I’ve lamented, once or twice even in this column, how much I miss the challenge and thrill of daily television news, cranking out stories on deadline, and throwing out tough questions on tangled issues. From now on, however, I shall hold my tongue.
Journalism in the age of President Trump is not for the faint of heart. Pursuing the truth will take more courage and energy than ever, and I will put my faith in my fellow truth seekers to do a job that I have no stomach to do any more.
What is truth? Truth took a major punch to the gut with the joke of a post-inauguration news conference held by Sean Spicer, White House press secretary and head court jester.
I was willing to give the new administration a chance, I was happy to keep an open mind and hope for the best with the Trump ascendancy.
But Spicer insulted the intelligence of every single American no matter what party or age, and sent government-press relations to the Stone Ages with his outright lies about the size of the inauguration crowds—a reality everyone could see with their very own eyes.
From day one, credibility was broken. Any possibility of resurrection was killed with Kellyanne Conway’s straight-faced explanation of Spicer’s twisted truth as “alternative facts.”
Come on. Any parent knows that if your teenager comes home and tells you a series of alternative facts, he needs to be grounded, pronto. If the emperor has no clothes, then he is bouncing around buck-naked; no alternative fact will convince you that he wearing anything but his birthday suit.
My very first news job was with the Associated Press in Beijing, People’s Republic of China, as a local stringer and office assistant. Back then, as now, the Xinhua News Agency was China’s official press agency and today, is described as “a ministry-level institution subordinate to the Chinese central government.”
Well, we all knew that Xinhua WAS the Chinese central government, a direct mouthpiece for the Communist party news machine, a propaganda factory churning out whatever alternative version of reality pleased the party elders.
Farmers had enjoyed a bumper crop with the recent harvest? Of course! Never mind the lines of people jostling and bumping each other for withered roots and scrawny greens.
Every family was enjoying the new year dressed in warm winter finery. So true! What about the children shivering in the streets clutching their threadbare and too thin fall jackets around them?
With Xinhua, reality was what the government declared it would be, and sadly, Trump’s White House has opened its first week looking very much like it’s gearing up to be a propaganda machine in the Xinhua tradition.
But there’s still plenty of blame to go around, even on the news media itself. I started turning off the television early in the presidential campaign—the cacophony of argumentative voices and self-righteous opinion makers literally gave me a headache that would be calmed only with silence.
‘At a time when we need to dig deeper and work harder to comprehend, we have less time and even less patience.’
The truth is that most news has lost its objectivity. Of course, any time there’s a human element involved, pure neutrality is virtually impossible. All writers, reporters, newscasters and pundits are a product of their upbringing, education and life experience, so inevitably, there will be bias, whether it’s in the choice of stories covered, the people who are interviewed, and how the piece itself is actually written.
However, in the past, there was at least a semblance of an attempt at objectivity. Today, any pretense is gone. So-called journalists shout out their opinions and try to quash any dissent. FOX News has become such a right wing mouthpiece that I’m embarrassed to acknowledge that I actually worked for the organization (a long time ago, and only for three years, before it became such a joke and before I knew any better).
Left-leaning liberalism also has become unabashedly, even cloyingly know-it-all and self-righteous, and I am done with that genre as well.
All of this noise and buffoonery comes at a time when everyone, but especially young people, are more distracted than ever and confused about this come-hither type news.
We no longer are drinking from a fire hose of information—it’s a veritable fire hydrant gushing out 24/7 and not just one hydrant but many, too many. We need to be more perceptive and understand when lies are being told, when that bright shiny reality is too good to be true.
And yet, we’re reading less than ever and losing our ability to understand and reason. The world is more complex and the problems are convoluted. At a time when we need to dig deeper and work harder to comprehend, we have less time and even less patience.
We need to tell children to get off their Snapchat channels and Twitter feeds and pay attention to the real news happening around them. We need to encourage them to read great literature and sharpen their powers of observation and analysis.
We all need to stand up, think, and fight back against untruths and injustice. What’s even more frightening than a government that would willfully tell lies is a population that is all too willing to take them at face value.
suburban mom,
