One woman ran into an Indianapolis church where evening services were being held and yelled, “New York has been destroyed! It’s the end of the world! Go home and prepare to die!”

On Sunday, October 30th, 1938 at 8 PM, American radio listeners were stunned to hear about a Martian invasion. As history.com notes:

A large metallic cylinder had crashed into a farm in New Jersey. The radio listeners panicked as they heard the announcer continue,

“Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now here’s another and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me … I can see the thing’s body now. It’s large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. But that face, it… it … ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it’s so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate.”

For more than two-thirds of the one-hour broadcast, radio listeners were shocked and scared out of their minds as they processed what they believed to be an accurate and real time reporting of a Martian invasion.

History.com continues,

“Perhaps as many as a million radio listeners believed that a real Martian invasion was underway. Panic broke out across the country. In New Jersey, terrified civilians jammed highways seeking to escape the alien marauders. People begged police for gas masks to save them from the toxic gas and asked electric companies to turn off the power so that the Martians wouldn’t see their lights. One woman ran into an Indianapolis church where evening services were being held and yelled, “New York has been destroyed! It’s the end of the world! Go home and prepare to die!”

You can listen to the radio broadcast here https://youtu.be/OzC3Fg_rRJM

Orson Wells’, “The War on the Worlds” radio drama presented what was the unthinkable at the time – that news announced on the radio can be a scam. Today, this is no longer shocking. Fake news is an accepted –albeit repulsive – reality. Not only are we numbed to the horrific news that a foreign entity can invade our democratic processes, but also new unethical reporting deliberately uses the media for the purposes of spreading propaganda in an effort to manipulate public opinion. Earlier I was going to describe how media bias and fake news played a major role in Hillary’s defeat. However, this article by Rantt covers all the points and some more in describing on how media is broken. Here are some of my key takeaways from that article:

It seems media’s priority is to sensationalize every single issue, no matter how important or unimportant, to get more ratings and clicks on their websites.

Sensationalizing topics and misleading the public about facts on the Clinton Foundation, Hillary’s health, Wikileaks, Comey’s letter and Russian propaganda are all examples of their year – long false equivalence and double standards.

As summarized on Rantt, “People need to become more active and aware of the information we are consuming. We need to be weary of fake news, and think critically and objectively when analyzing all information. Most importantly, we must fact check everything.”

Certain TV personalities such as Joe Scarborough, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly are acting not as responsible journalists, but are using their biased platform to spread lies, misleading facts and propaganda to their audience.

Here’s the reality: Many of Trump’s closest friends from The Apprentice days are now CEOs and Executives at NBC, NBC News, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News and CNN and gain more by being his propaganda machines than informing the audience about reality. Thus, it’s naïve of the public to expect mainstream media to change its priority and improve. Remember, every time Donald Trump screams “DISHONEST MEDIA,” he is trying to blur his association with these news media executives and deflect the voters’ attentions away from the select few real journalists, such as NBC’s Katy Tur, CBS (and now New York Times’) Sopan Deb and Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold, who are doing their job.

Media plays an important role in Democracy. Done right, it presents the facts and provides context allowing its audience to form opinions based on facts, not fiction, and to make informed decisions affecting policy reform. When David Fahrenthold reported on the Trump Foundation, he investigated and reported the findings. He presented us with the facts and allowed us to make our own judgment. But certain TV personalities such as Joe Scarborough, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly are acting not as responsible journalists, but are using their biased platform to spread lies, misleading facts and propaganda to their audience. They cherry pick topics to cover, intentionally show misrepresented data, and write misleading headlines and shallow stories to shape a skewed public opinion. This is not the presentation of facts or in depth research to give a story context, but the posturing by mainstream media reporters intent on forcing their own corporate-sanctioned propaganda onto their audiences. Detecting biases from fact is even more challenging for the casual observer, especially if that story is coming from a “well-established” New York Times reporter. With all the focus on fake news right now, I believe it is equally imperative for us to know our media better.

I’ll give you one example illustrating how a legitimate reporter’s bias played a significant role in his articles pertaining to Donald Trump and numerous conflicts of interests. It’s a common perception that New York Times leans left when it comes to the coverage of politics. Even Trump has tweeted about the New York Times bias many times:

The failing @nytimes just announced that complaints about them are at a 15 year high. I can fully understand that – but why announce? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2016

The @nytimes sent a letter to their subscribers apologizing for their BAD coverage of me. I wonder if it will change – doubt it? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2016

Wow, the @nytimes is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the "Trump phenomena" — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2016

My lawyers want to sue the failing @nytimes so badly for irresponsible intent. I said no (for now), but they are watching. Really disgusting — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 17, 2016

So, when Eric Lipton, an award-winning reporter from New York Times, writes an article covering Trump’s numerous conflicts of interest, the common public perception is his coverage of these important topics are informative and unbiased. In other words, the people want him to report the truth as it is, and neither embellish nor diminish the magnitude of these conflicts of interests. The last thing we want from New York Times is for a reporter to normalize Trump’s corruption and conflicts of interests.

I want to show you how Eric Lipton’s bias, or schema, towards Trump is deeply rooted in his coverage of Trump vs Hillary Clinton and Obama. We will analyze some of Eric’s articles using IBM Watson’s AlchemyLanguage API to identify his targeted sentiments towards the subjects he writes about. These targeted sentiments, based on his writing style in his articles, will indicate his bias (positive, negative or neutral).

Here’s the most recent article written by Eric, Denying Conflict, Trump Family Tries to Resolve Potential Problems. Here’s the targeted sentiment from that article:

Here’s Eric’s targeted sentiments in his article, Trump’s Son, Fearing ‘Quagmire,’ to Stop Soliciting for Charity.

Here’s his targeted sentiment in the article Access to Donald Trump, for $500,000: Pitfalls for Presidents’ Families.

Here’s his targeted sentiment in the article Auction Offering Coffee With Ivanka Trump Is Canceled.

At this point, there are two possible reasonable explanations for why Eric writes so positively about Trump, his family and his charity:

Maybe there are NO obvious conflicts of interests. Maybe Eric’s writing style is such that he generously paints his subjects in a positive or neutral way.

To test the first explanation, I chose an article Eric wrote about an event that has some glaring issues. Trump invited his Indian business partners to Trump Tower AFTER he was elected – a blatant conflict of interest. Here’s the article about the issue where Eric was one of the contributors, Indian Business Partners Hope to Exploit Their Ties to Donald Trump. And from the targeted sentiments below, Eric still presents Trump, his family and businesses as positive or at least neutral:

From the above example, it is apparent Eric still writes positively about Trump, his family and Trump foundation even when there are obvious conflicts of interests. So, the only reasonable explanation is that Eric’s writing style is such that he cannot write negative about anyone – no matter how obviously negative the reality is. I was also curious how his writing style compared to his coverage of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. I found this article where he wrote, 2009 Emails Reveal Intersection of Clinton Family Interests. Here’s his targeted sentiments toward the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation:

As obvious as Eric’s bias is at this moment, I wanted to give him the benefit of doubt – maybe the questions surrounding Clintons and the Clinton Foundation were indeed questionable. What if I could find an article where he wrote about Obama and a topic that he cannot blame Obama for – e.g. appointing a SCOTUS nominee after Scalia’s death. Here’s the article Eric wrote about the topic: Obama Mobilizes Campaign Veterans to Push for Court Nominee. And here’s the example of Eric Lipton’s blatant bias as witnessed from the targeted sentiments in his article:

Casual news readers may not notice right away how biased Eric Lipton is in his coverage of Trump vs Hillary Clinton, Obama and Democrats. May be there’s a perfectly acceptable explanation about the bias in Eric’s articles. However, he can’t fool a machine learning algorithm – and using this open source & unbiased tool, we identified that Eric Lipton may not be a credible source of unbiased information, even if he works for the New York Times.

The key takeaway from his example is that we need to know our media better, especially since they inform us about topics that will define our lives and future. We do not want reporters, media personalities and journalists who shove their own corporate opinions down our throat. We want them to report the facts, lay out the evidence and provide us the objective information so that the people can make their own informed opinion. The New York Times is clearly failing that test, and sadly they are not alone in this.

Identifying bias like this is a full-time job. It’s sad enough that we must be hyper-vigilant about our own Government. It’s even sadder that we also need to teach media how to do their job. But the cost of not doing so is high, and after 2016, we simply cannot take anything for granted.

Finally, here are some ways people can keep themselves informed: