I stopped trusting what I heard and saw in the news in May 1971.
1971 was the year my home town of Drew and the whole state of Mississippi celebrated Archie Manning Day. I was in the seventh grade. Despite what the history books might say, the Drew High School Band didn’t march. I know. I was in the band. I watched the parade from Frank Mixon’s front yard. There’s a whole different story there.
In May, my older brother Charley graduated from Drew High School.
So did a young lady named Jo Etha Collier. Her brother was my class mate. Charley graduated, went on to MDJC in Moorehead, and still lives in Drew. Jo Etha was shot and killed graduation night.
According to at least one national news report, she was Drew’s first black valedictorian and was shot in a fit of rage by KKK members on the high school steps, her diploma in her hand. According to testimony in the circuit court of Sunflower County she was shot by a drunken redneck in front of a café several hours later. Three men were convicted of that crime.
In the fall of 1976, I wrote variations of the same term paper for three different classes at Ole Miss. In the version I wrote for Journalism 101 I compared the coverage of the Ole Miss riots and the 1963 Mississippi governor’s election in the New York Times and Mississippi’s Jackson Daily News. What has stuck with me over the years was how the coverage differed.
I’m not going to try to recreate that paper, but the short version is the JDN told the story that portrayed Ross Barnett as the last bastion of hope for Mississippi. The NYT printed one in which James Meredith and the US Marshalls were heroes. I couldn’t find where either paper printed falsehoods. The differences were all in what was left out of each story.
In 1980 Ted Turner and CNN showed up that it could take all day, every day, to report all the news in the world. In the 1970s three TV networks said they gave us the news in 30 minutes or less. What all did they leave out?
Today, hundreds of websites publish news 24 hours a day. Some of these openly proclaim a bias of some sort. Others claim to be completely objective. Almost all of them claim sort of exclusivity in sources or analysis. None of them publish everything, nor can any one person honestly claim to read, hear, and process all the news, not even the paper that claims to contain “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
Fortunately, most news sources try to do things the right way. They try to verify facts and claims. They use publicly available documents. They avoid anonymous sources if at all possible and do their best to confirm the ones who have to stay unnamed.
So, what is a person to do to stay informed?
Read as much as you can. Read things you disagree with. Listen to as much as you can stand. Find sources that use multiple sources and attempt to include disparate views.
Question them all, and don’t believe any of them completely, especially the ones that seem to agree with you. Ask questions, and when the answers don’t make sense keep digging.
Stay skeptical, my friends.
