How to read the newspaper

Which is to say, a critical eye is warranted. Newspapers, like all the works of men, are imperfect things, and the nation’s newspaper editors and television-news producers are very much at fault for the low general level of trust in the media. But they do not traffic wholesale in fiction. All of the cries of “fake news!” in the world are not going to change that.

What is happening right now is not salubrious skepticism but a kind of mass hysteria, millions of heads plunging with struthioniform insistence into the same sand, as though insisting that reality is something other than what it is, or merely averting our gaze, would somehow alter the truth. Something has changed radically with remarkable speed. Not long ago, when I would inform someone that they had passed along an Internet hoax or erroneous claim (writers on public affairs spend a fair amount of their correspondence thus engaged) the response would be a sheepish “oops.” About once a week, someone will inform me that Hillary Rodham Clinton was disbarred for misconduct (she wasn’t) or that Barack Obama’s mother-in-law is receiving a six-figure federal pension for having babysat his children (she isn’t) or some other such nonsense, and then cry “fake news!” when corrected. The irony is that they have fallen for fake news, and retreat into “fake news!” when their gullibility is shown.

We all get took from time to time, of course: Not long ago, I responded to a Twitter parody of Sally Kohn, one of the saddest and most completely self-abasing of the Democratic pundits, without realizing that it was a parody. I find it difficult to tell the difference with Kohn and a few others. The easiest and most responsible thing to do is to acknowledge the error, but we live in juvenile times. If the New York Times publishes a report that displeases you, then the fact that it was in the New York Times is, for some people, enough to discredit it. If Fox News reported that dog-catchers catch dogs, nine-tenths of American college professors would sign a petition denouncing this as a lie spread by the Koch brothers, who have a nefarious plan either to catch dogs or not catch them, depending on what the day calls for.