Maybe it’s the weather.
Maybe Venusians have put pills in our water supply.
Maybe the wind is carrying some airborne disease we have yet to detect.
Whatever the cause, when I go online and observe the antics of some of my fellow citizens, I can only conclude that a sizable number of them have gone bughouse nuts.
Last week’s hearings for Mr. Brett Kavanaugh, nominated by President Trump for the Supreme Court, confirmed me in that conclusion.
Maybe Venusians have put pills in our water supply.
Maybe the wind is carrying some airborne disease we have yet to detect.
Whatever the cause, when I go online and observe the antics of some of my fellow citizens, I can only conclude that a sizable number of them have gone bughouse nuts.
Last week’s hearings for Mr. Brett Kavanaugh, nominated by President Trump for the Supreme Court, confirmed me in that conclusion.
The lack of civility and decorum, the pompous virtue-signalers, the strange questions put to Mr. Kavanaugh, and the grandstanding by some senators with higher political ambitions were a national disgrace.
Some of the protesters, and even some the senators, appeared off the wall bonkers.
Right now our culture is growing loonies faster than the weeds in Aunt Bella’s tomato patch. We could blame all sorts of people for driving so many Americans bonkers, and leaving the rest of us gape-mouthed, but one group in particular deserves our condemnation. I refer, of course, to our news media.
In so many ways, the press drives our perceptions and thinking. Television and printed news, for example, constantly stress division among Americans. Depending on which news outlet you follow, we are either misogynistic racists who truly belong in that “basket of deplorables” or progressives who seek to transform the country into a communist wasteland.
But what if most of us aren’t that way? What if we are a mixed bag of thoughts and opinions, those creatures once called human beings? And what if the media gins up most of its stories out of the dark basements of its own blindness and bigotry?
Take the latest move by The New York Times. The paper recently published an anonymous letter, purportedly written by a White House staffer, attacking Donald Trump. This is unethical. You don’t publish anonymous letters to the editor. It’s Journalism 101.
Once upon a time the news media did something amazing: they reported the news. They had an editorial page in the papers and editorial slots on the television, but for the rest they reported the news. They told us what had happened that day and then left us alone to draw our own conclusions. Were there slanted stories? Sure. But nothing like today.
Consequently, Donald Trump and many others are on target in indicting the mainstream media for “fake news.” There are several reasons why these accusations are just.
First, editors decide what they want to run as stories. Always have, always will. So your news, especially what you see and hear on television, consists of pre-selected stories. Some stories make the cut, others end up in the wastebasket. Most Americans, for instance, can identify Colin Kaepernick, the ex-quarterback who became a celebrity by kneeling during the national anthem. But how many of us can name one Medal of Honor recipient of the last fifteen years? (I couldn’t, though I have now looked them up online and read some of their incredible stories.)
Kaepernick makes the cut. The hero who died saving his buddies in Afghanistan ends up in the wastebasket.
Here are just a few of the stories downplayed or ignored right now in the “news.”
*Projected GDP for the United States in this third quarter of 2018: 4.4 percent. Huge.
*The US unemployment rate: 3.9 percent. Wonderful.
*Jobless claims: Lowest since 1969. Great.
*Black unemployment near historic lows. Excellent.
*North Korea isn’t shooting off missiles anymore. Sounds good to me.
*What’s happening with ISIS? Do you know? Do you see it in the news?
I could go on, but I’ll let the link below do that work. Instead, let’s return to the newsrooms.
A second reason why so much of our news fails to reflect reality is that reporters and broadcasters now openly display their prejudices in print and television. The line once drawn between news and opinion columns is blurred, or in some cases is altogether erased. As a result, wise news hounds of whatever political persuasion bring a gimlet eye to the stories they read or hear, much like those Russians who once tried to dope out truth from the Soviet Union’s primary newspaper, Pravda. Like those Russians, we read between the lines of a story, aware of a reporter’s prejudices, or else we put down the whole story as bogus and go back to our breakfast cereal.
Finally, editors and reporters ignore hard news in favor of the salacious or the titillating. An example: We hear all about Donald Trump’s affairs, his tweets, and his boorish behavior, but we learn little about real events and real changes during his administration. Indeed, most of us would be hard-pressed to name more than four or five changes wrought by the Trump administration in the last two years.
Americans are often described as ignorant about politics, both here and abroad. Maybe so, but the news media is responsible in part for that ignorance, encouraging us to became raging lunatics rather than informed voters.
Whether you love or hate Donald Trump, or both, click on the link below. See what the news has kept from you.
The weather, Venusian invaders, some new plague: these have no hand in our current lunacy.
But our news media do.
http://www.magapill.com/
Some of the protesters, and even some the senators, appeared off the wall bonkers.
Right now our culture is growing loonies faster than the weeds in Aunt Bella’s tomato patch. We could blame all sorts of people for driving so many Americans bonkers, and leaving the rest of us gape-mouthed, but one group in particular deserves our condemnation. I refer, of course, to our news media.
In so many ways, the press drives our perceptions and thinking. Television and printed news, for example, constantly stress division among Americans. Depending on which news outlet you follow, we are either misogynistic racists who truly belong in that “basket of deplorables” or progressives who seek to transform the country into a communist wasteland.
But what if most of us aren’t that way? What if we are a mixed bag of thoughts and opinions, those creatures once called human beings? And what if the media gins up most of its stories out of the dark basements of its own blindness and bigotry?
Take the latest move by The New York Times. The paper recently published an anonymous letter, purportedly written by a White House staffer, attacking Donald Trump. This is unethical. You don’t publish anonymous letters to the editor. It’s Journalism 101.
Once upon a time the news media did something amazing: they reported the news. They had an editorial page in the papers and editorial slots on the television, but for the rest they reported the news. They told us what had happened that day and then left us alone to draw our own conclusions. Were there slanted stories? Sure. But nothing like today.
Consequently, Donald Trump and many others are on target in indicting the mainstream media for “fake news.” There are several reasons why these accusations are just.
First, editors decide what they want to run as stories. Always have, always will. So your news, especially what you see and hear on television, consists of pre-selected stories. Some stories make the cut, others end up in the wastebasket. Most Americans, for instance, can identify Colin Kaepernick, the ex-quarterback who became a celebrity by kneeling during the national anthem. But how many of us can name one Medal of Honor recipient of the last fifteen years? (I couldn’t, though I have now looked them up online and read some of their incredible stories.)
Kaepernick makes the cut. The hero who died saving his buddies in Afghanistan ends up in the wastebasket.
Here are just a few of the stories downplayed or ignored right now in the “news.”
*Projected GDP for the United States in this third quarter of 2018: 4.4 percent. Huge.
*The US unemployment rate: 3.9 percent. Wonderful.
*Jobless claims: Lowest since 1969. Great.
*Black unemployment near historic lows. Excellent.
*North Korea isn’t shooting off missiles anymore. Sounds good to me.
*What’s happening with ISIS? Do you know? Do you see it in the news?
I could go on, but I’ll let the link below do that work. Instead, let’s return to the newsrooms.
A second reason why so much of our news fails to reflect reality is that reporters and broadcasters now openly display their prejudices in print and television. The line once drawn between news and opinion columns is blurred, or in some cases is altogether erased. As a result, wise news hounds of whatever political persuasion bring a gimlet eye to the stories they read or hear, much like those Russians who once tried to dope out truth from the Soviet Union’s primary newspaper, Pravda. Like those Russians, we read between the lines of a story, aware of a reporter’s prejudices, or else we put down the whole story as bogus and go back to our breakfast cereal.
Finally, editors and reporters ignore hard news in favor of the salacious or the titillating. An example: We hear all about Donald Trump’s affairs, his tweets, and his boorish behavior, but we learn little about real events and real changes during his administration. Indeed, most of us would be hard-pressed to name more than four or five changes wrought by the Trump administration in the last two years.
Americans are often described as ignorant about politics, both here and abroad. Maybe so, but the news media is responsible in part for that ignorance, encouraging us to became raging lunatics rather than informed voters.
Whether you love or hate Donald Trump, or both, click on the link below. See what the news has kept from you.
The weather, Venusian invaders, some new plague: these have no hand in our current lunacy.
But our news media do.
http://www.magapill.com/