralized, they launched the Tet offensive on January 30, 1968.
The communists’ plan was to have the Vietcong trigger urban uprisings that would distract American troops in Saigon and elsewhere while seizing “the Northern provinces of South Vietnam with conventional troops.” It was a colossal failure for the communists and a stunning victory for the Americans. Herman writes:
It not only destroyed the Vietcong as an effective political and military force, it also, together with the siege of Khe Sanh, crippled the NVA, which lost 20 percent of its forces in the South and suffered 33,000 men killed in action, all for no gain. By the end of 1969, over 70 percent of South Vietnam’s population was rated by the U.S. military as under government control, compared with 42 percent at the beginning of 1968.
The American public knew none of this, however. Almost from the moment the first shots were being fired, skeptics of the war effort in the mainstream media, including CBS News icon Walter Cronkite, would use Tet to prove that the war wasn’t being won as the Johnson administration was claiming. They went further, representing the failed attacks on the U.S. embassy in Saigon and other sites as symbols of Communist success.
In February, as the communists’ failure in the Tet offensive had become practically obvious as a matter of fact, Cronkite hosted a half-hour special in which he directly lied about America being “mired in a stalemate.” Herman continues:
After Tet, American media had assumed a new mission for itself: to shape the nation’s politics by crafting a single coherent narrative, even if it meant omitting certain relevant facts and promoting other false or misleading ones.
Lenin would have smiled. The Big Three American news networks did more for the preservation and expansion of communism in Southeast Asia than any efforts of the Vietcong or the NVA.
This isn’t to say that the truth wasn’t ever told back then. Sometimes, it was, even on major news networks. But most often, the truth was being told in countless newspapers, alongside the countless lies and falsehoods that were also being told in those newspapers.
Freedom is messy. As much as anyone, I’d love to have the news media simply present facts to American and world citizens in the form of easily digestible tidbits, allowing us to discern narratives and conclusions as individuals. But that’s simply never been the way that the news media worked in America or anyplace else.
Our Founders were brilliant men who weren’t given to fantasies about utopia, and they were realists about the fallen condition of humankind. You and I may foolishly imagine that it’s possible to have a large, nationally syndicated news media that would be stalwartly objective and without projecting any sort of bias. But the Founders recognized this as impossible.
After all, it was anonymous authors in publications like The Virginia Gazette and The Massachusetts Spy who bolstered the patriotic fervor against the Crown and promoted American independence. The citizens of Colonial America were far more informed and better patriotic citizens by reading local pamphlets and newspapers than they would have been by reading nothing but the King’s press. It shouldn’t be any wonder why the Founders enumerated the rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press as the first order of business in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.
Even if people have the best of intentions in striving toward absolute objectivity, they will still often fail in the effort. Jonah Goldberg, in his entertaining book A Tyranny of Cliches, argues that hindsight is not, as the cliché goes, 20/20. “Indeed, it’s hard to think of a more untrue phrase casually flung about in intelligent conversation,” he writes. “If hindsight is 20/20, then why do historians disagree about, well, just about everything after the date and place of an event?”
This is a problem, and it is a problem that is made worse by the fact that human beings, when motivated by money, fame, and/or power, will often not have the best intentions toward absolute objectivity in reporting and will deceptively inject their personal bias into the news as a means of storytelling, and will sometimes descend into explicit lies to attain a political outcome, as Walter Cronkite did way back when the news was supposedly “just the news.”
We Americans may not like the bias in major news networks or the frenzied exchange of information and ideas on social media, but such bias has always existed and will always exist because it is unavoidable. Lies have always been sometimes presented as truth, and they always will be. The very best way to discern truth is not to be spoon-fed information in bite-sized morsels provided by major news networks but to thoughtfully engage with information from several perspectives while maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism and seeking verification as to what is fact and what is fiction.
I understand that it can be exhausting to follow, and that’s why I suspect people long for those mythical days when Walter Cronkite just told them the news they needed to know in a half-hour at the end of the day. But the effort that is needed to follow information toward truth is the cost of being an informed and useful citizen, and, as our Founders knew, it is far better to have more information than to have less information that is carefully curated by the powers that be.
To illustrate the point—we witnessed an attempted assassination of a former president and presidential candidate last weekend. In the hours that followed, information was breaking by the minute, reported by citizen journalists and witnesses who presented visual, audio, and anecdotal evidence. Much of this was captured and presented on corporate news networks, and sometimes with an explicit bias.
Do you believe that Americans were made more informed as to the events of that day by having access to a free and open forum on social media like X, for example, or would they have been more aware by waiting for Tom Brokaw or some such to tell them what happened on the nightly news?
Jesus Christ is King
Comments are closed.