A source you can trust

The American newspaper industry lost one of its giants last week — Walter Mattson, former president and chief operating officer of the New York Times Co. and resident of Plymouth Harbor in Sarasota.

Mattson was the force behind the growth of the New York Times Co., back when the New York Times was regarded in the industry as the gold-standard in credibility. He was also responsible for the Times Co.’s acquisition of newspapers across the country, including the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and the Islander on Anna Maria in the early 1980s.

We had our first encounter with Mattson on April Fools’ Day around 2000. Mattson was retired from the NYT and a resident here with his wife. My wife, Lisa, then executive editor of the Longboat Observer, answered her phone. It was Mattson.

He had just read our latest April Fools’ edition. He introduced himself and was polite and gentlemanly. He told Lisa how he enjoyed reading the Longboat Observer. But he said he was “concerned” — that was the word. He was concerned about our publishing fake news and what that could do to the credibility and readers’ trust of the Longboat Observer.

(Our chairman, by the way, David Beliles, Lisa’ father and another longtime newspaper publisher and editor, agreed with Mattson.)

We have since continued our April Fools’ tradition for 15 years, with the belief that, once a year, all of us should be able to laugh at ourselves. 

But on more than one occasion, Mattson has been right about his concern for our publishing “fake news” — even if it is in the spirit of fun and laughter. As our company has expanded into the Orlando area and the east coast of Florida, we’ve introduced April Fools’ editions to those Observers. We have had some backlash. Last year, an advertiser in Winter Garden pulled its ads and threatened lawsuits.

Fake news has consequences. 

And now, thanks to Fakebook, er, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, et al, fake news is proliferating. It’s everywhere.

Year-end national TV and radio-talk shows were teeming with discussions about fake news and mainstream media bias during the presidential election. Unvarnished truth from either side was rare during the campaign.

One of the most notorious fake news incidents recently was when the owner of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C., and his employees started receiving menacing, abusive, life-threatening emails and text messages before the presidential election. The cause: Dozens of fake news articles on different websites and Facebook about Hillary Clinton and her aides running a child-trafficking ring in the restaurant’s back rooms. The fake articles also prompted a man with a gun to visit the pizza shop to investigate for himself.

Likewise, you receive forwarded emails all the time from your friends — seemingly legitimate reports that have been forwarded multiple times, the articles often reporting information that reads to be plausible and true but is also intended to trigger outrage or strong endorsement.

How do you know they are true? Often times you would have to venture down online rabbit trails for minutes or hours to find the source and the truth. Who has time for or wants to do that?

You read of hackers easily posing on Twitter as Donald Trump or other celebrities. If you spend 10 minutes with our company’s IT development manager talking online security, he would show how easy it is to hack into the cyber world. You would walk away from him essentially convinced you should never buy another item online with your credit card. Or, at least never open an email from a name you don’t recognize. But even then, we have found out, you can’t always trust those emails. Addresses are being hacked into by the hour.

To make the trust issue worse, everyone today is a journalist, or many of the bloggers and other commenters think they are. They’re writing their opinions, sometimes interspersed with facts, often sources unknown. 

All of this is coming at you so fast you almost want to withdraw. You don’t know whom to trust.

That’s where the Observer and  YourObserver.com come in. The pendulum will continue to swing our way.

We have been here before. Today’s onslaught of fake news is not a new worldly phenomenon. Jacob Soll, a historian at Rutgers University, reported last month in Editor & Publisher, a trade magazine for the newspaper industry, that fake news has been a part of every century and culture around the world ever since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1439.

In the United States, fake news reached a nadir during the yellow journalism days in the 1800s — the time when sensationalism was truly a marketing tool for the newspaper industry (see box below).

But as physics dictates, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the 20th century, the journalism pendulum swung away from Hearst and Pulitzer’s fake-news brand of journalism toward accuracy and credibility. Soll reported how American papers hired reporters to cover local beats and local governments, “building a chain of trust between local, state and national reporters and the public … [O]bjective journalism did become a successful business model — and also, until recently, the dominant one.”

This deluge of fake news will run its course. And consumers of news — as they do now — eventually will sort out the believable from the unbelievable. And they will gravitate toward those sources they believe they can trust because of the accuracy and credibility of their information.

There’s an old saying in our business: Our most prized asset is our credibility. We take that to heart at the Observers. And we continue to believe, that in spite of what you hear and read about the future of newspapers, we believe there is a strong future for local newspapers like ours. There will always be a need and a desire in every community for credible, trusted local news and information. And in the communities we serve, we at the Observers intend to be that source — in print and online — and will work every day to win and maintain that trust.

You may not always agree with our opinions on the Opinion page. And sure, we will make mistakes in accuracy (hopefully, rarely). We’re human. And when we do err, we will fess up and correct our mistakes. 

But we will never mislead or report inaccurate information deliberately — with one exception. That will occur only on April Fools’ Day.

A couple months before Walter Mattson died, my wife and I chatted with him at Plymouth Harbor. Lisa recalled that conversation about credibility that occurred many years ago. Mattson remembered it. But he also confessed: He had become our April Fools’ edition’s biggest fan.