This last Friday’s
weather forecast offers a cautionary tale. For the entire week, we’d been
warned about the blizzard approaching. Yet all week long, the various
forecasting models had diverged widely.
Come Friday morning as
the storm moved closer, school superintendents, among others, were faced with the
decision to open as normal or to close. In our household, my husband’s school district
opted to close for the day. Meanwhile, our daughter had gone to her school two
hours early to practice for her district speech competition. Her school opted
to stay open.
At home, I monitored
weather all day, periodically checking various stations and web sites. And as
the day wore on, it became clear that our location in Southwest Iowa was going
to have very little precipitation. My daughter’s school got in a full day.
Monitoring our
government is a lot like monitoring the weather. If you’re not checking
multiple sources constantly, you probably don’t have the best overview of what’s
happening.
I was surprised to see
Paul Krugman describe this situation in politics in his Thursday New
York Times column: “Why can’t Republicans govern? It’s not just that their
party is committed to an ideology that says that government is always the
problem, never the solution. Beyond that, they
have systematically deprived themselves of the ability to analyze policies and
learn from evidence, because hard thinking might lead someone to question
received doctrine.”
That in a nutshell is America’s
and, closer to home, Iowa’s problem.
If you rely on one or
two news sources, you have no idea what’s really happening. The only way to get
adequate information to cast informed votes, or even develop opinions about
current events, is to monitor multiple media sources. This includes reading
long running news sources like the New York Times or the Washington Post.
That’s not to say such
sources don’t occasionally get it wrong. On the same day Krugman’s article appeared,
Eric Boehlert, a veteran progressive
writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon Magazine,
posted an editorial on Daily Kos titled, “The
New York Times is overdue for a Russia reckoning. What went wrong in 2016?”
In this post, Boehlert
outlines the fate of former Times public-editor Liz Spayd. In that role, Spayd acted
as an internal watchdog, monitoring news coverage, answering reader questions
and addressing their concerns. But in May 2017, Spayd’s position was eliminated,
forcing her out of a job. Why?
According to Boehlert,
in late 2016 and early 2017, Spayd had been criticizing the Times’ minimal
coverage of the emerging Russian story. Boehlert writes, “She claimed readers
had been ‘shortchanged’ on the Russia hacking story, while the Times newsroom
seemed completely ‘turbocharged’ in covering Hillary Clinton's emails during
the same election cycle.”
As we have learned
since, Spayd correctly accessed the situation; however, no one at the Times has
acknowledged their role in misinforming the public regarding both stories.
If I’d been relying solely
on the New York Times for information, I might have missed the information
about our president’s Russian connections, too. But I choose to read from a
variety of sources as well as monitor public radio and multiple television news
broadcasts. I compare these various sources daily to parse the truth.
No single source will
ever give me that. I must seek it. No one source is going to pour truth in my
ears.
So, who you gonna
believe?
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