Sorry Twitter, fake news is the real problem

A very important fact has been lost in the current controversy over the latest tweet by President Trump flagged by Twitter as misleading or inaccurate content.

Because when it comes to saying that "fake news" is a bigger problem than racism in America today, Trump happens to be right.

No, fake news isn't the only problem in America and it rarely is the root cause of any particular challenge. But it is now functioning to exacerbate existing problems and obscure so many positives that it's threatening to tear the country apart on a permanent basis.

Let's start by defining "fake news" a little more specifically. The most common form today is highly editorialized content masquerading as straight news coverage on mainstream news media outlets. This manifests itself most often with stories and headlines that make sure to portray anything President Trump says or people say about him in the most negative possible light. The overwhelming majority of professional journalists who are liberal and/or despise President Trump and his supporters is the clear catalyst for the prevalence of biased, anti-Trump fake news. All of this is amplified even more by social media.

But the more Trump-friendly FOX News and others are also guilty of promoting fake news. This is more due to the number one bias the news business has been guilty of for all time: sensationalism and negativity. Fear, anger, and "action" always create more readers, viewers, and clicks than stories about the nation and the world being in generally good condition. This is true from your local news reports on "SNOW-MAGEDDON 2020!" all the way up to hyped up reports about foreign military troop movements.

The two top stories dominating the headlines right now serve as sad proof of all of this. First, the news media's sensationalism, scare tactics, and strong bias against any calming news connected to the COVID-19 outbreak has been evident for months now.

This had led to confusing and changing safety directives, unnecessary economic hardships, and even healthcare dangers that far outweigh the effect of the coronavirus. Right now, we're seeing too many news media outlets over-hyping new confirmed cases of the virus without putting the numbers in the proper context of actual infection rates, death rates, and the effect of heightened COVID-19 testing across the country. That faulty reporting has undeniably played a role in unduly frightening businesses, consumers, and investors, including goosing Apple to decide to re-close some of its stores in Florida and Arizona instead of simply increasing social distancing and mask protocols.

Second, the news media has taken upon itself, and not just in the last few weeks, to exacerbate and stoke racial tensions and violence across the country. Even as the statistics show the number of police killings of black men are actually smaller than those of white suspects, the impression news consumers get is that there is some planned out racist plot to hunt down black men and kill them. No one can deny that racism is a problem that primarily affects African-Americans in this country. But the problem does not justify rioting, looting, physical attacks on police, or the charging of cops being threatened with 1st degree murder.

And when decent people call for an end to the violence, we have news anchors who respond with what sounds an awful lot like a call for more violence.

But it doesn't end there. If you don't believe the propensity to encourage more anger and fear above all else, look at what happens to all the people who propose solutions to these real problems.

Again, racism in America is still real despite the clear campaign to make it sound worse than it is. Many of us have noted this fact for years, and have tried to do something by focusing more on fixing tangible problems as opposed to focusing on the theoretical "changing minds" efforts too many people waste their time trying.

The clear and undeniable educational opportunity gaps that exist in too many of our poor and minority neighborhoods is one place to focus well-meaning efforts to strike a blow at the heart of American racism. For decades, those efforts have fueled school choice and charter school movements in dozens of states. I've gone a step further over the years by calling on America's top universities and corporations to set up and fund free, private, K-12 schools in the nation's poorest areas. Another plan I've proposed and promoted is simply setting up accounts with the same amount every state spends on each student and allow parents to use that money on an array of educational options, including private school tuition, tutoring, or computers/tech for educational use.

Now, the problem isn't that some people oppose my ideas and those similar to them. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But there's a real problem with people opposing solutions who don't offer and solutions of their own, and use fake news to refute solutions offered by others.

That's what happens every time I or anyone else argues for more school choice or anything that's different from the educational status quo. We're bombarded with fake news statistics about how charter schools don't perform better than regular public schools or that private schools don't make a real difference. Before you join that ridiculous and ignorant chorus yourself by grabbing the latest school-choice bashing "study," ask yourself: are the millions of richer Americans in urban areas who send their children to private schools, (even the ones who lie about it, like Senator Elizabeth Warren), all crazy? Are the thousands of poorer parents who line up in the cold every year in New York City and stay out all night to register their kids in the better magnet schools all just stupid? And even it charter or private schools don't inspire all poor and minority parents to get even more involved in their children's education, shouldn't they be allowed to exist and thrive to bolster the parents who are motivated by them?

Don't let statistical studies that defy common sense sway you. The teachers unions have just too much money and too many politicians have too much at stake in appeasing those unions for anyone to trust any "study" they're promoting to bash the alternatives.

But it gets worse. One of the "studies" many anti-school choice advocates often parrot isn't even real. Whenever anyone insists that closing educational gaps will do the most to reduce racial disparities and neighborhood-based racial violence, policing issues, etc., they're presented with the statement that "studies show" that the most educated people in America are black women. And since black women are still very low on the economic ladder in this country, this is "proof" that education isn't really something that does much to improve racial disparities and discrimination.

The problem is, that "data" about black women isn't true. For years, people in the news media and on social media have either ignorantly or deliberately misread a study that simply shows that black women are more likely to be more formally educated than black men at a rate much higher than women to men in any other ethnic group. That's a far cry from saying "black women are the most educated."

This misreading isn't just an innocent and harmless mistake. It's a tool used to push back against a crucial path to ending a plague of poor education hitting the most vulnerable of our children. It's hard to call the promotion of these myths anything other than evil. Because it is.

Indeed, black women and all poorer minority groups need more educational options all the time. Teachers unions who have long ago forgotten that schools are primarily for the children's benefit and not theirs cannot be trusted to understand this.

Switching back to the COVID-19 threat, we're now seeing some of the same groups jump in the way of any positive developments. Again, the schools are a flash point for this as more and more teachers union groups are opposing any effort to reopen schools even by this coming September. And again, the news media is aiding and abetting this negative effort by suppressing the more positive facts about children and the virus. Even a report by a leading children's hospital in Canada that advises all schools to reopen with just a few hygienic changes necessary isn't getting any attention on the mainstream media at all.

That's because fear sells.

Of course this is all a choice of one fear over another. The news media could actually put its bias in favor of scaremongering stories to better use by putting our fears in the proper context against more dire consequences.

What should we be more afraid of? The minimal chance children will contract and die from COVID-19, or the bigger chance they will suffer irreparable harm from staying at home and forcing their parents, (especially single parents), out of work permanently? Should we be more afraid of our kids getting the coronavirus from a few teachers, or from the closer contact with adults they're experiencing by staying at home or having to accompany their parents to work? Should we be focusing on schools at all when the evidence shows that nursing homes and long-term care facilities have been the real source of what may be more than 50% of all coronavirus deaths?

Why is the news media ignoring these other choices for sensational scariness? The simple answer is that the media's left-wing bias isn't as strong as its bias in favor of negative news, but that left wing bias is dictating which kinds of negative and scary stories it's choosing to feature. In this case, the left wing bias is marching along with the union propaganda and also providing cover for the mostly Democratic governors and state health officials who bungled the response to the virus in those nursing homes and similar facilities.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about all of the temptations and effects of fake news is we've known all of this to be true for a long time... a really long time in fact.

If you're a devout atheist, I apologize for quoting the Bible in the next few paragraphs. But even non-believers must admit that the Old Testament provides incredible insights into human nature.

By sheer coincidence the Bible portion for this week that will be read and studied by Jewish communities all over the world is the section from the Book of Numbers that tells the stories of the 12 scouts Moses sent to observe and study the land of Canaan that the Children of Israel were approaching. The story goes on to recount how 10 of the 12 scouts exaggerated the strength of the Canaanites and the challenges the Hebrews would face in trying to reclaim their their ancestral homeland. Their report sent the hundreds of thousands of Israelites into a hysterical frenzy and despair. This mass brainwashing angers God, who goes on to punish the Hebrews by forcing them to wander 40 years in the desert while eventually wiping out the entire generation of those who believed the scouts' fake news.

You don't have to be religious to realize what a great warning about the dangers of fake news we've had in our hands for about 4,000 years. The Bible notes that human nature tends to worry more about potential bad news than the real good news that's right in front of us. This comes from survival techniques early people must have learned while trying to survive in the wild against unseen and deadly human and animal predators.

But the story of the scouts also tells about the natural human temptation to increase one's influence by hyping up stories and inducing the maximum possible reaction. The sheer power and notoriety that presents itself to those who spin the most fabulous, shocking, and frightening of tales is very alluring, and the Bible knew it.

Now you know it, if you didn't already.

But if your hatred for President Trump and the MAGA crowd makes it too hard for you to see the massive amounts of fake news and its ill effects erupting all around us, there's probably nothing short of a professional deprogrammer that can help you. None of that will change the fact that society is being threatened by the dissemination of lies, just as it has been for thousands of years.

The only difference is now those lies have a unprecedented number of amplifiers.