What Do You Want To Hear?
At one point maybe 8 months ago I was thinking, ‘What the heck. Great leaders come out of nowhere at times, maybe Trump could fool us and really be good.’ Not that I was going to run right out and vote for him with the pretty lousy track record he had in business, but he was intriguing. That floated in and out of my brain until he started his incredible run at stabbing everyone who walked by; the disabled journalist, Megan Kelly, John McCain and other legislators, Muslims, women, veterans, Latinos and active duty servicemen. I know these people, all of them and they all contribute to our society. All of the outlandish things he was saying enabled him to be on television every hour of every day on all the 24 hour news channels. He never spent a dime on all that incredible coverage for a year or better, yet he decries the media as being unfair at every turn. They reported on things he said, none of it was made up, but he didn’t like the impact it was having on his image as he got deeper in the swamp he was creating. Instead of changing his ways he blamed the media for HIS shortcomings…Therein lies my concern.
First off, listen to him…he blames everyone for his shortcomings and has his whole campaign and more recently the media. The idea that the media is somehow unfair is a tactic many have used for years now to pull attention away from themselves. Sarah Palin did it convincingly for some, when she and her husband were facing ethics violations for firing a state trooper who would not do her personal bidding, setting us on a course of drifting farther and farther away from the truth. It was really hard for me to believe that people actually took her serious back then, but her legitimacy was cemented when the idea of a non-fact media began to take hold with her followers. It grew out of the age of people buying fake animals on the internet with real hard earned money simply to play on a fake farm…
All of that brings us to today where facts and reality are so blurred with intentional falsehoods that legislators and candidates can reel off one after another without anyone batting an eye. You see, we have been hearing all those things in email forwards and on social media for some time now, which of course proves beyond doubt it is all correct; right? The truth takes forever to make it around the world, but a lie is instantaneous.
As if that is not enough, the media in general is being denigrated by some politicians and people of trust to the point that many believe nothing they report is correct…accept Fox Network and pundit stream. Somehow folks do not see that they too are mainstream media, or at least they want you to take them that way. In recent years under Roger Alies Fox became very slanted to the right and somehow that was okay and slanting left is not? I have yet to understand that take on things, but hey I do not have a gullible personality and happen to believe that opposing info is good for democracy. As for Fox, since their groper in chief Alies was fired, they are sounding a little more legit and have actually come down hard on their anchors for reporting marginal online polls and information from not so credible sources. Brett Baier apologized profusely a couple of weeks ago for reporting that Hillary Clinton was “under indictment” when in fact she was not and never has been. He had been given false info by a pundit. Fox has a few quality journalists these days that deserve a network that is not bent.
Blurring the lines even farther, the “fake news” which is all the rage today like those farm animals of ten years ago, is flooding social media from Macedonia with ridiculous stories. There is pretty much zero truth in any of it.
Trump has had the bed made for him on the mistrust of the media by his predecessors in the last several years, so it is only natural that he pick up where they left off and that is a scary thing when pushed by a President. Without the press and giving social media legitimacy, he and others are free to roam out of site without so much as an idea what they are doing with our tax dollars, our neighbors and in the larger world.
We have to understand that although sometimes leaning a bit one way or the other, the free press is overall not setting out to deceive us and they are all we have to keep an eye on our country. Most of them will bury a story on page 6 now and then if it doesn’t suit their audience or even leave it out all together, but they are by and large journalists who stand by their stories and have the proof to back them up.
You would never buy a car without looking under the hood or buy a horse without looking it in the mouth, so why pray tell are we being sucked into this idea that our freedom of the press is a bad thing and reporting on some of these guys is somehow unfair. Bull shit. If they have done bad things or will I want to know about it, left or right.
The single most used tool by dictators is to dispatch through state run media the message they want you to hear. People like Putin and Kim Jung Un of North Korea, they have their state run news and you will get whatever they want you to hear, not what is real. Trump will never tell you that Russia has an economy smaller than Calif. or Putin has broken it so badly all they have is oil and that Putin’s people are starving because money intended for food there was pocketed by Putin. Putin tells his people how great things are and they are blissfully ignorant, only the elite have a dime. No car, no food no money for anything, a stark difference to the U.S. both in what they have and what they hear.
Please read and listen with a discerning ear and check out what you read on the Internet. Not with more of the same, but with opposing views…that is how we learn. The American people are not stupid, this controlled media tactic was successful in Germany with well educated people. Understand that the press is all we have between our government and us, and by and large it sets out to learn the truth. What do you want to hear? Listen to all of it, not just what you want to hear. Losing the Constitutional right to a free press is the end of our free society.
