Marble Falls Let me start by acknowledging that some parts of the world may simply be moving too quickly down the road for me to keep up. In my defense, or as an excuse, I realize I’ve got a lot of company. I’d like to argue that I’m simply on the trailing edge, rather than the cutting edge, but the truth is that I simply don’t have the time and bandwidth.
Let me get closer to the point. I rarely watch videos for example. Too often, they make me feel like a captive audience, wishing they would hurry up, get to the point, and then let me go on with my life. I still know how to read. I can do so quickly and have a fairly good grasp of the point without wallowing around on every word and sentence. I understand that I don’t necessarily think the way everyone else does, but I want to make up my own mind. I’m not looking to be influenced and, frankly, am suspicious of those who try to influence me.
For a number of reasons, this was on my mind. Yesterday, in the studio in a meeting and then later at a board meeting of KABF, our giant 100,000-watt noncommercial radio station, we were talking about how people get the news. The main thrust behind these conversations was the decline of legacy journalism as a news source and the efforts to counter these trends. I was sympathetic but trying to hold on to radio as a space for information and news for huge parts of the population. No one was really disagreeing, but all of a sudden, I was hearing that some folks wanted to include an increasing role for social media and influencers as news sources. Really? What did we learn from Facebook in one incident and election after another? Or in Covid-times and the damage to public health that is enduring.
Then scanning the Washington Post, there was lead story about s kerfuffle between Pennsylvania’s Governor Shapiro and anti-vaxer, Robert Kennedy, Jr. head of Health and Human Services over two measles deaths in the state where the rate of measles vaccines have plummeted. Sidestepping this argument, what really shocked me was that in the middle of the article the reporters saw it as part of a news piece to write that…
As of Thursday, left-wing political influencers were talking about measles about five times more often than right-wing figures, according to a Washington Post analysis of their social media posts, podcasts and newsletters. The frequency of the mentions this week by the left is the highest since early 2025 during the West Texas measles outbreak, which infected more than 700 people and contributed to the deaths of two unvaccinated children.
This report included a big chart illustrating their point. How was this news? How did it help the reader, except to infer that if we didn’t want to figure out the facts, maybe we could just drift to port based on whether we identified as left or right? That’s now news. That’s bias persuasion.
Was this an outlier? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? I wish. Moving on along, I read a piece in the Post that was interesting to me about the Flock traffic surveillance cameras that police are using that have finally become a real issue. Post reporters shared poll numbers that showed that over the last year support for the cameras had flipped to opposition on a bipartisan basis. Fair enough, but then this story also included the following…
Since then, right-wing accounts have posted about Flock cameras more than three times as often as left-wing ones, the analysis found. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism, posted dozens of times about launching a federal investigation into the technology’s use. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) posted last month on X, “Mass Surveillance + Government + AI is a very, very bad combo for freedom.”
That elected officials are flipping is important, but, once again, where do they get this right-wing versus left-wing accounting and its three times number? Post staff is determining these accounts and their leaning, which is subjective, not objective, and absolutely not transparent, but somehow part of a news story. And, once again, a chart underlining their contention is embedded in the story making their own social media team even bigger news that the pols shifting sides.
All of this seems suspicious to me, and wrong. They are also sending a message that we shouldn’t trust polls as a barometer of what people think, or at the least, we need to shore those numbers up by also calculating comments on social media and by influencers.
To me, it seems like what used to be the “real” news is trying to remain relevant and undergird their position by lending credibility to a gumbo of “fake” news and just plain self-certified opinion. People are going to get their news and form their opinions one way or another, but why should we pander and legitimize anything but the facts, ma’am?