By John Stossel Stupid News
My selections: • Invention of the personal computer and cellphone. • Google and Facebook. • The fall of the Soviet Union. • Changing attitudes about sex and gender. • A drastic reduction in poverty around the world. Only one of those giant changes (the fall of the Soviet Union) led the news! Instead, “big” headlines of my previous reunion years (five-year periods when I might show up for the celebration) were topics like: • Patty Hearst robbing a bank. • Serial killer Ted Bundy. • The accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. • The “Band-Aid” concert for famine relief. • The Exxon Valdez oil spill. • The O.J. Simpson trial. • Columbine. • Michael Jackson’s death. • Ebola. • And this year: the Ethiopian Airlines plane crash. (I chose those stories from “biggest stories of the year!” reports in mainstream media like MSN and ABC News.) • Pollution-control rules. • The women’s movement.
“Fake news!” shouts the president. His supporters cheer. That drives my colleagues into a frenzy of self-absorbed handwringing: “Threats to press freedom... press persecution!” It’s silly. American reporters are hardly less safe because of President Donald Trump’s hyperbole. (Trump is reckless when he uses the term in other countries. Authoritarians in Russia, China, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, etc., now cite “fake news” while they jail or kill reporters. He should shut up about “fake news” when he’s overseas.) But I smiled when I first heard him use the phrase, not because news stories are “fake” – they typically aren’t (reporters who make things up are usually caught and fired) – but because so much of what people call “news” is press releases and breathless exaggerations of isolated problems. It’s stupid news. This spring, I attended my 50th college reunion. Alumni officials asked me to join a panel titled “Free Speech and Fake News.” It made me ask myself, “What were the biggest life-changing events in the 50 years since I graduated?”
American Consequences
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