Collect the Facts:
During the 2020 presidential campaign, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump said the election was a fight for the “soul” of America. This now cliche term has come to represent what America stands and what its citizens value. The fact that both major party candidates viewed the presidential election as a fight for the soul of America, illustrates the great divisions in this country.
A month before the 2020 election, 80% of Biden supporters and 77% of Trump supporters said their differences with the other side were about core American values. Furthermore, 89% of Trump supporters and 90% of Biden supporters said that a victory for the opposing side would lead to “lasting harm” to America. These stark partisan divisions are very problematic because they prevent us from working towards solutions to the problems we as a country face.
The 116th Congress (2019 and 2020) was the least productive Congress since at least the 1970s. In 2020, Congress enacted the least amount of newly introduced legislation since at least 1990. This dearth of legislative activity was sadly not due to the lack of problems facing the American people.
In 2019, despite great partisan divisions, over 50% of Americans said that health care affordability, drug addiction, college affordability and the federal budget deficit were “very big” problems. So why was Congress not able to take significant action to address these pressing problems?
While there are undoubtedly a variety of reasons for the rise of partisanship in America, from my limited vantage point, the news media is only contributing to this problem by intentionally inflaming tensions on both sides of the political spectrum. To be clear, it is not the job of the news media to report the news based on how it will impact partisanship or whip up fury, but the news media must do a better job at getting the story right and putting it into context.
Late into the evening on June 26, 2020, The New York Times reported that U.S. Intelligence had concluded that Russia offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for the killing of American troops in Afghanistan. The report went on to say that some militants were believed to have already collected bounty money and that President Trump was briefed on the situation in late March, but had yet to take any action.
Within less than an hour of this damning report appearing in The New York Times, the most watched cable news program, outside of Fox News, went into outrage overdrive.
After reading the highlights from The New York Times article on Russian bounties, Rachel Maddow summarized the story as such, “This is jaw dropping. This is kinda sickening news... Not only does the President know that Russia was paying for American soldiers’ deaths, paying rewards for Americans dead, the President knows it, he has been told and what he has done with that information since he was briefed on it in March is - well what has he done to Russia since then?...Trump did nothing about it for months and months and counting.”
The problem with Maddow’s righteous indignation is that the story about Russian bounties on the head of U.S. troops was not as entirely clear cut as the Rhode Scholar anchor portrayed.
During the White House press briefing on the following Monday, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters, “There is no consensus within the intelligence community on these allegations.” McEnany went on to say that there are “dissenting opinions” within the intelligence community about whether Russia offered bounties to the Taliban for the killing of American troops. In a similar statement, Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said, “To date, DOD has no corroborating evidence to validate the recent allegations found in open-source reports.”
It is entirely understandable that journalists and liberal commentators would not want to give the Trump Administration the benefit of the doubt. According to The Washington Post, President Trump made over 30,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency and was known to ask others to lie for him. McEnany also repeatedly made a mockery of her promise not to lie and played fast and loose with the facts on a daily basis.
However, just because Trump and his posse repeatedly lie, that does not mean that journalists and commentators are off the hook when it comes to verifying information. Case in point, President Biden’s White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, recently revealed that there is not strong evidence that Russia offered bounties to the Taliban to target U.S. troops. Paski told reporters in mid-April that the intel community has concluded the veracity of the allegations with only “low-to-moderate confidence.”
This disclosure by the Biden Administration should be a blow to the credibility of liberal commentators who used the bounty story to imply that former President Trump was more concerned about his relationship with Putin than the lives of American troops. Instead of rushing to indict the former President, anti-Trump media figures should have taken more time to fully vet the Russian bounty story before getting on their high horse and practically accusing Trump of being an accomplice to murder. This is not to say that Trump did not put his interests above the American people at every chance he could; but the facts must always be well established before rushing to judgement.
The inability or indifference to collecting all the facts before drawing conclusions can also prove to be quite costly. Immediately following the 2020 presidential election, Fox News personalities and guests repeatedly claimed that former President Trump was robbed of a second term due to rigged voting machines designed by Smartmatic and Dominion. These allegations coming despite the fact that Trump Administration officials who oversaw the election, said they found no evidence of fraud or malfeasance.
Chris Krebs, the Trump administration’s former cybersecurity head, said in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Governmental Affairs Committee that the 2020 presidential election was the most secure in American history. In addition, Trump’s own Attorney General and frequent Fox News guest, William Barr, said that the Department of Justice uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the election.
Nevertheless, on Fox, Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, went on program after program to claim that Smartmatic and Dominion were founded to “fix elections” and where “flipping votes” or “adding votes that did not exist” to ensure Trump lost reelection and Biden became president.
Giuliani and Powell were aided in their spread of misinformation primarily by Fox hosts Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs who prominently featured them on their shows and supported their allegations against Smartmatic and Dominion.
All this fact-free wrath against the voting systems concluded rather abruptly when in late January, Fox News was sued by Smartmatic for $2.7 billion in damages. In its over 200 page lawsuit, Smartmatic argues that Giuliani and Powell created a false story about Smartmatic and that Fox Hosts Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro, “joined the conspiracy to defame and disparage Smartmatic.”
Shortly after Smartmatic sued Fox, Dominion Voting Systems brought their own lawsuit against the cable news leader for $1.6 billion. Dominion alleges that Fox actively spread false information about them “even while they were being told the truth over and over again.” The lawsuit goes on to claim that Fox intentionally aired the false claims about Dominion to boost their ratings and caused Dominion "enormous and irreparable economic harm.”
While it is far from certain that Smartmatic or Dominion will win their cases against Fox News, a partial victory for the truth can be seen in Fox’s decision to fire Lou Dobbs just 24 hours after Smartmatic filed their defamation lawsuit. Dobbs was the highest-rated host on Fox Business.
Despite both MSNBC and Fox News engaging in the spread of misinformation, it is wrong to argue that both sides are equally as guilty of this sin. Almost every week, Fox News is peddling some form of misinformation to rile up their audience and drive ratings. In just the past week alone, Fox News has pushed two completely false narratives about the Biden Administration.
No fewer than five Fox personalities claimed, without any evidence, that the Biden Administration was trying to force Americans to cut their red-meat intake by 90%. Where did Fox News get this crazy idea? A British tabloid.
Fox News also claimed this past week that Vice President Kamala Harris’s book was being distributed to migrant children at the Southern border as part of “welcome kits.” Needless to say, the story was false, and the Vice President’s book was not being handed out to migrant children in welcome kits.
The safety of our troops and the security of our elections are both extraordinarily important issues to the American people and of vital importance to a functioning democracy. The news media needs to take the utmost care when reporting on these issues and not jump to conclusions that fit into one’s ideological perspective. The rush to explain how all news developments fit into one’s point of view is no doubt contributing to the decline of trust Americans have in the news media.
For the first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans (46%) have trust in traditional media and 58% of Americans believe that "most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public." This decline in trust is so problematic because the news media was once the arbiter of facts and truth and held those in power accountable. Now that Americans no longer trust the news media, who is keeping those in power honest?
It is vital that the news media regains their lost credibility so that the American people have a trusted source regarding what their government is doing. This trust in the news media will begin to return when the American people believe that journalists and commentators put facts first. Instead of rushing to explain how a story fits into one’s ideological spectrum, collect all the facts and then form an opinion. Only after America regains the trust of the news media can we begin to reduce partisan divisions and heal the soul of America.
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