What is “News”? Can there be “alternative” facts?

Day 2 of the Trump administration and there is clearly an open, established and acknowledged war between the administration and the media. 

Earlier this morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, presidential counselor KellyAnne Conway had a remarkable interaction with moderator Chuck Todd about the distracting media troll job about the size of President Trump’s Inauguration audience.  In defending White House spokesperson Sean Spicer against claims of lying at the President’s direction, a fairly remarkable assertion on the second day of an administration, Ms. Conway declared that the White House had merely presented an “alternative set of facts” for consideration by the public. 

It really was quite an interview, one that almost certainly Mr. Todd’s predecessor, Tim Russert, would have had the good sense to avoid, and it brought up a lot of issues for me.  What is the news?  As a consumer of media, is it proper to call it “news” media?  Is it something else?  I’ll try to flesh those out based on my sense of things.

Funk and Wagnall’s defines “news” as “[r]ecent intelligence; something new; always used as a singular.”  Not particularly helpful without knowing what’s meant by intelligence, which it defines as “[m]ental power; understanding”.  Not a lot to unpack there. 

How do estimable Messrs Funk and Wagnall handle the definition of “facts”?  It is a word that has been presented by the entrenched media as an Excalibur, a razor-sharp foil used to eradicate any opposing viewpoint President Trump or his defenders might proffer.  In FW’s definition, a “fact” is “[a]nything that is, is done, or happens, an act; deed; truth; reality”.  

Only one more, I promise.  What, just to round things out, is “opinion”?  Again going to my terse definers at FW, “opinion” is “[a] confident belief without full certainty.” 

Now we’ve got a start, then.  “News” is recent intelligence/understanding.  By definition, however, a proper definition of news does not by necessity include fact.  A fact is something concrete, it “is”, has been “done” or “happens”.  Opinion on the other hand lives where there is less than full certainty.

To me, this helps give an understanding of the fight between the media and administration of President Trump.  For over two years there has been a nearly complete lack of “fact” reporting by the “news” media.  By necessity, except for the reporting about specific things that happened or words printed or uttered in deed, there have been no facts to report about the Trump administration; it hasn’t done anything yet.  Media outlets are free to report and speculate about the meaning of specific facts, but upon wading into those waters they leave the realm of “fact” news and enter the sea of opinion, by definition. 

Given the definition of fact, Ms. Conway erred in declaring that Mr. Spicer and the Trump administration had presented an “alternative set of facts” as related to the size of President Trump’s Inauguration Day crowd.  There was one crowd size, but without a recognized official attendance count, that number cannot be known with certainty.  The tweet used by media outlets, and retweeted by the National Park Service, certainly indicated that there were fewer spectators for this Inauguration than there were in 2009, but without indications of what time a photo was taken, that clear conclusion can be somewhat reasonably disputed.  Given what is acknowledged as fact both the media and President Trump can have alternative opinions.

In my opinion, the slim definition of fact is the cause of the war between the Trump administration and the media.  The definition of “news” does not require fact.  The definition of news does not differentiate between fact and opinion.  In my view the news media has determined that it is an arbiter of fact.  In today’s media environment however, consumers of media have the same ability to see objective images and hear objective words.  There is no barrier between the public at large and the concrete substance that the media reports upon.  Having presented the concrete images to the public, however, the media then determines that it is free to opine upon the meaning of the substance it has presented.  While opinion on the substance can be helpful for understanding to an audience it is not necessary, humans are able to see facts for themselves and form their own opinions about those facts.  To me it is kind of funny, precisely by providing more access to campaign rallies and speeches, the media in essence eviscerates one of what it appears to see as its core functions, to frame facts.  To an empowered audience, facts don’t need framing.

I think this has been interesting.  Funk and Wagnall’s have provided narrow, and in my opinion, natural, definitions to our understanding of language.  Because there is such a narrow definition of fact, concrete occurrences which have existed or currently exist, there naturally is a broad range for opinion.  By providing wide ranging access to facts, which allow consumers to form their own opinions, the news media has obviated its role to frame those facts to consumers.  The news media is fully within its role and true to its function by providing opinion based on the facts as it sees them, but that doesn’t mean its audience must agree with that assessment.