To the Editor:

While I agree with many of the concerns you have with fake news (www.smokymountainnews.com/opinion/item/18865), it didn’t start with social media or the internet. The “people [who] are too lazy to search out the truth or they just don’t really care” have existed since before Gutenberg, not just with the advent of social media. Your so-called “legitimate” media have been in free-fall for decades. Yellow Journalism started with newspapers, not social media. The only difference is one of magnitude.

You ask, “What happens to democracy in a post-factual age? We have no idea because it hasn’t happened before.”

You couldn’t possibly be serious. The old media have no equal when it comes to distorting facts or simply making them up. Contrary to your assertion, they have been doing it for years. And, I won’t even count the network quiz show scandals.

Charles Hammond, in an editorial in the Cincinnati Gazette, wrote, “General [Andrew] Jackson’s mother was a Common Prostitute brought to this country by British soldiers. She afterwards married a Mulatto Man, with whom she had several children, of which General Jackson is one!!!”

Who knew at the time that FDR was a cripple or that JFK was a drug and sex addict? It was only with the conspiratorial aid of a complicit media that it was covered up. But, only those favored by the media received, and continue to receive, partiality.

Using a quote from Thomas Jefferson to “re-emphasize civic education in our public schools” is rather peculiar when you consider that while he served as Secretary of State, he was the impetus to founding the National Gazette to counter the influence of the Gazette of the United States, a Federalist newspaper. He subsidized the paper with grants from the State Department. Back then, as now, it was all about politics. Fake news has been with us for generations.

Then there is Dan Rather’s Killian documents controversy. The New York Times with the plagiarism of Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg. NYT’s John F. Burns and Newsday’s Roy Gutman’s reportage of the Balkans wars. Jack Kelley at USA Today. Brian Williams. Stephen Glass. Janet Cooke. George Stephanopoulos.

Don’t forget that Newsweek had to retract a story claiming the Quran had been flushed down the toilet at Guantanamo Bay by U.S. prison guards.

Last, but by no means least, is Walter Cronkite. Despite his sobriquet of  “The most trusted man in America,” his political slanting was so egregious that CBS replaced him as anchor at the 1964 political conventions with Robert Trout and Roger Mudd. He also led the media lies about the Tet Offensive. Cronkite lied. Young men died.

In a rare, candid essay Will Rahn, managing director of politics for CBS News Digital, confessed that the White House Press Corps “were all tacitly or explicitly  #WithHer.” “Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice…. We must become more impartial, not less so. We have to abandon our easy culture of tantrums and recrimination. We have to ... admit that, as a class, journalists have a shamefully limited understanding of the country we cover.”

I’m certain a good many of your readers are not surprised by the content of his essay, but are surprised at the admission.

We realize the media haven’t changed much from the days of the New York Times’ Walter (“you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs”) Duranty and his ill-gotten Pulitzer Prize despite lying about the Holomodor. That’s why, when Donald Trump points to the media at his rallies and calls them liars, the response is overwhelmingly in agreement.

Timothy Van Eck

Whittier