Editorial: Fake news and the public's obligation to know

We and other news organizations are united in a responsibility to inform the public, a sacred obligation that surpasses all others.

It's not just why we're in business. It's central to the welfare of the community and the republic.

Government by the people, after all, assumes that the people form their opinions and make their decisions based on facts and information.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization," Thomas Jefferson aptly observed in 1816, "it expects what never was and never will be."

In other words, facts matter.

Without them, opinions don't. Or at least, they shouldn't.

Bunk and misinformation, of course, have been promulgated for centuries to one degree or another. Carnival barkers guessing weights, elixir peddlers misrepresenting their products, politicians concealing documents or lying about their accomplishments and opponents. It's always been with us.

But in recent years, with wide and rapid dissemination fueled by the digital revolution and the rise of social media, we have witnessed an awful explosion of it.

There has been so much fake news, in fact, that opportunists even misrepresent the meaning of the phrase, applying it lavishly as a label to dismiss any criticism and virtually any news or information they don't want to hear.

In other words, even the phrase "fake news" itself is often falsely and cynically applied - a fake definition of fake news!

This sad phenomenon is not just harmful to the news media's credibility and to the journalism profession.

It is harmful to the public and to our society and to our republic.

Unchecked, it leads to polarization and government by impulse, intuition and manipulation.

How much was George Orwell exaggerating the threat when, in his gloomy novel 1984, he had his character O'Brien warn:

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one. Don't let it happen. It depends on you."

We agree, at the very least, in part: It depends on you. The citizenry has an obligation to think critically.

In this misinformation age, that obligation grows in importance as never before.

And that obligation starts with the facts. It can start nowhere else.

If we don't all accept the facts as facts, how would we hope to resolve differences? How would we hope to find common ground?

How would we detect fake news?

And how would we meet our most important obligation: to question dogma?