Media literacy as an act of faith

Media literacy as an act of faith
Sunday Service Unitarian Church of Calgary July 2 2017

Board member greets audience

Chalice lighting: Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why they call it, the present.

Opening:

Welcome, and thanks for coming. Today I’m going to talk about how to evaluate the political and meta-political overtones in the news media that surround us, especially the online media.  I think Unitarians should be interested in this topic because our fifth principle affirms the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.  Democracy is only possible with an informed public, and that’s the news media’s job.

By the end of this talk, I hope you will have some tools to evaluate whatever you read or watch, to help choose some reliable outlets and assess any new outlets you encounter.

By “reliable”, I mean a news outlet that cites its sources, confirms its facts at least two ways, declares its bias and maintains its integrity. As a woman, I’m all too aware of media biases. I’ve spent most of my career challenging them. While I’m not sure that any news source can be “objective” or “neutral,” I AM sure it can be honest and transparent.   

My point is that we as readers and as voters should choose our media sources as carefully as we choose our food sources. I think most Unitarians prefer local, whole foods to nourish their bodies, instead of fast food or frozen TV dinners. In the same way, we should be careful to choose news outlets that emphasize facts, with perhaps a bit of social justice analysis.

Who am I to offer such advice?  I’ve been a free-lance journalist for 46 years. I’ve published six books with major publishers, I wrote a national column for 12 years and a Calgary Herald column for four years. I’ve been listed in the Canadian Who’s Who for my work since 1988, and in Wikipedia since 2006. In 1992, the Governor-General sent me a medal with a certificate for my “significant contribution to compatriots, community and Canada.” Since 2002, I've been writing the On The Other Hand blog for rabble.ca . I try to publish on Friday.

As a journalist, I’m here to persuade you that an educated, informed and engaged electorate is the bedrock of democracy. That’s kind of a truism in my business. While drafting the US Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously said that if he had to choose between a government and no newspapers, or newspapers and no government, he would choose newspapers without government.

More recently – 2014 – a scholar named Lisa Muller wrote a paper for the London School of Economics, looking at how news media affect elections in 47 countries. She concluded that, “As it happens, countries with a higher degree of media performance show higher levels of political participation and less corruption. They also tend to have a more lively civil society, and elected representatives seem to reflect the preferences of citizens more adequately....”
  
So let’s say that the media are at least potentially valuable to all of us. Since we’re all constantly exposed to major media, everybody feels qualified to be a critic. But an outsider may not see all the forces operating against effective reporting, starting with the fact that major news media workforce has shrunk drastically in the last two decades.

Reporter Jan Wong calculated that Canada lost half its newsroom staff from 2006 - 2011, falling from 10,000 jobs to 5,000 in five years. In the US, once-great newspapers like the Seattle Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor now exist only online if at all. Network news programs are in competition with specialized cable news channels. Journalism itself is an endangered industry.

Yet I repeat, without journalism or some kind of reporting standard, we cannot expect to have an informed electorate or a functioning democracy. We have only to look back at the 2003 US attack on Iraq to see what happens when news media fail to do their job adequately. The New York Times’ Judith Miller actually served time in prison for not doing her job properly. She and the Times were so enamoured of the “scoop” that they reported whatever the mendacious George W Bush White House told her, without checking it. She flunked the skepticism test.

Reporters are supposed to be skeptical, persistent and to have at least two separate confirmations for every fact. But persistence is dangerous in Donald Trump’s America, where last month, West Virginia reporter Daniel Heyman was arrested and charged with disturbing the peace, for persistently asking questions of Health Secretary Tom Price.  If convicted, Heyman could face up to six months in jail – for shouting questions at a public official.

Unfortunately, politicians who stonewall are just one of the reasons that facts are becoming harder to find. Perhaps that’s why, for the past 20 or 30 years, the ever-expanding media have featured mainly opinions rather facts. Rush Limbaugh on radio and Bill O’Reilly on TV built their careers by having white-man tantrums on air.

CNN aired shows like “Crossfire,” with opponents shouting over each other, until Jon Stewart scolded them on their own show and told them their format was actively harmful to democracy. The late Roger Ailes built Fox News on patriarchal white rage, as did the neo-Nazi Breitbart “News,” with columnists like Milo Yiannopoulos and his idiotic claim that anything -- including cancer -- is better for women than feminism. 

The 2016 US election brought us an unprecedented barrage of stories presented as news that were completely unrelated to any confirmable facts.  Many if not most of these stories were shared online, on specialized websites, or on social media. And almost all of them could be disproved quickly for anyone who took the time to check.

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Let’s pause for a moment to sing together. Our beloved Music Director Jane Perry is off-duty for the summer, so we have video hymns today. The words to We Would Be One, will be projected. The tune is Finlandia, and it’s #318 in the grey hymnal. Please rise in body or spirit, as you are able.

We Would Be One

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Now I want to show you some of the steps I usually take in order to check the validity of the news I read or see on TV. Let’s start with a sample case. How many people here have heard of the Bill and Hillary Clinton Foundation? I’ve been following the Foundation for about a decade because it is one of the largest non-profits promoting women’s rights, and IMO, most of the stories circulating about the Foundation are fabrications.

So let’s start with a shocker, a video from RT TV, that looks like a news item.

The broadcaster’s argument is that, “In 2015, the Clintons wrote off $1,042,000 in charitable contributions. Of that, $1 million went to none other than the Clinton Family Foundation, where they get to control the flow of money. So in 2015, 96% of the Clintons’ charity went to…themselves.”  Even if true, this argument is kind of irrelevant. But what this video seems to claim is the reverse, that somehow the foundation’s money ended up in the Clintons’ hands. 

So let’s start fact checking. Since we’re looking at a charity, we’ll go to two websites that evaluate charities and non-profit organizations, Charity Watch, and Charity Navigator, which is much larger.  
Here’s CharityWatch.org, which gives the Clinton Foundation an A rating overall. For governance and transparency, CW says the Foundation fulfills all its filing requirements. That’s a very favourable report. 

Let’s try Charity Navigator, a much larger site that assesses non-profits. Charity Navigator tells us that the annual budget is $190 million and gives the Foundation a 97% score for financial accountability and a 93% score for transparency. That's very favourable too.

We could launch a general Google search, as long as we stick to news outlets we know and trust. Fortune Magazine ran a comprehensive article about the Clinton Foundation before the 2016 election. One of the Foundation’s programs provides healthy food and exercise classes to 31,000 US schools. Another separate but still affiliated program, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, negotiated hard with pharmaceutical companies to decrease the price of anti-retroviral drugs, and now supplies AIDS drugs to 11 million patients, mostly in Africa.

Here’s another magazine article. Inside Philanthropy tells us that, between them, Bill and Hillary Clinton earn $141 million a year.  They donate 10.8% of their income to charity,  (or about $14 million) including to their own private Clinton Family Foundation. The IP article follows the Family Foundation’s grants of $5000 to $25,000, to 70 nonprofit organizations in Arts and Culture, Health and Human Services, Children and Youth, Education, and Policy and Global giving. “To our eyes,” the article concludes, “the Clintons look like pretty standard major donors.”

By now we have four solid sources that say the Bill and Hillary Clinton Foundation does a lot of good in the world. And if we go to the Foundation’s own website, at the bottom of the front page, we find a quick accounting statement that says 87.2% of revenues to go Program Services,
8.6% to Management and General expenses, and 3.7% to Fundraising. 

So what about the RT video I showed at the beginning? Here’s another reason to know your news outlets.  RT stands for “Russia Today.” I view RT as a Russian propaganda machine, of the kind that was very active during the Cold War.  RT popped up on Youtube about 10 years ago. At the time, I was editing an independent weekly newsmagazine online, and RT looked like it would be another Al Jazeera, which I regard as a usually credible source.

These days, unfortunately, as TV critic John Dolye says, “... if you’re a thinking person with a reasonable level of skepticism, Russia Today might seem ridiculous....But it’s not funny. It’s a bracing, brazen example of skewing the news coverage. And it is not without power and influence. It is commonly accepted that RT pays American cable and satellite companies handsomely to carry the channel. It has a lot of money to spend and has slick, well-staffed channels in several countries...” 

RT is far from the only party attempting to influence our thinking, of course. Here in the city, we live in a sea of advertising. Political parties vie for our attention. The National Post promotes conservative views and free market capitalism. SUN News attempted to win a spot on basic cable, in hopes of building popularity for right-wing views, similar to Fox News in the States. Ezra Levant claims to be a journalist, and calls Rebel Media a news organization, even though he organizes right-wing political events in order to cover them.   

In fact, I think the reason most people don’t think much about media literacy is that the media presence seems kind of overwhelming.  And yet, if you ever tried comparing US coverage of, say, the Iraq war, with the CBC’s coverage, you’ve probably already noticed a difference. With luck, each of us has a few favourite news sources.

I’ll talk about how to choose reliable news sources in a few minutes.

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We’ll take a break now to collect the offering. I invite you to light a candle of joy or concern on the side if you like, or drop a pebble in the water here. Our hymn is Meditation on Breathing
You’re welcome to sing along, or just enjoy.

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Let's talk about mainstream sources for a few minutes. At home, we take the Globe and Mail and usually listen to CBC Radio One. I like the Metro and I'm not so keen on the Herald. I subscribe to the Atlantic and Consumers Report. What publications do other people like? 


We've talked about some of our preferred major media news sources. When we go online, we have instant access to thousands of news outlets globally -- plus millions of individuals' accounts and opinions. Some web page have official sounding names and zero credibility, like "National Report." Without some kind of sorting mechanism, we could easily drown in "content."

Every published story usually carries some clues. As a journalist, I look at the reputation of the source of the story and the outlet that carries it, as well as how many sources are cited within the story. I search on the topic and see what other publications are saying. Lack of corroborating stories is usually a bad sign. And I try to check the facts, or find a fact-checker on the story. 

Perhaps the longest-serving fact-checker on the Web is Snopes.com , which began in 1995 by checking urban legends and has evolved into checking news stories and celebrity claims.

Started by two retired insurance workers, Snopes soon became a standard newsroom reference if you wanted to check a jarring story. Last December, Facebook signed a deal with Snopes to check the fake news circulating on member pages.

Now, says Kalev Leetaru in Vanity Fair, Snopes’ founders are divorcing, and the expanded Snopes site is part of the divorce case. Snopes is still a standard reference in newsrooms, he says, for situations like the recent case when the president’s spokesperson invented an imaginary Bowling Green Massacre to justify the travel ban on people coming from Muslim countries.  

A more recent contender is Media Bias Fact Check, which fact checks stories and also rates publications according to their left/right bias or reliable/unreliable status.   MBFC even includes a list of the 10 best fact-checking sites, such as Politifact, or the Annenberg Centre, or the Poynter Institute. 

Fact checkers can help identify which news sites to avoid, and their responses can be useful in online discussions. However, we seem to live in a post-fact or “alternative fact” political climate.


Fans of democracy argue that, as a society, we need the whole news media ecology, including funding for major investigations as well as independent journalism sites like rabble.ca where I write a weekly blog post. One major difference between Canada and the U.S. is that Canada's CRTC rejected core-cable status for Sun News Network, a kissing cousin to far right-wing Fox News in the U.S. Canadians have shown that much media savvy already.

In the U.S., a mere six companies control all the news media, outside of PBS. There are a few independent media outlets, such as Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! and Glenn Greenwald's The Intercept. I visit Commondreams.org and Alternet.org daily. On YouTube, I like The Young Turks -- youthful, insightful, insouciant, and literally Turks of Turkish descent. Bill Moyers also listed his top 10 investigative sites on his blog.

Among mainstream media, Reuters News Service stands out for editor-in-chief Steve Adler's instruction to newsroom staff to cover the White House the way they cover governments such as, "Turkey, the Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Thailand, China, Zimbabwe, and Russia, nations in which we sometimes encounter some combination of censorship, legal prosecution, visa denials, and even physical threats to our journalists."

For what it's worth, in my opinion most Americans would be amazed at the even-handed and thorough approach CBC takes to news gathering. Business Insider found that Americans place most trust in British news sources, but rely on the likes of Fox and CNN for domestic news.

Pew Research Center approaches the question another way, asking instead which news outlets are the more trusted. The Center found differences between liberals (who trusted 28 out of 36 news outlets) and conservatives, who trusted only 12 out of the 36 news organizations named.

Like anything else we see, what we observe depends largely on where we're standing. Social media tend to reinforce our own attitudes, in that we see more of what we indicate we like. We need to treat our media diet like our food diet, aiming for variety as well as flavour and sustenance.

We need to teach our children how to assess what they see onscreen, looking at source, content and context. As individuals, we need to follow a few trusted news sources like rabble.ca and CBC.ca, and keep a list of wildly inaccurate or politically unpalatable ones, like breitbart.com. And we can't take high quality news gathering for granted.

News used to be the most important programming that local or national broadcasters could offer. These days, newspapers are thinner than thin mints. TV network websites promote entertainment or reality shows, and conceal news programming under the "more" button.

Last December, Canada's Public Policy Forum des politiques publique du Canada issued a report that warns Canada's news media cannot survive their steeply dropping revenue. The Shattered Mirror report found that 225 weekly and 27 daily newspapers have merged or closed shop since 2010, in more than 210 federal ridings. Small market TV stations have closed. Newsrooms everywhere whittle away at staff and services. The Public Policy Forum cites an estimated 30 per cent reduction in journalism jobs since 2010.

In response, Public Policy Forum President Ed Greenspon convened a panel of experts including pollster Allan Gregg to recommend ways to save the industry. The Shattered Mirror calls on the federal government to support Canadian news media in a dozen ways such as adjusting tax breaks for online advertising; allowing non-profit media to register as charities and thus be eligible for philanthropic funding; strengthening the Copyright Act; strengthening and expanding Canadian Press; establishing Indigenous journalism as a discipline; creating a legal advice service for investigative journalists, and establishing a Future of Journalism and Democracy Fund, with an immediate endowment of $100 million and annual deposits of taxes from Canadian advertisements placed in foreign online media.

There's a reason the 45th U.S. president is furiously trying to control the news media, to the extent that Washington D.C. police have laid felony charges against six journalists who covered Inauguration Day protests. And it's the flip side of the reason that the U.S. and Canadian constitutions protect freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

As former Globe and Mail editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon put it: "Canada's news media is in the midst of an existential crisis. So, therefore, is our democracy."

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Questions? Discussion?




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We end today's service with our linking song, Spirit of Life  but we invite everyone to stay for lemonade and cookies. This video plays the song through twice. We'll sing the first time, and let it run. You're welcome to sing it twice.  Thanks for coming.