Real news, fake news and everything in between (originally written Jan. 28, 2017)

I don't envy any of us looking for real news these days. It was so much easier in years past. All we had to do was wait until six o'clock to tune in to one of the 'big three' channels (ABC, NBC or CBS) and wait for 'Uncle Walt' (Cronkite), Eric Sevareid, Douglas Edwards or Chet Huntley and David Brinkley to tell us what happened while we were at work or school. Granted, we also had the radio to fill the void, but it was the major networks that did the heavy lifting. They were supported by the newswire services like the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters and others with international contributors stationed around the globe, so we ended up being pretty well informed.

It was news we could take to the bank, usually bereft of personal opinion. If even the most news-hungry among us wanted more then we subscribed to a newspaper or two and found enough balance to form our own opinions and make informed judgments. THAT was a time when we were less critical and less jaded and believed most of the news we heard because we trusted the men and women that were reporting it. I don't know for the life of me when things changed and made us disbelievers, but whenever it was, it really shook things up and sent us on a downward spiral to the deepest reaches of skepticism.

Perhaps it coincided with the Kennedy Assassination of the mid-sixties and the Warren Commission that followed, or it could have been the Watergate Scandal of the early seventies. Maybe it was the Vietnam War. In any event, many Americans became frustrated and discouraged and turned off and tuned out, but some hungered for more which gave rise to CNN and later the other cable networks.  The good news was that this resulted in more choices with more places to find the 'real news.' That was until almost every outlet started wooing specific audiences and 'tweaking' their coverage, accordingly. It didn't help that they allowed (and in some cases even encouraged) their reporters to wear two hats of both journalist and commentator.

To be fair, some, like CBS, the former home of Edward R. Murrow (who made his name covering the Blitz in London), resisted, but over time, even the Columbia Broadcasting System - that was known as "Can't Broadcast Sports" - succumbed, as the reality of dwindling news budgets made their demise as a 'true' news network a foregone conclusion.  The final nail in the newsroom's coffin was the Internet which opened the floodgates to a tsunami of webloggers of every stripe and enabled even the truth-illiterates to act like journalists. Couple that with the advent of the smart phone (with camera) and all those with an axe to grind or a special interest to promote could gain access to thousands if not millions of eager consumers of their particular brand of news. The only trouble with such an expansion of possibilities was that the facts were often lost among the lines of their bits and bytes.

Today we're awash in information and have no spirit guide to help us circumnavigate the roadblocks. So, instead of having a dearth of news sources, we now have an 'embarrassment of riches' of them. The problem is that this multiplicity of sources isn't bringing us any closer to knowing the truth about events happening all around us. We are faced with a real dilemma. Do we gravitate to the source we like best, that reflects our own opinions, or do we look beyond the commentators that have a different viewpoint (even though they rile us up) because they are making an effort to give us something more objective? It's a tough choice, but one each of us makes every day.

I know people that never watch cable news or any channel for that matter, and I know folks that only watch one. I have friends that only get their information from websites. The newest form of news is something called, 'fake news.' These are stories that are blatantly false and are spewn out into the ether with the ostensible purpose to delegitimize, demean, or defame individuals and/or their ideologies. These are, quite simply, 'propaganda.' Originally a religious term, the word is now used to characterize a message designed to promote a political cause or point of view. Most of us associate it with the national socialist movement of 1930s Germany, but it is now being revived and used to describe information emanating from the podium of the new U.S. Administration.

Propaganda is not making our job of ferreting out the truth any easier, as it has even infiltrated the studios of many of our traditional news-gathering and disseminating sources like certain cable news outlets that are only too happy to repeat them to boost their ratings.

If we're really intent on learning the truth behind the news then we're going to have to spend more time seeking it from a variety of sources OR we could just use that old 100% reliable, time-tested method. You know the one I mean..."If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's probably a duck."

Stephan Helgesen is a retired diplomat and now political strategist and author. He has written six books and over 600 articles on topics ranging from politics to economics to social trends. He can be reached at: stephan@stephanhelgesen.com