Lots of attention these days is devoted to whether the news is real or fake. That often depends on the eyes and ears of the beholder. One person’s fake news is another person’s indisputable truth.
What I find more concerning is the current tendency toward what I call “make news.” In our information-addicted culture, we are constantly fed a stream of so-called news, and much of it seems to be more concocted than real. Politicians, the media and pundits alike seem to feel compelled to “make news” to fill the airways and social media.
Take, for example, the recent brouhaha over President Trump’s visits to Houston following Hurricane Harvey. What did some of the media focus on? The length of Melania Trump’s high heels as she boarded the presidential helicopter at the White House. Never mind that she wore sneakers when she actually toured the flood devastation. The unending need for news put her shoes front and center in the Harvey media story.
When shoes are the subject, such news-making is harmless enough, though unfair and unnecessary. But where news is stitched together out of stray threads, the result can be downright damaging. The best recent example is the media-manufactured firestorm over which statues should stay and which should go in our town squares. Are we really, seriously talking about taking down Columbus statues because explorers exploited native peoples? Should the slave-owning faces of Washington and Jefferson be obliterated from Mount Rushmore? Where does this obsession with political correctness end?
Let’s go back a step further. How does such an improbable discussion begin? Now, we all should condemn the hate-mongers who assembled in Charlottesville, Va., a few weeks ago. There’s no place for them in our country. Yet, I don’t know about you, but in my lifetime I have never personally come across a neo-Nazi. Can there be more than a pitiful few of them in the U.S., strutting around in ridiculous uniforms, carrying torches, hungry for attention far out of proportion to their tiny numbers? Still, the media shined such a relentless spotlight on these few nuts in places like Charlottesville that they were made to appear far more numerous than the sick few they really are. That spotlight almost guaranteed that the other tiny fringe, represented by the far-left Antifa, would show up to help stage a rumble for the cameras. Voila, “make news”!