This was the time of repressed memories. Patients would undergo hypnosis and suddenly remember events from their past. Even if that event never happened. This was the case with Cook, who claimed to have a repressed memory uncovered through hypnosis of being molested by Bernardin. Only it never happened.
Cook was encouraged to make accusations against Bernardin by a third party as way to get money from the Church. Only 2 people knew this when the story came out; Cook and the third party.
When the story broke, the WCIX news producer declared that she "hated the Catholic Church" and led the newscast with it: lead story with an edited video segment. Her comment has stayed with me for three decades.
About six weeks later, Cook announced the truth; that he'd lied and Bernardin was innocent. I looked to the producer for her response. It was this: the story would run as a 20-second reader leading into sports and weather. And no regrets for having run the original story.
It was at this point that I lost interest in my news career. It was clear that any sense of objectivity was dead. And being objective was a goal of the highest ideals that we were taught in our college journalism classes.
Funny thing about the idea of journalistic objectivity--it was a marketing ploy publishers in the early 20th century used to sell newspapers. Before this time, newspapers were roundly viewed as subjective publications. You read a newspaper, or pamphlet, because it reinforced your viewpoints on the world. Yellow journalism was the norm and two of the biggest players were Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal.
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| An example of New York Journal's famous yellow journalism. |
Seems like we are living through a second coming of yellow journalism. Biases lead news judgement and no one is willing to admit they are skewed.
CNN is overwhelmingly liberal and has a justifiable axe to grind against Trump. Fox News is overwhelmingly Trump friendly and ignores 99% of the stories critical to our current Administration. InfoWars isn't news and MSNBC breathlessly delivers every story as melodrama. And I haven't even touched on fake news.
I find its best to keep news sources in rotation, moving among the outlets and compiling truth from various sources. But which ones to trust?
There are a few efforts on the interwebs for scoring the major news outlets on their political biases, but even those evaluations are skewed. What I find most interesting is that NPR is now considered to be fairly mainstream. It used to be far left.
If you want to have your opinions reinforced, then by all means, rely on the sources with whom you agree. If you want to be challenged, read material from the neutral zone of news. Or even the opposing views.
Here are a few sources who have categorized the various news outlets. Not all agree, but they have plenty of similarities.
- Quora: Is there really any non-partisan news sources that don't have such a liberal or conservative "twist"? If so what are they?
- University of Michigan Research: "Fake News," Lies and Propaganda: How to Sort Fact from Fiction
- MarketWatch: How does your favorite news source rate on the ‘truthiness’ scale? Consult this chart
