Important fights are being fought today – and have been fought throughout history – in the name of social, political and economic equality. Many of them for causes that I support; not only with words but with actions.

However, being a niceoldlady and an old school liberal, I have a tough time buying into some of the fighting methods. All too often the fighters are so caught up in the righteousness of their cause that they are intolerant in the name of tolerance, harass in the name of non-harassment and at times even call for glaringly unequal treatment in the name of equality.

To be clear, when denouncing calls for glaring inequality, I don’t mean calls for measures that can help minorities catch up with the head start that years of inequality have given those in positions of power. Sometimes such catching up can best be facilitated through measures that in themselves are unequal treatment including, but not limited to, quotas.

However, lines have to be drawn somewhere. Mine are drawn pretty much at the point where French writer Pauline Harmange proudly states: ‘Mois les hommes, je les déteste’, which basically translates to ‘I Hate Men’. This is not just a catchy title for her pamphlet as one might assume; it is the prevailing sentiment throughout her essay. The thinking being that you are allowed to blatantly hate those that have done you wrong, if you are in a minority.

Even if one were to buy into that theory, the problem remains that not all men have done Harmange, or women in general, wrong. Still Harmange feels free to profess to hate men in general. I am not into hating, but should I profess to hate something, it would be sweeping generalisations and hate speech.

Then there are those, who feel free to rewrite history and interpret past actions with total disregard for facts and truth just to prove their point. My favourite newspaper recently carried a major story on women as software engineers. To make a short story longer, the writer took all sorts of liberties both with facts and their interpretation.

As if gender equality wasn’t a good enough cause on its own merits, the writer saw a great conspiracy in the fact that Finnish card punchers in the early 1960’s and 70’s were predominantly female, while a majority of the early 70’s software engineers were male.

As one commentator pointed out, card punching (a computer-related job, which in itself required great concentration and careful execution, but had nothing to do with software engineering) was as closely related to software engineering as my online banking is. In order for the software to work properly, the inputted information has to be correct, but that does make the one who punches or types in the information a software engineer.

Instead of acknowledging this, the article writer sweepingly alluded that the female card punchers could be considered the first software engineers, and that the hiring tests for software engineers were different from those for card punchers in order to favour men. The fact that the jobs were totally different – hence the hiring tests were different too – did not fit into her storyline. Therefore it was disregarded.

The writer then proceeded to speculate that the use of the term software was related to the fact that the early card punching “software engineers” were women and hence the programs were considered easy to produce i.e. ‘soft’ as opposed to the term hardware, which referred to something difficult and hard.

And here I was, thinking that the use of the term hardware originated from the mid 15th century concept of small metal goods i.e. referred to the physical components of a computer.

The sad thing is that with less emphasis on proving a point by any means – right or wrong – and more emphasis on getting the facts right, the article would have been interesting. Instead, it became a sorry example of how a good article can turn bad and a good cause can be undermined by blatantly disregarding facts.

Finland was actually training both male and female software engineers as fast as they could be hired in the early 70’s. The real story to tell would have been, why the number of female software engineers didn’t increase in proportion to the early numbers. That story did not make its way to the surface past the alternative facts, so it has yet to be told.

Wrongs do not a right make. The spreading of hate and unreason – or just alternative facts and untruths – do not promote equality; they promote hate and unreason as well as an increasing disregard for facts and truth.

Yet my favourite newspaper chose not to correct the story, but to argue that by reading the whole article a discerning reader would realise that card punchers were not software engineers, despite what the title of the article and the alternative facts presented in the early paragraphs of it claimed.

Since when did good journalism mean that the sorting of facts from fiction was to be left to the reader?

Social media has a tendency to make mountains out of molehills, but it also has the power to highlight wrongs that deserve our attention, yet they might never have come to our notice through old school channels. Most people recognise that things may be blown out of proportion, or less thoroughly researched, on social media sites. Which is why it’s so important that traditional media continues to take a more factual and in depth approach.

Originally newspapers where just that – papers with the latest news. With the growth of electronic media as well as the internet and social media, newspapers didn’t have the means to keep themselves in the forefront as news breakers. Instead, they focused on the context and the background of news.

Today social media darlings with little or no journalistic background are invited to write for newspapers in order to keep up with times and win over the next generation of readers. Unfortunately, fact-checking seems to be the first to suffer from this development.

Why give up your true competitive advantage? In addition to its adherence to time-tested journalistic ethics and standards, the reliability of its fact-checking process has so far been the true value-added of my favourite newspaper. Both are missing on social media.

Life is messy. Life is complicated. Life is seldom Instagram-ready or Twitter-formatted. Social media can serve as a podium for all sorts of voices: from silly to wise, from scary to nice, from hate to love; but we still need the context and the background.

A good newspaper is all about getting the story right and interesting enough – not about making sure it’s catchy and instantly trends whatever the cost. There will always be leaders and followers. A good newspaper does not let itself fall into the latter category as times change. It finds new ways to build on its competitive advantage instead of eroding it.