Everyone is a publisher these days. It doesn’t matter if you have a building full of reporters or are just one person (like me) who writes a blog. There are no barriers of entry to news anymore.

And that presents a real problem.

What I’m writing today, on my little blog, is opinion. But with so many people writing, it’s become increasingly hard for people to understand what’s news and what isn’t.

On one hand, that should be easy. News is what’s happening now and is reported free of any bias; just the facts, ma’am. (And no, Joe Friday never said that on Dragnet).

But by removing the barriers of entry, real journalism has been usurped by a blend of advocacy and opinion that masquerades as news. What’s worse, most cable news and internet sites don’t help their readers differentiate between real news and everything else.

Let’s take Fox News. As I mentioned in my last blog, the cable network has a number of very credible journalists. Then, it has Sean Hannity. Hannity is not a journalist – he says so himself – but his followers don’t know that. His show masquerades as news as it follows the same format as Fox’s news shows. The difference, as we know, is that Hannity is an avid cheerleader for GOP causes and makes no bones about it.
This isn’t to say Hannity is the only one at fault. Over at MSNBC, the wildly entertaining Chis Matthews, and Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell are in the same boat. Rush Limbaugh belongs there, too.

I have no problem with anyone doing their schtick. Free speech and all that. But I do have a real problem with entertainers acting as journalists, news shows or sites further muddying the waters by not labeling what is and isn’t news.

Again, a fairly simple definition. If your show reports without bias and presents both sides of the story, it’s news. If you don’t, it’s not.
These news purveyors would do everyone a favor by noting, in a scroll on the TV screen, or along the top of their website, that Sean Hannity, for example, is a talk show host whose views and guests favor a conservative audience. (It would be, of course, the opposite for the liberal and anti-Trump MSNBC).

At least viewers would know, for sure, that they’re about to engage in an exercise in tribalism because they’re about to listen to someone who parrots the views they believe in – and they’re not watching a newscast.

The issues of how media – especially social media – has increased tribalism and group think are ones we’ll tackle as we go.
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But for now, we need a little change that no one will ever do.

There’s been a lot of talk about Fake News, and really, it’s a term that does a horrible disservice to the Fourth Estate, a critical component to our democracy.

The term Fake News has confused what’s fake and what isn’t, what’s news and what’s advocacy, and what’s fact and what’s opinion.
So let’s try to clear the air a little bit.

Fake News is now being used as a term by people who don’t like or agree with a news story. Report about government corruption? Nah, Fake News. Report about an ongoing probe? Nothing to see here, it’s Fake News.
In reality, there’s nothing fake about these stories; there’s nothing wrong with the stories. It’s just that someone doesn’t like it – and it’s OK not to like what’s written.

But it’s not OK to weaken a critical component of society by attacking its credibility. That’s simply wrong.

It also isn’t Fake News when a publisher makes a mistake. Mistakes have happened, daily, since the advent of print. When mistakes happen, reputable news organizations immediately fix them. The New York Times is a perfect example. If the Times makes an error, it publishes a correction that lives at the bottom of a story in perpetuity. They don’t hide it. They own it. The mistake is not proof of Fake News; it’s proof that we’re human.

Opinion isn’t Fake News, though it is something worse – it blurs the lines between what is news and what isn’t. All the cable news networks are guilty of this.

Let’s take the much-maligned Fox News as an example of this. Fox has some outstanding journalists who report the news without bias, journalists like Sheppard Smith, Brent Baier and Chris Wallace (who is one of the best in the business).
But the problem occurs when Sean Hannity, Rachel Maddow and the like come on with programs that clearly have a slant (Hannity shills for Donald Trump, Maddow can’t stand him). The cable news networks don’t try to differentiate between news and opinion, and that confuses viewers.

Hannity’s viewers (and Maddows) believe them to be impartial journalists, and they are not. There’s nothing wrong with them having an opinion and playing to an audience that tunes it to hear their version of the truth.

It’s dead wrong for the cable networks not to label these programs as opinion.

Remember, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but they’re not entitled to their own facts.  So what happens? We hear these talking heads spout their version of the truth, and everything else becomes Fake News.

There are too many of us forgetting how important a free and impartial press is to our society. The press uncovers abuses, sheds lights on important societal problems and acts as a government watchdog. Communities that no longer have a newspaper are weaker for it, because citizens don’t know the actions their local school boards, city councils, planning commissions and the like are taking.

We should be fighting for the press, not tearing it down, with unfounded cries of Fake News. We should be supporting the press through whatever subscription fees they’re now forced to charge, not encouraging confusion with these Fake News sentiments.
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Most importantly, anytime anyone uses the term Fake News we should cast a suspicious eye toward that person, because, in all likelihood, they are the ones who are really Fake.