Bad as government is, trust me, it could be exponentially worse

I’ve been biting my tongue. At least about some things. Most of the time.

For instance, that time I typed “how the media” into the Google search engine and it dutifully completed my thought with the word “lies.”

Ouch.

I hit enter anyway. The first return was “How the media handles Trump’s lies.” Next was “7 of the media’s most egregious lies in 2016,” an opinion piece by the Conservative Review. The third entry, by Alex “9/11 Was An Inside Job” Jones, had me far enough down this particular rabbit hole.

Still, I’m pretty thick-skinned about this “dishonest media” meme that’s all the rage these days.

The first city council I covered accused me of making up quotes. I countered their accusation by walking into the next meeting and placing a cassette record on the council table. They looked at it as if it were a rattlesnake. An alderman called my bet the next meeting with his own recently purchased recorder — and the insinuation I doctored the tapes.

Those shenanigans ended when his recorder ate a tape, and we came to the realization that this feuding had nothing to do with good governance. We called a truce.

The ancestors of newspapers were published by the governments of ancient Rome and China’s Han dynasty. It wasn’t until the people got their hands on printing presses that things went south.

Nowadays we seem to be headed backward — to colonial times when journalist John Peter Zenger was tossed in the clink for criticizing colonial governor William Cosby. But the arrest backfired, setting America on the course that led to truth being a viable defense against libel charges. Which is why so few of the folks screaming “liars” are seeking a remedy in court.

A few years back, historian T.H. Breen wrote “American Insurgents, American Patriots.” Breen holds journalists in higher esteem than the average Joe.

“Newspapers — a relatively innovative form of communication in eighteenth-century provincial society — helped persuade colonial readers that no matter where they happened to live, they had a personal stake in what occurred in Boston,” he wrote. “During 1774 and 1775 an unprecedented exchange of political intelligence gained momentum, and long before the Continental Congress got around to declaring independence, a surge of shared information convinced Americans that they could in fact trust other Americans whom they had never met.”

These days, the president can say something demonstrably false — the biggest electoral college victory since President Ronald Reagan, for example — and brush off reporters who challenge the statement.

People tell me, not all the time but a lot, that we should just publish stories they agree with.

Fortunately, Americans have never been inclined to march around in lockstep. That’s what has made us great. What threatens us now is the inability all along the political spectrum to listen to opposing views.

Want proof? Look at Washington, the town that invented partisan gridlock.

It’s OK to disagree. It’s OK to point out mistakes.

But to dismiss anything you disagree with as “fake news” or unworthy of print is a disservice, mainly to yourself.

This story was originally published February 19, 2017 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Bad as government is, trust me, it could be exponentially worse."