Facts, Fears and Conspiracy Theories

Fox News Channel is the most-watched U.S. cable news network, according to this October 2019 story in Deadline.com. 

Viewers in 3rd Quarter 2019 (millions)

• Fox: 2.4 
• MSNBC: 1.5
• CNN: 1.0

I have acquaintances who emphatically refuse to watch CNN News. I've been told that nobody who knows what's going on watches CNN any more; that CNN has been completely discredited; and that MSNBC has been caught reporting "fake news."  

This is a great example (as if we needed another one) of how party politics have divided the U.S.

I don’t view CNN as discredited. Neither is Fox or MSNBC. To me, the issue is that all of them go too far in trying to push back against what they perceive as bad reporting from the other side. All three serve up much more partisan, point-of-view material than national newscasts used to.  I like to think I'm mature enough, and educated enough, to identify bias and separate fact from opinion. I'm not sure everyone is, though. These channels broadcast opinion and debate mixed in with hard news in ways that sometimes make it hard for the casual observer to distinguish one from the other. 

It seems to me that the fear of fake news and conspiracies has become so pervasive that people have come to doubt everything unless it comes from a source they have already decided they trust.  And the message they get from the trusted source is some variation of:  “Listen to me. Don’t trust those other guys. They're giving you bad information. I’m the one who will tell you what’s really happening." 

Talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh bear huge responsibility for this state of affairs. It's bad enough that Americans are so polarized that they can't agree on who is telling the truth. But the problem became much worse when we learned that Russia launched "a social media campaign to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States," in the words of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, before and during the last presidential election. As we now know, Russia's aim was to favor Donald Trump's campaign and put Hillary Clinton at a disadvantage. When that came to light, Americans were handed a legitimate reason to trust nobody. The result is described by James Clapper, a former director of U.S. national intelligence in his memoir: 

“…my fear is that many Americans are questioning if facts are even knowable, as foreign adversaries and our nation’s leaders continue to deny objective reality while advancing their own alternative facts.… Getting its target audience to believe that facts and truth are unknowable is the true objective of any disinformation campaign… the primary objective is to get readers or viewers to throw up their hands and give up on facts.”

I share Clapper's concerns. Our national conversation has become a toxic hell-broth of finger pointing, name-calling and bizarre conspiracy theories like QAnon. With these distractions, it's hard to see how we're going to come to grips with pressing concerns like health care, climate change and immigration policy.