Let’s be fair to the facts, not to the gullible

It’s absurd to say NBC’s firing of McDaniel disrespected election deniers

NBC’s embarrassing hiring-and-firing of former Republican leader Ronna McDaniel gave me hope.

It showed that:

• Not all media misbehavior will be tolerated.

• Some major journalists are willing to confront their bosses to defend the truth.

• A lot of us refuse to forget or forgive the Big Lie pushed by Donald Trump and McDaniel.

Of course, some journalists didn’t see this episode as a victory. Anonymous NBC staffers whined that the firing of McDaniel will make it harder for them to get information from their Republican sources. (Cue the violins.) Other people argued that the firing disrespected the one-third of Americans who believe America’s biggest liar, Trump, and think the 2020 election was rigged despite the lack of any evidence.

One of the hand-wringers, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, wrote this for the Washington Post:

“Do we cancel them all? Should no one who has these views be allowed to speak on NBC News? I think the executives at NBC were trying to find a reasonable way to have the views of 85 million Americans represented on their airwaves.”

Zakaria, showing himself to be the kind of easy mark that fascists love, noted that McDaniel backed off her election denial after being hired by NBC. I suppose if we offered a $600,000 TV deal to each of those 85 million election deniers, we could get some of them to declare that Biden was the legitimate president too. 

Zakaria’s essay got me thinking: What about the people who believe the moon landings were fake? Doubts have persisted for half a century. In a 2019 poll, 6% of Americans thought the landings were staged, and 15% didn’t know. That’s millions of people. What about them? Don’t we need a fake-moon-landing commentator to appear on TV whenever there’s news about space exploration? Otherwise we’re disrespecting the moon truthers, right?

Right. We are disrespecting the moon truthers. They don’t deserve our respect. They deserve better education and perhaps counseling.

The popularity of conspiracy theories has long been a problem for journalists. The media’s desire to be open-minded and welcoming to potential customers is in tension with its duty not to buy into disinformation.

I saw it when I was an editor at the Chicago Tribune and was assigned to handle a story about the rumor in 2008 that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and was thus ineligible to become president. Other editors and I were highly skeptical – there was a birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper in 1961 – but the top editors said the rumor was “out there” and we should fact-check it. So we did. We found no indication that Obama was born anywhere but Hawaii, and we published a story. (The headline, “Rumor calls Obama's birth certificate fake,” could have been a lot better.)

Did our debunking quell the manufactured controversy? Of course not. But we “respected” the views of the liars who ginned it up, and Trump used the hoax to gain political prominence. 

Mainstream news outlets haven’t learned very much since then. They want to acknowledge the positions of the right wing because it represents a lot of Americans, but the right is constantly trafficking in disinformation. It’s one thing to show a variety of opinions on issues. It’s quite another to show a variety of purported facts when some of them are 100% wrong. 

We know the 2020 election was not rigged. We know that. More than three years later, the right can’t even agree on how the election was supposedly stolen. Secret thumb drives? Italian satellites? Mail-in ballots? A plot hatched by a Venezuelan dictator who died nine years earlier? “Votes that flipped”? Suspicious suitcases? “Smart thermostats” controlling voting machines? Drop boxes? “Ballot mules”? Dead people voting? 

It’s a collection of dumb claims that deserves to be disrespected. It’s not a case of “Hmmm, there might be something to it.” It’s a case of “Geez, there’s not a damn thing to it.”

Yet some journalists think fairness means airing any theory that has a constituency, no matter how crazy. One of my favorite examples involves the Chicago Tribune’s coverage of the lynching in Mississippi of 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till in 1955. This was a milestone in the civil rights movement: Till’s mother left the casket open so thousands of mourners could see what the racists had done to her son. A photo appeared in Black publications, inspiring outrage nationwide.

Yet the Tribune article about the funeral spent six paragraphs examining a Southern sheriff’s claim that the body wasn’t Till’s – that it was a hoax. The Tribune fact-checked the claim and found it lacking (as we would later with the Obama birther lie), but the end result was that a story about Black outrage over a racist murder got hijacked by a lie. The Tribune was right to check out the claim; it was wrong to give it air – to quote the sheriff as saying that “the whole thing looks like a deal made up by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.”

That same platforming of disinformation is happening today, and it endangers us all.

It’s past time for the news media to stop respecting the liars and concentrate on defending the truth.