Adam, Eve and the Russian bot

Vatican pronouncements on the media exist in a metaphysical world away from the working life of journalists and from the problems within and without the media. The subject of Pope Francis’s World Communications Day message – “fake news” – showed promise, though. I liked his blaming the world’s first fake news on the snake in Genesis, which the Associated Press led with. Paul Moses, in Commonweal, found good things to say about the message, even as he had to identify one shortcoming, about which I agree with him.

On reflection, the message, like its predecessors, won’t do any good. I don’t know how to fix it, either. The problem is that anyone with the will can apply what the pope says about fake news to a story that is reported in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and several networks. Donald Trump, who claims to have invented the name “fake news” (he didn’t), laid into them again at Davos, and drew a little hissing and booing.

I guess I hoped the pope would say something helpful to mend a rift over fake news that has ended several years of biweekly lunches with a very nice person. I know what he would say about the story about Trump having wanted to fire the special prosecutor last July because we have been there so often before. I’ll tell you after the break.

My ex-friend would say of the stories about Trump wanting to fire Mueller: “(They have) to do with false information based on non-existent or distorted data meant to deceive and manipulate the reader.” Those are Francis’s definition words, and they describe what my ex-friend thinks major media do day in and day out. He is not talking about Breitbart, Fox News or Russian bots. To him they present “the other side,” and truth is somewhere in the middle. Honest.

Francis writes: “The difficulty of unmasking and eliminating fake news is due also to the fact that many people interact in homogeneous digital environments impervious to differing perspectives and opinions.” Exactly, my ex-friend says. I and you (yes, Jim P, even you) and Paul Moses soak up the lies of The Times and only he, by “balancing,” can find the truth. So, as to this story, “What about the secret Nunes memo? Wouldn’t that justify firing Mueller?”

I finally ended our lunches this month because two hours with him on Wednesday was leading to eight hours of work on Thursday to figure out whatinhell he was talking about and sending him mild correctives on stories that come right out of fevered brows of Tea Partiers and other such gullibles. He is, like most biz ad majors, an expert on the media. So during the 2016 campaign he kept telling me how the local paper was slanting its coverage against Trump through headlines, the size of stories, the ledes and the photos. Then for the next few days I had to compare headlines, measure stories, analyze ledes and point out that, once again, there were more photos of Trump (local boy) than of Hillary Clinton.

He would concede for the days reviewed, but go right back to making the bias charge. Finally, I said, “Terry, do you know that you are telling me that 50 years of my life were devoted to lying to and misleading the American people?” And he said he didn’t mean me. It’s all those other people doing what I did; they are the bastards.

He is a nice guy, aside from his toilet politics. He is charitable; he has given people the shirt off his back, and he will spend long hours with people in trouble. We have worked together on spiritual programs in the parish. But I don’t have enough years left to make him realize that there’s bad stuff in his Kool-Aid.

Moses cites a poll that has 51 percent of Americans saying even accurate stories about politicians, if they are negative, can be  “fake news.” Half the country is operating on an instrumentalist definition of news in which truth and accuracy matter only to the extent that they advance an agenda; if the lie works better, believe it.  Nothing the pope says about fake news can help if truth is only an incidental.