By Buddy Early, December 2019 Issue.
When the buffoon who currently occupies The White House moves out —
whether that’s in January of 2021 or sooner — this nation can start to pick up
the pieces.
There will be a ton of damage to clean up,
too much to go into detail here, but we’ll recover … eventually. One of the
filthiest legacies Trump will leave is the crap he takes on our basic freedoms,
and of particular concern to me is the mud he throws against journalists.
If this heavy-handed trash metaphor is not
clear enough, what I’m trying to say is Trump is human garbage. Fight me on
this!
The history books are full of presidents
who have had difficult relationships with the media. Many have not appreciated
the way they were portrayed, sought to restrict access and hide information,
tried to manipulate and/or control the press, and even played the victim.
(Sound familiar?) But no one, not even Richard Nixon, went as far as Trump goes
regularly: vilifying the professionals in the media; threatening to jail and
even beat up, as well as inciting violence against reporters; successfully
turning his slack-jawed followers against the media and convincing them that
the media is evil; and, of course, employing his ”fake news” mantra every time
a news story is unfavorable to him. (So, a lot.)
Until 2016, I never knew that simply
uttering the phrase “fake news!” was enough to convince people that something
wasn’t true. Then again, I had no idea Morgan Freeman made all those
intelligent, poignant comments floating around the Internet next to his photo.
But here we are.
Trump’s foolish use (and overuse)
of the phrase is just another reason why his time in The White House will be
remembered like that home invasion in The Prince of Tides that nobody
talks about for decades but for which we all need therapy later in life. Still,
the true perpetrators of this assault on the media are not the ones shouting
“fake news,” but rather the gullible populace that believes it.
The proliferation of
extreme right-wing news sites — Breitbart, Drudge Report, National Review,
InfoWars, and about a hundred other propaganda outlets across radio, television
and Internet — have given Trump’s disciples an incurable case of Confirmation
Bias. These folks believe whatever they read on these inflammatory,
poorly-designed websites, because it confirms the bias they already have. They
don’t believe facts, and they certainly have no understanding of or
appreciation for the institution of journalism. Trump, his followers, and the
right-wing media have been stuck in this gross circle jerk for the past
three-plus years, and while we can’t stop it, we can certainly stop giving it
any attention.
Yes, I know that Confirmation Bias is a
symptom of the far left, too. You can save your emails arguing your false
equivalency, however, as there are but a fraction of these “news” sites
compared to the far right. Not to mention there exists a fundamental
difference: the far left, for its extremism and penchant for overreacting to
almost everything, actually respects reporting, journalism, the freedom of the
press, and the goal of getting to the truth. (Again, fight me on this. It’s
widely known where I hang out on the weekends to watch football.)
So, what can we do to help protect the
First Amendment until Trump is behind a jail cell or hiding out overseas while
his minions have been left behind in that circle jerk rubbing one out to his
photo? For starters, we can all call bullshit to anyone who yells “fake news!”
(I mean, unless it’s a story from The Onion or such site.) Real news is,
well, real and not fake, and people who yell the phrase need to be shamed. We
can be stewards of accurate information. That means being careful of the news
we are digesting and regurgitating, making sure we are skeptical of stories
that may infect us with Confirmation Bias. We can stop sharing memes without
considering the source and/or doing our own fact-checking. We can recognize
that any time a headline says a talking head has “destroyed” someone else’s
argument, it’s not so much news as it is opinion.
And when Huffington Post says “The
cast of Family Ties no longer looks like this” — don’t fall for it!
In this current state of the nation, it’s not enough that journalists keep producing honest, factual news. It’s all of our responsibility to demand it.
