Randy Schultz, Editorial Page Editor, the Palm Beach Post

At our September meeting, Palm Beach Post Editorial Page Editor Randy Schultz made the case against misinformation – and for the continued existence of newspapers.

“Since my part of the paper is the one that deals with comment, I would like to discuss the difference between informed comment and uninformed comment. Because it has never been more important to distinguish between the two,” Schultz said.

He began his talk with a series of assertions that are not true, but which many people believe, because they’ve read them on the Internet, a medium that provides easy access to all the facts you would ever need but which also mixes those facts in with a lot of nonsense. Some of those distortions are partisan, like the idea that Barack Obama wasn’t really born in the United States, while others are simply urban myths that keep circulating no matter how much anyone tries to debunk them. Meanwhile, most of the actual news that appears on the Internet actually starts with newspaper stories that Google and Yahoo aggregate and which bloggers cite and comment on – and often distort, Schultz said. Politicians and talk show hosts often feed and magnify the distortions because they “want to make the facts fit their opinion, rather than having facts and drawing an opinion from them,” Schultz said.

As a result, too much of the debate over public policy “turns on misinformation and uninformed comment,” Schultz said. That makes it much tougher to solve serious problems, like health care reform, because so much of the discussion is about side issues and distractions rather than substance, he said. “You’ve got to fight through all that before you can get to the real debate. It’s sort of like having to run two miles of a marathon, and then say, ‘Now you’re at the starting line.’ ”

This is a problem not only on federal issues like health care reform but on the local level, in fights over budgets and taxes. He cited the case of a Palm Beach Councilman who went to the County Commission to complain about all the tax dollars being spent on running four airports. The only problem with that argument is that the airports run on fees, not taxes.

The coming debate over the Florida Hometown Democracy amendment could turn on just such uninformed opinions. The amendment’s goal of giving voters veto power over zoning changes is likely to sound good to many voters concerned about over-development, he said, but the actual effect will likely be to paralyze local government by making it too difficult to make even the most routine changes. “This is popular sentiment run amuck. But I have to tell you, I can see this passing.”

His admittedly self-serving conclusion is that people need to spend more time reading and supporting newspapers. “Even in our somewhat wounded, shrunken condition we still provide more information that you can rely on,” he said.

That’s not to say that newspapers don’t make mistakes, or sometimes miss important stories, Schultz said. But they still have a tradition of trying to get the facts. Even though his job gives him the freedom to state his opinion, he said he has killed many editorials because they weren’t supported by the facts. “And we knew that because we checked,” he said.

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