The recent rise in public awareness about so-called fake news is, by any measure, a good thing.

It has crystallized national attention on some of the new and increasingly shrewd forms that misinformation now takes. It has sparked a debate about who — apart from those who create and profit from it — is responsible for the dissemination of these lies. It has prompted the sharing of tips, tools and strategies to help the public avoid being fooled by falsehoods, including a new warning system by Facebook.

And it delivered an unmistakable and near-tragic reminder of the very real power of information — accurate or otherwise — when a misguided vigilante gunman stormed a Washington, D.C., restaurant on Dec. 4, having read online that it was home to a child sex-slave ring in which Hillary Clinton was involved. (“The intel on this wasn’t 100%,” the man later said.)

But awareness of this phenomenon has also prompted a sharp and contemptuous backlash from those who insist on applying the “fake news” label to anything they wish to dismiss — including (or maybe especially) the mainstream news media itself. (For examples of this, just read the comments on articles or social posts that reference fake news, like this one, this one or this one.)

It is a backlash that ironically, though perhaps not surprisingly, stems from the very cynicism that helps fake news and other kinds of misinformation to take hold in the first place. It is, in short, a backlash against the very concept of credibility, a hallmark of the post-truth era in which personal beliefs and emotion are the new benchmarks for assessing the quality of information, and the number of facts held in common are rapidly diminishing as a result.

Left unchecked, this widespread cynicism about the value, and even the practice, of quality journalism may well render meaningful public discourse all but impossible — and jeopardize American democracy itself.

This is the “fake news” conversation we need to be having now.

We need to grapple with the context in which entirely fabricated pieces of information about the 2016 presidential campaign not only gained the trust of so many citizens, but also outperformed (based on an analysis of Facebook “likes,” comments and shares) real reporting by standards-based news organizations. We need to come to terms with the way the exposure of these outright falsehoods has quickly morphed into a cross-partisan denunciation of the very news organizations who alerted the public to their prevalence and profitability.

A starting place for this process is public attitudes toward institutional news media. In a September Gallup poll, only 32% of Americans expressed “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in the mass media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly.” This is the lowest number since 1972, when the organization began asking this question, and an 8 percentage-point drop from the previous year. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in early 2016 found that a stunning 8% of Americans think that the news media “do nothing positive.”

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It might be tempting to stop there and conclude that this lack of trust is wholly deserved — that these numbers are a direct reflection of the quality of journalism today. But doing so overlooks the strong likelihood that this trend is largely fueled by a disconnect between what quality journalism is and how it is perceived by a considerable portion of the public. This divide is complex, but we can begin to close it through news literacy efforts that help consumers understand how to recognize quality journalism when they see it, and how to constructively respond when they don’t.

For example, at the News Literacy Project, we teach students to run any piece of information, regardless of its origins, through what we call a “Check” process. Does the piece cite multiple credible sources? Have assertions been verified and backed up by relevant documentation, such as studies, records, statistics and other fact-based evidence? Does the creator make an effort to minimize bias and avoid false balance? Is the piece fair in that it provides adequate context and the opportunity for the subjects discussed to respond to any criticism? While we acknowledge that these standards of quality journalism are often imperfect in practice, we encourage students to develop these habits of mind and to hold the news media accountable to these standards and to be skeptical about information that doesn't at least attempt to meet them.

But news consumers also need to acknowledge the role their own biases play in evaluating the news they consume.

As readers and viewers, we often see unmistakable bias in the appearance of a report that damages a cause or a candidate we care about (but rarely the other way around). We want the issues most dear to us to dominate the news cycle, to be covered the way they are by openly partisan alternative outlets. We tend to turn to hyperbole to describe our frustrations, alleging agendas and preconceived narratives and coverage blackouts by “the media,” instead of offering more specific and reasonable assessments of the reporting that we perceive as imperfect. And we often underestimate the extremely challenging nature of journalism itself — a discipline that, as New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has pointed out, is “uniquely vulnerable to criticism” because it is produced quickly under necessarily impractical circumstances, then widely shared and “endlessly argued over.”

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It’s worth adding here that a portion of the mistrust of news media is deserved, especially when it comes to political coverage. We’re frustrated with on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand reporting and the artificial balance it tends to produce. We are rightly wary of horse-race coverage that focuses more on public perceptions, poll numbers and the process of the campaign than on candidates’ policy proposals and other substantive issues. And while newsrooms have made strides in becoming more representative of the communities they cover, they are still not nearly as diverse as they need to be, especially at the highest levels.

But we shouldn’t pretend that most of the problems in journalism are easy to prevent or solve. And we shouldn’t allow our frustrations with some news coverage to eclipse our recognition of the role that quality journalism still plays in our democracy. We shouldn’t mistake the “endless” arguments and discussion that journalism ignites as a signal of widespread incompetence among reporters and editors. And we certainly shouldn’t tolerate anyone recklessly equating the work of propagandists and “fake news” opportunists with that of journalists.

Doing this — which is all too common across social media and anywhere else people are discussing “fake news” at the moment — only serves to deepen the cynical distrust that is threatening the existence not just of the American press, but of the very concept of truth in our society.

If that is lost, we may find out just how fake “news” can get.

Peter Adams is senior vice president for educational programs at the News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan education nonprofit that helps students sort fact from fiction in the digital age.

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