When 'Misinformation' Is Named the Word of the Year

This has been a rough year for news junkies. Changing stations for network and cable-TV news reveals not coherence but alternative realities. It's easy to be confounded when caught in the middle of a muddle of polarizing differences, as social media spreads interpretations of the theology of what Flip Wilson, a popular comic of an earlier time, called the Church of What's Happening Now. Today, the abundance of sources enables the news to fit personal prejudices and predispositions. It's the famous slogan of The New York Times, "All the news that's fit to print," distorted to "All the news that fits our bias, we print." 

Television is the most obvious distorter of the news, but newspapers have their biases, too. Gone are most of the rigorous, careful editors of bygone generations. Abe Rosenthal, the celebrated executive editor of The New York Times, is long dead. Horace Greeley, founder of the dominant New York Tribune, is even longer dead. So, too, is Walter Cronkite, the authoritative anchor of the "CBS Evening News" whose stentorian voice soothed his audience during the Vietnam War with his signature sign-off, "And that's the way it is" — not always accurate but reassuring.

The voices from respected institutions of newspapers and television networks once provided confidence in what was printed and said. We trusted them as gatekeepers. Investigative reporting was not driven by partisan opinion. 

Loud barkers and boxcar headlines have always been around to mislead and misinform, eager to manipulate emotions. But most readers and viewers in simpler times were sure they knew how to separate the wheat of facts from the chaff of manipulation.