I am a member of the media.
For most of my adult life I have made my living working closely with city, county and state governments while chasing the news. I have certainly made mistakes, but I can’t remember ever being called fake news.
There is one reason for that as best I can tell. I don’t make the news, I report it. That story is the same for reporters all over our nation. We report what is said, discussed, voted on and what we see with our own eyes. If we have opinions, and believe me, we all do, we try our best to keep them out of news stories.
The key word there is news stories. This column is not a news story. This column is my opinion. And because it is an opinion, it can be argued with, disagreed with and many people would consider it flat out wrong. And that is OK. My opinion is not meant to be news. It’s simply my opinion. If you have a different opinion, that is absolutely OK.
But back to news. News becomes fake news when the author, or in some cases the editor, used space for a news story to push a specific agenda. In the big media — TV, some radio and many major metro papers — that agenda is often slanted to the left. The bigger the market the more likely a reporter is going to support liberal policies. In middle America, in small-town America, that is not always the case.
I have worked with reporters who were very liberal, very conservative and quite a few who to this day I have no idea. And all of them did a good job reporting the news in a way no one could tell their personal beliefs.

That is the sign of a good reporter. As for me, I have always admitted I am mostly conservative. But I have been able to sit down with Republican and Democrat leaders and tell their story, not mine. As a reporter, when you are reporting the news, the goal should be to let others do the talking.
If you work at CNN, the New York Times or the Lake Powell Chronicle as a reporter, your goal in every story should be to tell the story not become it.
And that is the problem with most of the major media today. Whether it’s CNN trying to take down Donald Trump and Fox News trying to excuse every mistake he makes, reporters are becoming the news.
Because of the emotion surrounding our president, few major media reporters seem able to distance themselves from their opinions while just reporting the news.
I see it every day and it is frankly driving me crazy. Here’s the reality. Just because an avowed liberal at CNN reports something that might be negative about Trump on CNN does not make it fake. Just because a conservative on Fox reports something positive does not make it fake.
There really is some of both coming out of the White House. Has Donald Trump made mistakes? Oh yes, plenty of them. Has he done some good? Yes, quite a few things.
But it’s hard to see that when watching TV or reading the major papers. And that’s where the problem comes in.
CNN is not fake news, but the station has intentionally chosen to sway the vast majority of its reporting in a way to make Trump look bad. That doesn’t make it fake, it just makes it difficult to trust CNN. The same can be said for Fox News in the opposite direction.
In many ways reporters have forgotten the basics — report the news only. In a column like this, my opinion is fair game. If I’m reporting about the city council, or a fire, my opinion is irrelevant.
My suggestion is pretty simple — follow my lead and turn off CNN, Fox News and every other similar channel. I did that many years ago, probably when George W. Bush was president. And in doing so I lowered my blood pressure, slept better and brought a lot more peace in my life.
Give it a shot.