{"id":22080,"date":"2016-11-14T09:16:55","date_gmt":"2016-11-14T14:16:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/?p=22080"},"modified":"2016-11-14T09:16:57","modified_gmt":"2016-11-14T14:16:57","slug":"without-an-engaged-media-no-one-is-watching-out-for-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/?p=22080","title":{"rendered":"Without an engaged media, no one is watching out for you"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lies, ‘Fake news’ can’t become the new normal<\/em><\/h2>\n

By Mike McGann<\/strong>, Editor, The Times<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"utmikecollogo-copy\"<\/a>Friday night, I had honor of gathering to mourn the virtual death of a small town newspaper \u2014 The Suburban Trends<\/em> \u2014 after its purchase by Gannett and subsequent layoff of the vast majority of its staff.<\/span><\/p>\n

We met in a small place in Bloomingdale, N.J., hometown to current GOP power player Mike DuHaime \u2014 as a cub reporter, I often came under the wrath of his father, Passaic County Freeholder Richard DuHaime \u2014 to say goodbye to The Trends<\/em>, which will sort of continue to publish but essentially be a newspaper zombie, staggering to a sure death in a year or two, robbed of soul, staff and sense of mission.<\/span><\/p>\n

From the day I walked into the newsroom as a 19-year old idiot \u2014 Sept. 13, 1983 \u2014 through three separate times during a decade of writing for and ultimately editing the twice-weekly, paid-circulation newspaper, I was guided by lessons taught to me from pros who learned their craft in the 1950s: tell good stories and get them right. I worked at much bigger, daily newspapers and was lucky enough to move on to edit some fairly large magazines, but those basic lessons stuck and always informed my decisions as a journalist.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s no secret that our business is broken \u2014 newsrooms are getting gutted, ad revenue is a disaster and even those able to hire are having trouble finding motivated young people who want to keep the flame alive. Hint: we really need three or four more news and sports correspondents but can\u2019t find anyone to take the gig.<\/span><\/p>\n

Worse, we\u2019ve come under attack \u2014 not just from the likes of Donald J. Trump \u2013 but all those who want to blame the media for everything.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sure, a lot of the media has pandered to get ratings and eyeballs \u2014 again, see Trump, who it is estimated to have gotten something like $2 billion in \u201cearned media\u201d during his campaign, well above what any candidate has ever seen \u2014 but most of that is driven by you, the consumer. The suits making those decisions, and I\u2019ve been one of them in large corporate environments, have to weigh paying the staff and keeping the company afloat and run what you want to see, even if it turns their stomach at times.<\/span><\/p>\n

Few of us have the luxury of trying to just tell the story, revenue be damned.<\/span><\/p>\n

Worse, we have seen this cycle how \u201cfake news\u201d poisoned the conversation, as Facebook-promoted and Google-funded fake news sites (as an example, a pair of brothers in Macedonia ran more than 100 sites full of completely made-up anti-Clinton stories \u2014 and yes, there were likely just as many fake anti-Trump sites out there). Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed this week that Facebook\u2019s conduct didn\u2019t affect the outcome of the election. I will politely point out that he is full of crap, as I continually saw these fake stories in my newsfeed pushed along by friends and family, unable to discern the difference between fake news and real news.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is, by the way, what real journalists and editors do, every day. Years of training, experience and so on, guide us in, hopefully, figuring out what is legitimate news and what the facts are in any given situation. And even with all of that experience, we get it wrong sometimes. Worse, with dwindling resources, most of us do the jobs of four or five people now \u2014 rushing around continually putting fingers in the dam to plug leaks.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, it really hurts when local news gets twisted for political purposes, as happened in a number of local state legislative races.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll focus on the worst example: the 158th District State House Race won by Eric Roe.<\/span><\/p>\n

The House Democratic Campaign Committee sent out a number of mailers late in the race cycle quoting this publication with deceptive snippets of a story we wrote about Democratic claims over whether Roe was eligible to run based on whether he had lived in the state long enough.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let me be blunt: if the state house Democratic Caucus had any sense of ethics or morals, it would clean house at the HDCC, both for stunts like this and its utter failure this past cycle. I plan to write a letter to every Democratic member of the house calling for this. It won\u2019t happen, which tells you all you need to know about the folks making decisions there.<\/span><\/p>\n

But don\u2019t think for a second that Republicans are without blame here. Chester County Republican Committee Chair Val DiGiorgio and Roe both were on the record, willfully misrepresenting (political speak for lying) the record of Susan Rzucidlo, the Democrat running for the seat. In this case, the issue was over Gov. Tom Wolf\u2019s budget proposal \u2014 which Rzucidlo was on the record as opposing, quoted as such in The Daily Local News<\/em>, and in interviews with me in April of this year.<\/span><\/p>\n

Again, here and in other races this cycle, both parties went beyond playing fast and loose with the truth \u2014 they lied and lied repeatedly, about candidates in the other party. And it was our job to point that out, which we tried to do as much as possible, despite the hurricane wind of cable TV commercials and mailers trying to drown out the simple reporting of the facts.<\/span><\/p>\n

The last six weeks haven\u2019t been much fun, but we hunkered down and did the best we could, trying to stay in the middle and separate fact from fiction.<\/span><\/p>\n

The worry is that lying is easier than trying to make the argument based on facts (and it\u2019s lousy, lazy politics, too, as the truth always becomes evident eventually). But if no one calls the parties in question on it, the lies become \u201cfacts\u201d like those fake stories from Macedonia.<\/span><\/p>\n

The bottom line is this: without a vibrant, healthy media, we become nation of people without a shared reality. Facts stop mattering.<\/span><\/p>\n

So what can you do about it? Support your local media \u2014 read it here, buy it from others on the newsstand and if you own a local business, buy ads. Not only do the ads help your marketing, they help us to have the resources to do our job, keep elected officials from looting, and shine a needed spotlight on issues from schools to local sports. It\u2019s a way to do yourself good and do good for the greater community.<\/span><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t do it for me \u2014 frankly, I\u2019m not here to get rich (not that it would happen in media these days) but because I saw a real need to improve the local news coverage in Chester County \u2014 but do it for yourselves. I can\u2019t tell you how many times a public body was going to do something shady that stopped in its tracks because me or one of my reporters showed up at the meeting.<\/span><\/p>\n

Without a healthy, engaged media, no one is watching out for you.<\/span><\/p>\n

Help us, help you.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lies, ‘Fake news’ can’t become the new normal By Mike McGann, Editor, The Times Friday night, I had honor of gathering to mourn the virtual death of a small town newspaper \u2014 The Suburban Trends \u2014 after its purchase by Gannett and subsequent layoff of the vast majority of its staff. We met in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22082,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[8203,6518,203,8202],"class_list":["post-22080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-campaign-2016","tag-featured","tag-media","tag-newspapers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22080"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22081,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22080\/revisions\/22081"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}