Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them
I formerly worked as a news editor at a metro daily newspaper, and before that I worked at various other news outlets and magazines.<p>Here&#x27;s the reality: The average journalist values the truth and desires to report on the news with accuracy and fairness.  I worked with a bunch of really talented reporters and editors throughout my career, and almost without exception, they highly valued those things.  Moreover, many have an anti-authoritarian bent, and that leads to a desire to expose corruption, rather than protect it.<p>But ...<p>* I&#x27;ve seen publishers kill stories because they thought it would make advertisers unhappy.<p>* I&#x27;ve seen senior execs put pressure on editors to downplay stories that painted the region in a bad light.<p>* I&#x27;ve seen a political campaign refuse to permit a certain reporter to attend their campaign events because they didn&#x27;t like that the reporter wasn&#x27;t acting like a PR tool.<p>* I&#x27;ve seen budgets for &quot;watchdog journalism&quot; become slowly starved, in favor of clickbait.<p>And unfortunately, most of the public doesn&#x27;t see the difference between the reporters on the ground (who are, by and large, genuinely trying to do a good job) and the publishers and other people running the business (who are really trying to make money and exert influence).<p>Granted, there are certainly news orgs where objectivity and accuracy are not ideals that are valued, and unfortunately that&#x27;s where a lot of eyeballs end up these days, because so many people just want their existing biases to be re-inforced.<p>But what America really needs is more media literacy, so we can better distinguish the former from the latter.  We, as a society, are SO BAD at this.  Our B.S. detectors have lots of false positives and false negatives.  We look to the wrong signals to determine whether a news report is trustworthy.  We fail to evaluate information critically as long as it validates our pre-existing views.  We have a hard time separating facts from opinions.<p>This lack of media literacy is worrisome enough, but now we&#x27;ve got political leaders capitalizing on the fact that we&#x27;re bad at this and actively trying to delegitimize the media (as if it&#x27;s a single thing) because it serves their own purposes.