By Michael Rizzo
Misinformation, disinformation, fake news. It’s around us 24/7 on social media, and bombards us in all forms of media. It’s a big topic in my journalism courses at St. John’s University, where I teach my
students how to avoid it: Verify everything, provide balance in your stories, and be unbiased in your reporting.
But the news consumer in me also sees how disinformation is widening that dark hole that leads us down factually incorrect paths. It’s especially important this election. How can we know what to choose if we’re lied to about the facts?
Combatting it with calls to change the First Amendment is fraught with danger. Once you start curtailing more freedoms of expression, you run the risk that other Constitutional protections, like freedom
of religion, could be next. Perhaps the embrace we need to make is with something intangible but powerful: our faith.
First, we need to have faith in what is right. Good journalism tells facts with context, offers multiple perspectives, and does not advocate but informs. Bad journalism and deliberately false reporting
are the opposite.
Armed with that faith, it also takes action. Perhaps it means sacrificing our presence on a website encouraging disinformation. It is better to discard these small parts of our lives than run the risk
of potentially malevolent results.
It means supporting news organizations that embody the ethics of good journalism and tell stories other news outlets don’t report. The Tablet tells stories that the secular media ignores and speaks to people with views that other outlets don’t include.
Reading and supporting this publication are tangible ways to show your faith in good journalism. Consider removing yourself from that news silo of just one perspective over and over. Try out other news outlets to see their reporting on your community. When you find the ones that tell those stories properly, add them to your action list of who to follow.
In 2018, Pope Francis described journalists as “protectors of news” and said that “ensuring the accuracy of sources and protecting communication are real means of promoting goodness, generating trust, and opening the way to communion and peace.” Let’s stand with these protectors to promote understanding, correct information, and reporting in which we can believe.
Michael Rizzo is an associate professor and director of the journalism program at St. John’s University.
