Reliable news

My latest ruminations on news sources got started while reading last Sunday’s New York Times, which I consume daily along with three other newspapers, two online news resources and two network TV news shows.

I think the Times is the best newspaper in the country. It has an amazing reach, devotes enormous resources to gathering news and presents it in a largely unbiased manner. I know this is not a widely held view.

Specifically, I was reading a terrific report by the Times (“90 Seconds of Rage”) on seven participants in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol who had been identified as having beaten a police officer with a metal pole bearing an American flag. The Times has done astonishingly good work on the insurrection, plunging deeply into hundreds of hours of videos to detail what happened on that day. Online, they have augmented this work with additional footage. This story is one more excellent example.

What jumped off the page to me early in the Sunday news story was this reference to “President Donald J. Trump’s unfounded assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from him.”

Unfounded assertion.

News reporters are supposed to be unbiased. There was an industry trend in the 1960s and 1970s to say reporters should be “objective.” But no one is, and so the true standard is fair and balanced. Without bias.

“Unfounded assertion” is mild language to describe something you know is untrue — and when you know the person saying it knows it is untrue.

But as a newspaper reporter, which I have been for more than nearly 50 years, it is, frankly, a quandary.

Do you call it a lie? It is such a highly charged word, and, in using it, you abandon the appearance that you are unbiased, even if it is, quite accurately, an unbiased statement.

If a politician lists a college degree on a resume, and that person never got that degree — never even attended the college — the person is a liar. You resolve it with a simple recitation of fact: Candidate Schmidlap stated on his campaign resume that he received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Harvard University. There is no record of his ever attending or enrolling at Harvard or receiving a degree. But I can tell you from personal experience, saying so will result in accusations of bias.

And when candidate Schmidlap refuses to remove the falsehood from his campaign materials, do you continue to bring it up? Do you say it is a lie?

Throughout the Times story, they continued to wrestle with this issue, at one point edging close to calling the former president a liar, describing his statements about the election as a “political lie.” Certainly, there is acceptable license in political rhetoric in which a candidate can assert an opponent is soft on crime, for example, because she supports reduced sentencing for nonviolent offenses. The underlying basis is accurate. The characterization of it is part of the rough and tumble of a campaign and, as Mr. Dooley wrote, “Politics ain’t beanbag.”

But a lie should be a lie, and characterizing it as anything else is just one more example of the bramble path journalism has had to walk since 2016.

It is such a strange time. A time of great truths. A time of enormous lies.

And that applies, perhaps more than anywhere else in our divided nation, to the information we consume, digest and reformulate into opinion.

We are awash in sources of information that are unreliable and, in the pre-social media era, would never have appeared in a news outlet of general circulation.

I would like to think there is such a thing as truth. The problem with the truth, it would seem, is that everyone thinks they know what it is, and that they are the sole possessor of it.

All of which leads back to my initial question. I would like to have a discussion with you. I want to hear from you.

Where you get your news? What are your credible sources of news? Are they unbiased? Are they more reliable because they do have an obvious bias?

In this era of information bewilderment, tell me where you go for reliable news.

Mark Simon is a veteran journalist, whose career included 15 years as an executive at SamTrans and Caltrain. He can be reached at marksimon@smdailyjournal.com.