I wrote some fake news last week.
It ran on Sunday -- the story of a high school student intrigued by all things presidential for most of his 17 years. That part was true. The fake part came toward the end of the column, when I wrote that Zach Hoke would be in class at Northeast High on Feb. 20 BECAUSE HE DIDN’T HAVE PRESIDENTS DAY OFF.
Which seemed SAD to me at the time, and was also entirely untrue.
I discovered this when an email from a teacher greeted me Monday morning: Presidents Day is Monday. Zach will not be in school finishing things up; there is no school ... in honor of Presidents Day.
And I felt like an idiot, which is how a journalist should feel when she doesn’t double-check each and every fact in her story.
There’s been a lot of talk of fake news lately, and of the untrustworthy and failing journalists who inhabit America’s newsrooms -- particularly those at the New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, at least according to our commander in chief, who recently tweeted that the “fake news†media was the “enemy of the American people.â€
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If I can presume to speak for the president here -- and I’m no Kellyanne Conway -- I hope he’s talking about unflattering news, news from unnamed sources in the White House that makes him look less than presidential.
Or news that he sees as politically biased or politically motivated.
Because that feeling seems reasonable, but calling the press the enemy of the people sounds like Intro to Russian Propaganda.
Throughout our history, presidents have found themselves less than happy with leaks that call into question their policy decisions or the inner workings of their administrations.
That doesn’t make the leaks fake news.
President John F. Kennedy spoke of the importance of an abrasive press; Barack Obama worked hard to limit its access.
We would be fools to believe every piece of information we come across is the George Washington Cherry Tree-Chopping Gospel Truth. Birthers and 9/11 Truthers and Sandy Hook Deniers can have their space; the internet is open to all.
Point of view is what the editorial page and talk radio are all about. It’s the calling card of cable pundits whose political stripes range from the bow-tied condescension of Tucker Carlson to the liberal outrage of Keith Olbermann.
And there is bias in straight news. From the wording of a headline to word count in a story to placement on a page (or a website).
But it doesn’t make that news fake, it doesn’t make a fact a lie. Indeed, bias is often in the eye of the beholder. Case in point, this newspaper is alternately maligned for being a liberal rag and then taken to task for printing conservative claptrap.
The media should report context. Piling on for the sake of piling on is a cheap shot, an epidemic in the age of Twitter.
When President Trump spoke at the Black History Month breakfast, much was made of his bungled attempt to praise Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist and renowned scholar, long dead.
What didn’t get much ink was the context, at least according to one attendee, who said Trump was referring to the bust of Douglass at the newly opened Museum of African American History on the National Mall.
We don’t believe everything we read. But there is such a thing as objective truth. And verifiable facts. The sun does not revolve around the Earth. And a terrorist attack did not take place in Sweden on Friday.
The media make mistakes. We are guilty of gaffes. (Like our 45th president, who declared something “unpresidented’ instead of “unprecedented,†or this columnist mistaking “annunciation†for “enunciation†in a story about a waiter who spoke very clearly.)
Almost as long as I’ve been in this business, my profession has ranked right down there with dog catcher in the eyes of the public, who seem to view the mainstream media with suspicion and scorn in equal measure.
But here’s the deal: We endeavor to tell the truth. We are not dishonest. We are not the enemy. We are not in the business of reporting fake news.
We own up when we get it wrong.
So you’ll see a correction on Page A2 of the paper today, along with this confessional in column form.
Perhaps, one day there will be an admission of the same from our president, who made a number of questionable claims in the past week ranging from a historic Electoral College victory to the vetting process for refugees to Hillary Clinton selling uranium to the Russians.
These claims were fact-checked by any number of credible news sources and found to be false -- or mostly false.
Believe it or not.