Fake News

Reader comment on: Two Views on Trump and the Press

Submitted by David Lang Wardle (United States), Sep 13, 2017 17:53

When I was a sophomore at Columbia in 1968, my dorm room was right over the tennis court, opposite the main classroom building, Hamilton Hall. So I had a bird's eye view of the radicals shutting down the University that Spring. What I saw over many weeks was not what the NYTimes was reporting. They reported what they were happy to see and not much else. It was fake news then and we have fake news now because of the abomination called Advocacy journalism.

In 1970, my wife worked at the Columbia Journalism School and happened to mention to the students preparing the election issue that her husband was voting for James Buckley for U.S. Senator from NY. They were truly amazed — apparently no one in the entire class knew or had even heard of anyone who planned to vote for the Conservative Party candidate. Buckley, of course, won, and these students would go on to populate the reporting ranks of most of the major newspapers.

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