News Real

I’ve never used the term “fake news,” and I hope I never will. One reason for that is articulated particularly well in a 2017 National Review column by the peerless Kevin D. Williamson:

I used to be a newspaper editor, a cog in the wheel of the dreaded “mainstream media.” I’ve written for the New York and Washington newspapers, and even — angels and ministers of grace defend us! — Politico. And the checks go both ways: I am a paid-up subscriber to the New York Times. Call me an enemy of the people. Here’s a little secret for you: The news ain’t fake. (Mostly.)

Observing that “for conservatives, hating the media is a reflex, and sometimes a funny one,” he provides the amusing example of Sean Hannity “reading breathlessly from an Associated Press (AP) report on a federal surveillance program, ending with the instinctual harrumph: ‘The mainstream media won’t tell you about that!’ ” Except, writes Williamson, that the AP, as a nonprofit cooperative owned by large numbers of newspapers, television networks, and radio stations, actually generates the ocean of news from which the media “mainstream” flows.

The AP, he continues,

has bias problems and some notable competency problems, and, like any organization that does any substantive reporting, it makes errors. But it does not, for the most part, traffic in fiction.