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I don’t have to tell you how much effort the Right has put into discrediting and bad-mouthing the Press, accusing it of treachery and treason, and doing their best to replace it with an alternative of their own. The Press is where people go to find out what is happening, to get the news, and in order to influence the shared perception of reality it is necessary to control it.

The Press has never been a monolith of opinion. In a free society, there are are always competing mouthpieces for every political point on the spectrum, and there are variations in quality as well as ideology. And even the best news outlets respond to market forces, and cultivate audiences. After all, they are businesses, and businesses must serve their corporate masters immediately, and their customer base eventually.

I have my own problems with the press. They quickly lose interest in long-term stories and issues, they can be influenced by their advertisers and owners, they pander to their market audiences, and they are prone to fashion and rumor like everyone else. And of course, they are too often tempted by the fact that people want to have their prejudices catered to, not questioned. A good press is a varied one, that represents many sources and answers to many masters. If they favor some particular point of view or ideology, so be it: hopefully there is a competitor available to counter it. The press often trivializes issues, or ignores them, or loses interest in them, or tries to tell people what they want to hear and not what they need to know.

But when I hear the press, ALL of it, exists to spread lies or push one POV, that it is dominated by one single elite, that its members are ALL a part of some sinister conspiracy of intellectuals…well; that is a dead giveaway that fascism is behind the criticism.

What broadcast news do I watch? Every day I watch BBC America, because it gives me an idea of what the world is doing and thinking without it being overly steeped in parochial USA news. Then I watch PBS News Hour, to find out what is going on in my country, especially in politics. I trust them to be honest and thorough. I finish up by watching Network TV news, which although I often find it superficial, incomplete, even childish, much like local TV reporting, I have never caught it actually lying to me. The commercial network broadcasts have a relatively low information content, and are reluctant to take a stand on anything, too often retreating into a false equivalency; at least they give me an idea of what the bulk of my fellow citizens are exposed to. After all, there may be only one Truth, but the world tends to act on its own perceived version of it.