Media Betrayal

Our media are betraying us. By “media,” I mean virtually all of the so-called “free” news organizations operating in the United States. By “our” and “us,” I mean all of us—every single human being in our country, plus many others on our planet. And by betrayal, I mean consigning our civilization to a fate that could make the worst horrors of Orwell’s imagination look merry.

Are these acts of betrayal deliberate? I think not. At least they’re not deliberate in the sense that the likely resulting catastrophe is a conscious, desired end of those who present and analyze the “news.” No reporter or pundit actually wants American democracy to die, global or regional wars to proliferate, and planetary heating to run away to the point (at least) where most of the tropics become uninhabitable and desperate migration to so-called “temperate zones” becomes a flood.

But as the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes opined, people can be presumed to intend the natural consequences of their acts. All these horrors and more—at best, a new Dark Age longer and more terrible than the millennium after the Fall of Rome—is a highly probable consequence of our media’s acts.

What are those acts? In essence, they involve keeping us in a constant state of helpless agitation, with little or no corrective commentary. And much, if not most, of the causes of helpless agitation are reports of what people say, rather than actual events in the real world. Our media have become a gigantic loudspeaker for unrestrained social and politial gossip.

In focusing on speech in preference to real events, virtually all of our media, not just Fox, emphasize what’s, bizarre, inaccurate, crazy, violent, threatening, and alarming. When (increasingly rarely) they devote time and effort to analyzing hard data carefully and in volume, they usually try to reveal the financial or other misdeeds of leaders and oligarchs like Justice Clarence Thomas and his rich “friends.”

Rarely, if ever, do our media devote time, effort and factual detail to showing someone doing something real right, even if that something is vitally important. And with doing something real right seemingly so rare these days, isn’t it a special category of “news”?

Where, for example, are reports of all the many infrastructure projects planned and now beginning all over the country, financed by the Biden infrastructure bill? There are projects planned, “shovel ready,” and ongoing in every state and likely every important county in the nation. That’s how the bill got passed: it had something in it for everybody, at least everybody with clout in the House or the Senate. So why have its universal benefits seemingly dropped off the edge of a flat Earth, insofar as our media are concerned?

Planetary heating caused by our own burning of fossil fuels is one of the two greatest threats to modern civilization, the other being fascism wrought by demagogues like Trump. The media have devoted lots of coverage to how heating and ice melting are accelerating, and rightly so. They’ve even begun to digest the basic engineering concept of positive feedback and how it accelerates planetary heating and might even make it self-sustaining. But all these things, when pushed into the public mind, just foment popular fear and anxiety, not to mention righteous anger at the fossil-fuel firms and others whose deliberate acts of delay and denial have made the problem far worse and more immediate than it might have been.

Where is coverage of solutions? Don’t people who can afford electric cars need to knew where they can buy them, which ones are most popular, and which work best? Don’t mammoth wind and solar farms proliferating over the countryside deserve coverage? Don’t drivers need to know where electric charging stations are already running, or are being planned and built, in their neighborhoods? Won’t they want to know what superhighways in their regions are now fully navigable by electric cars of average range? Don’t they deserve to know how quickly their own friends and neighbors are turning to the first truly “new” technology of individual transport in a century? Don’t they deserve to hear about all the good engineering and manufacturing jobs these initiatives create? Isn’t all this “news”?

Then there’s coverage of leaders. To read or (worse) view our news media, you would think that our national leadership consists of morons and imbeciles whose chief occupation is mimicking six-year-olds hurling insults and taunts on a grammar-school playground. That’s the vast majority of what gets reported and shown on a day-to-day basis.

Reporters might say that it’s “news” when a member of Congress tells a lie or insults another leader or an ethnic group. Maybe that’s so, at least in theory. But reporting that sort of dismal stuff preferentially and incessantly, not to mention all the fallout, resulting gossip, charges and countercharges, has had obvious consequences. The worst and most useless leaders now resort to “performative politics” far more now than any did previously. And preferential reporting of this nonsense encourages ever more of it by simple cause and effect that any intelligent observer can see. Monkey get endless media coverage, monkey do.

Is there any foreseeable end to it all, other than an exponential increase in lies and taunts to the exclusion of all common sense and useful business? And if not, who’s ultimately responsible for the avalanche of garbage? the performative goons who just do what comes naturally because they have no other skills or talents, or the media who encourage and incite them by giving them the biggest megaphone in human history, namely, electronic media and the Internet?

While on the subject of leaders, there are two other vital points to make. There are logical reasons why President Biden has no viable Democratic opponents. First, no one else can match his wide experience—including decades in the Senate and eight years as Vice-President under Obama. Second, no one else enjoys his long acquaintance with key domestic and foreign leaders, during times of normalcy when politics actually worked and leaders expected to govern, not perform.

Biden in particular learned politics when leaders practiced it to solve problems, not to accuse each other in the media of failing to solve them. Finally, no Democrat has risen to challenge Biden for the simple reason that all of his best possible rivals understand these points exquisitely. Not one of them is ready for the top job in this crazy time, and all know it.

All of Biden’s potential rivals and successors need more training and experience. But the most important is Kamala Harris. Barring something unfortunate happening to her, she will be first in line for the presidency until January 20, 2025.

You would think that our national media would focus relentlessly on her with a single question in mind: “Could she be our next Harry Truman if the worst happens?” Yet, as far as I can tell, our media are engaged in a nationwide news blackout of her. Might not some media focus—whether welcome or unwelcome—encourage our leaders to give Harris the experience and exposure that she needs?

Then there’s the question of polls. Recently a spate of news “analyses” have told us that working people, young people and minorities are turning away from President Biden in droves, with a probable result of the Demagogue’s re-election and the loss of our democracy to fascism. The latter link—Trump to fascism—is sound enough. But there are fewer holes in needlepoint than in the idea that polls taken now are useful, let alone decisive.

Polls this far out are known to be unreliable, and the most important demographics (youth, hard-pressed workers, minorities, and economically marginalized people) are notoriously hard to poll. On the other hand, the blowhards who eat Fox for breakfast are eager to tell anyone who will listen how and why they will vote for Trump.

Do I think our media are consciously trying to destroy our society from within? Of course not. The reporters and pundits, let alone their managers, are not nearly that diabolical, or that clever. They’re just lazy. They generate clickbait and chase salacious leads as dogs chase cars and trucks. And this they call “journalism.”

But their laziness does have an inconvenient result. In the process of doing what all their colleagues are doing, they are relentlessly destroying our democracy, our social fabric, and our sense of a coherent, rational society and a common destiny.

Reporting the latest idiocy of Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan or George Santos, or the latest “result” of a useless and premature poll, as well as all the resullting commentary and countercharges, is so much easier than collecting statistics to show how much infrastructure is being built or rebuilt in every citizen’s neighborhood, or how the CHIPS Act is bringing advanced semiconductor manufacturing—and good jobs—back to the nation that invented chips, or whether inflation at home is lower than inflation abroad and is actually coming down in several respects. And if reporters really wanted to stretch themselves, they might show us how the resurgence of labor unions is beginning to re-recreate the economically healthy, egalitarian-trending postwar America.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. Our media, after all, reflect the intelligence and values of the society they serve. How can we expect reporters and pundits to see and report cause and effect when alarm, rage and hate have captured the hearts and minds of our leaders (Joe Biden and a few others excepted)?

Yet every would-be athlete knows that the body follows the head. For better or for worse, reporters and pundits are the head of a democratic society. If they lead us into a sewer of lies, baseless charges, countercharges, blame, shame, rage, anger and hate, that’s where we will bide. That’s where we’ve been living for about half a decade, as the most consequential election in American history looms a year away.

Euripides is supposed to have said, “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.” We don’t believe much in plural gods anymore. But if those who give us information are in on the madness and even inadvertently working hard to magnify it, how can we escape destruction?


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