Blurred Lines Between Fact and Opinion

The new politics of an old(ish) media strategy

It’s taken me a minute to get my footing in a world where the right wing now claims to be against censorship. Huh? Yes, the conservative movement, after decades of buy-in on book bans, has seized the banner of free speech and is now waving it around for all to see.

See Trump’s executive action on censorship, which he signed on day one of his presidency: “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

I mean, yeah! Totally. But the Trump administration’s definition of free speech is … highly specific.

In the executive order, Trump claims that the Biden years were marred by an unconstitutional federal effort to suppress free speech on social media platforms by targeting misinformation. It’s clear that Trump doesn’t want you to think this is a thing. “Under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens,” the order reads. By the time Trump slid behind the desk in the Oval Office, Mark Zuckerberg had already declared that he was ending fact checking on Meta. We all know how Elon Musk feels about misinfo on X.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, like a weird amount. Let’s break it down.

It’s clear that Trump and his boy band of billionaires want the ability to spread what former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway so memorably referred to as “alternative facts” as a way to influence public opinion. The president has benefited fiercely from these social media whisper (or honestly, very shouty) campaigns. Now that he’s been elected, he doesn’t want his own pesky government interfering in his, or anyone else’s, ability to strong-arm the national narrative to his liking. If you’ve ever heard a former New York gossip columnist talk about Trump in the 1980’s and 90’s, you know that he’s never let something as flimsy as the truth get in his way.

This brings me to modern media and how it’s not only shaped Trump, but has greased the pan for his half baked-relationship to the facts, too.

Once upon a time in print journalism, there was a clear ethical wall between reporting and opinion writing — one gave the facts, the other helped readers wade through them. Reporters were supposed to be neutral while op-ed writers, or columnists, were allowed to have obviously partisan ideas, as well as blindspots. In its purist form, reporting is (hopefully) a compelling presentation of multi-dimensional quotes and details while op-eds are (again, ideally) more like a conversation with a smart, informed friend. Newspapers label op-eds clearly and trust their readers to know the difference.

But television journalism is a whole other animal.

Thanks mostly to the Australian media magnate, and my former boss, Rupert Murdoch, TV news has become an unwieldy hybrid beast of reporting and opinion, so that viewers can’t always tell right away what they’re watching. Is Fox 5 local news reporting? Mostly — although it’s sensationalistic in a way that’s designed to capture antsy channel changers. Is Fox News opinion? Mostly — although the hosts do interview guests, albeit ones who come prepared with generally right wing friendly talking points. (This isn’t just an issue with conservative news outlets, of course, but I’m using Fox as an example. I also just read Paper of Wreckage, an oral history of my onetime employer the New York Post, and I found it to be a really edifying look at Murdoch’s tabloidification of American news. It’s fun, too.)

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but bear with me. Media has slicked the runway for this current moment, where facts are malleable and the line between journalism and opinion is fuzzy. The News Literacy Project calls this “opinion creep.” Add in the ability for people to do armchair web research, amplify their own ideas on social media and grow avid followings with absolutely no journalistic training and you’ve got — well, I’m not sure what metaphor I’m going with here but you’ve got a freaking mess, embodied in a guy with a bright orange face, to deal with.

We’ve got a free speech problem on our hands, folks. Censorship is bad! Unless you’re targeting hate speech, or lies flitting around in truth’s clothing. But the left has been too quick to conflate hate speech with bad opinions and the right has allowed opinions to cosplay as facts. You know what they say about opinions, right?

They might just be sinking the country.

I want to be explicit here that I don’t think the issue of censorship is the same on both sides of the aisle. Democrats support a free press while some very influential Republicans want to make life very uncomfortable for journalists, which is just one of the reasons why Trump’s executive order is absurd. But I believe this question of what’s opinion, and what very bad ones you’re allowed to air out, is important and needs to be settled, holistically, in a way that makes it harder for would-be press-suppressing, book banning conservatives to claim that they’re anti-censorship.

At the very least, I believe we need clearer demarcations; the return of the ethical wall in all forms of media. An FCC — though not Trump’s, obviously — could enforce much stricter rules about what we’re allowed to call news, and what gets labeled as op-ed or even, entertainment. Fox’s Entertaining Current Events Subjects doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but check out that acronym! ; )

I also think the entire country needs thorough media literacy training, starting at the elementary school level.

But maybe that’s just my bad take. Either way, I’m happy for my right to put it out there.