Some years ago, a cam­era­man gave me one of the tee shirts he’d sold as a side­line at a Repub­li­can con­ven­tion. The front read “Life in News”. On the back, in large type, was print­ed “BLAME IT ON THE MEDIA.” Del­e­gates, he told me, didn’t get the joke. Today, it’s in dan­ger of becom­ing less a joke than a jus­ti­fi­able truism.

An edi­to­r­i­al car­toon by the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Michael de Adder summed it up under the head­line “The Great Replace­ment”. On the left, Wal­ter Cronkite is on a TV screen say­ing “News and facts”, on the right, Tuck­er Carl­son says “Lies and misinformation”.
Not even the mae­stro of mal­ice and will­ful fact-dis­tor­tion can deny the accu­ra­cy of that.
The Erik Wem­ple blog, which dogged­ly, one might say ruth­less­ly, tracks the rants of FOX News’ num­ber one star came up with this self-descrip­tion Carl­son offered on a pod­cast: “I lie if I’m cor­nered or some­thing. I lie.”
In that case, it’s a good thing for Tuck­er that cable TV came along when he went look­ing for a job in journalism.
One hun­dred and one years ago, the great Man­ches­ter Guardian edi­tor C.P. Scott wrote, in a lead­ing arti­cle to mark the cen­te­nary of the paper that is now sim­ply ‘The Guardian’:
Com­ment is free, but facts are sacred. “Pro­pa­gan­da”, so called, by this means is hate­ful. The voice of oppo­nents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard. Com­ment also is just­ly sub­ject to a self-imposed restraint. It is well to be frank; it is even bet­ter to be fair.”
That Carl­son and his fel­low “opin­ion” spew­ers — and by exten­sion opin­ion mak­ers — on FOX get away with treat­ing that kind of jour­nal­is­tic prin­ci­ple and wis­dom with con­tempt is down to two things:
First: they’ve almost cer­tain­ly nev­er heard of Scott’s dic­tum, and if they did, wouldn’t under­stand or give it cre­dence, not least because they’re not jour­nal­ists in the first place.
Sec­ond: their “shows” draw sub­stan­tial audi­ences. Carlson’s alone pulls three mil­lion view­ers a night. That trans­lates as seri­ous adver­tis­ing rev­enue, which trans­lates into cor­po­rate auton­o­my for him.
                                    MONEY MATTERS
It’s unrea­son­able to expect a news net­work, or show for that mat­ter, to be a mon­ey-los­ing propo­si­tion. How­ev­er, it is fair to expect, indeed insist that prop­er jour­nal­ism be includ­ed on the prof­it side of the bal­ance sheet. That can only be decreed by those in charge of the net­work. They, how­ev­er, give every indi­ca­tion of being hap­py to embody the quote by Cas­sius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
“The fault, dear Bru­tus, is not in our stars,
But in our­selves, that we are underlings.”
For­tu­nate­ly for them, the Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion “fair­ness doc­trine”, which required broad­cast­ers “to cov­er ade­quate­ly con­tro­ver­sial issues of pub­lic impor­tance” and tried to ensure “that broad­cast sta­tions’ cov­er­age of con­tro­ver­sial issues was bal­anced and fair”, was over­turned in the 1980s.
Iron­i­cal­ly, the push to end it came from jour­nal­ists who opposed the pol­i­cy as a vio­la­tion of the First Amend­ment rights of free speech and press. An unan­tic­i­pat­ed and unfor­tu­nate side-effect has been a free-for-all are­na where the fringe is a reg­u­lar and accept­ed com­po­nent of the mainstream.
While FOX is arguably the most egre­gious offend­er, oth­er cable out­lets as well as the major net­works are cul­pa­ble to var­i­ous degrees when it comes to pan­der­ing to pop­ulism over jour­nal­ism. That includes, unhap­pi­ly, dumb­ing down gram­mar and allow­ing scripts that would be lucky to earn a C‑minus in a ninth-grade Eng­lish class.
                     WHAT MATTERS MOST
As a print jour­nal­ist I was cas­ti­gat­ed, men­tored and encour­aged by edi­tors who would have been proud to be described as “old school”. I count myself blessed that when I made the tran­si­tion to broad­cast news, the same applied to my new mas­ters. In the CBS News guide­lines of the ear­ly 1960s, leg­endary CBS News pres­i­dent Richard Salant wrote:
“We in broad­cast jour­nal­ism can­not, should not, and will not base our judg­ments on what we think the view­ers and lis­ten­ers are “most inter­est­ed” in, or hinge our news judg­ments on our guess­es as to what news the peo­ple want to hear or see. The judg­ments must be pro­fes­sion­al news judg­ments — noth­ing more, noth­ing less.”
The view­ing pub­lic would be bet­ter served than they are if that was embla­zoned as a gold­en, unbreak­able tenet in every news­room. Instead, it’s been rel­e­gat­ed to a dusty stor­age cupboard.

Mis­in­for­ma­tion, whether delib­er­ate or sim­ply a by-prod­uct of lack of jour­nal­is­tic stan­dards, can make for appalling bed­fel­lows. For­mer CBS pro­duc­er Fran­cois Bringer, who’s cov­ered more than a few con­flicts, offered the fol­low­ing pairing:
                                     “DUBIOUS GROUNDS”
It has been said that “war is peo­ple who do not know each oth­er but mas­sacre each oth­er, for peo­ple who know each oth­er but do not mas­sacre each other.”
It made me think of two young men. One is a 21-year-old Russ­ian tank offi­cer, who has plead­ed guilty to a war crime. He stole a car for a joyride while invad­ing Ukraine, and shot dead an old civil­ian who tried to interfere.
The oth­er is a young white Amer­i­can who thought it his duty to plan a shoot­ing in a super­mar­ket to kill as many black Amer­i­cans as he could. He man­aged ten dead in a few seconds.
Both of them thought they were obey­ing orders.
The Russ­ian was part of his leader’s inva­sion of a neigh­bour­ing coun­try on dubi­ous grounds.
The Amer­i­can, only 18, thought he was fight­ing an inva­sion of his home­land. He feared a term that iron­i­cal­ly, he might not have known the mean­ing of — that he was being ‘replaced’ in his own coun­try by an eth­nic group, brought there by force under the vilest con­di­tions over decades, to build his country.
                          PRODUCTS OF THEIR BIRTHRIGHTS
Both young men com­mit­ted mur­der, can­celling many lives, includ­ing their own, blind­ly obey­ing forces they might not have been equipped to under­stand. Maybe their soci­eties for­bid that under­stand­ing. Or encour­aged igno­rance. In their reduced mind­sets, they may have both thought they were saviours.
The Russ­ian lives in a nation as big as a con­ti­nent, with the GDP of a small Euro­pean country.
The Amer­i­can lives in the rich­est coun­try in the world, where there’s a weapon and a half for every cit­i­zen, but if you have a baby there these days, you may not be able to find for­mu­la to feed him or her.
That was one day in the news of May, 2022.
The young are force-fed pro­pa­gan­da. And the youngest are fed nothing.
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