Critical thinking skills on both sides are at a low.
“Well, we reelected the rapist.”
It was about midnight. I checked the news on Election Day, and found Donald Trump had been reelected president. That was my first reaction, so that was the first thing I posted on Facebook and Mastodon.
I am, as regular readers of my blogs and social media have kinda figured out, a never-Trumper. I have never voted for him, and never will. Even if his allies overthrow the Constitution, make him president-for-life, have him run unopposed, and threaten to shoot anyone who won’t vote. I wouldn’t vote for the Beast either. (No, Trump’s not the Beast. He’s just beastly.)
Unfortunately many of my fellow Christians refuse to understand my never-Trumper thinking, and assume it’s just because I’m liberal. That any abysmal defects of character Trump demonstrates are simply partisan attempts to make him sound as evil as possible; but in real life, he’s the nicest guy. The smartest guy. The greatest president since Ronald Reagan. Why, better than Reagan. Up there with Washington and Lincoln.
Y’know, eight years ago when Trump first ran for office, a lot of these same people acknowledged that Trump was a slimy huckster, but at least he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Since that time he’s somehow gone from “Could be worse” to “Put him on Mt. Rushmore.” How’d that happen?
Duh; brainwashing. Turn on conservative media and that’s all you’ll hear.
It’s the media’s job and duty to be a check and balance against politicans and businesses who try to get away with stuff, because power corrupts. But conservative media only works that way when they perceive the politicians and businesses to be liberal. Otherwise they get a free pass. Partisanship first; checking and balancing last.
And because that’s how conservative media works, that’s how conservatives imagine the rest of the media functions—the “liberal media,” the “woke media,” or Trump’s favorite term, the “fake news.” They think non-partisan moderate (and, to be fair, liberal-leaning) media organizations only exist to attack conservatives. And while that’s absolutely true of partisan liberal media, the non-partisans go after everybody. Because, again, that’s their job and duty.
Yes there’s partisan liberal media; of course there is. If you wanna find conservative-bashing media, there’s plenty; Yahoo and the Huffington Post will swipe and reprint tons of it. I tend to avoid it, though I do read some of it, same as I read Fox News articles.
The rest of the media admittedly has a liberal bias. Because humans are biased… and those of us humans who go into journalism tend to be liberal. We get into the biz because we wanna change the world. Back when I was a young knee-jerk conservative, I went to journalism school because I wanted to change the world in a conservative direction… and I liked to write, I was a news junkie, and I liked knowing what was going on. By and large my fellow students wanted to change the world in a liberal direction. But we were all trained to recognize bias—including our own—and trained to strive not to unfairly bias our own stories, and let the facts speak for themselves.
And if a member of our own party royally screwed up, they never got a free pass: They were hypocrites, the public needed to be informed, and if the public chose to penalize or impeach or recall them, they could. If a liberal like Sen. Bob Menendez (D–NY) is accused of taking bribes, you never shut down that story. It’s your job and duty to report it. Otherwise, if he’s guilty, you’re complicit in his evil.
Whereas a partisan “news” organization has no trouble at all with being complicit in the evil. Because their priority isn’t truth. Isn’t in informing the American public. Isn’t about providing a check and balance to power. It’s about power: They want more. If the truth helps ’em get it, they report the truth. If silence helps ’em get it, they report nothing. And if they themselves are evil, they’ll report lies.
Hence Fox News regularly shuts down stories that their conservative patrons and audience don’t like, and don’t wanna hear. Which really irritates the actual journalists who work for the organization, who learned you don’t do this, and many of ’em actually still practice proper journalism ethics. That’s why they’ll occasionally leave. Like Chris Wallace, who departed for
Lemme be fair: Fox News isn’t the only mainstream media outlet who puts the kibosh on stories for political reasons. Ronan Farrow will tell you all about
And it’s a false claim that it happens all the time in “liberal media.” If that were true, Menendez—and Rod Blagojevich, Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, Corinne Brown, Andrew Cuomo, Katie Hill, Al Franken, John Conyers, and other scandalous Democrats would never have made the mainstream press. One can argue, “Well, way more Democrats would’ve been exposed if the media did its job”—and if that’s true, why isn’t conservative media doing its job, and exposing all these supposed corrupt Democrats with reasonable evidence? Is it because conservative media is incompetent, or because they’ve got nothing? (Well, likely both.)
Anyway. Turn on or read conservative media, and you’ll read little to nothing about Donald Trump’s incompetence, malfeasance, and growing senile dementia. Instead you’ll hear praise and worship. He loves praise and worship—and they want him as a viewer, so they’ll give him what he wants!
And if you watch or read nothing but conservative media, you too will think he’s achieved some level of divinity. You’ll get brainwashed.
It amuses me when conservative friends insist I’ve been brainwashed; that my exposure to the liberal media has made me embrace an alternate reality that isn’t real. Not just because I was just saying the same thing about them!
But y’see, when you go to journalism school, you learn how not to be brainwashed. Because we study it! There are multiple classes on media manipulation. Not so we can go out and do it… although if you decide to use your journalism major to work in public relations, or work for some politician’s press office, often you do go out and do it. But properly these classes are to train us to watch out for it. ’Cause, you know, public relations, politicians’ press offices, and the occasional totalitarian foreign government who naively expects American journalists to believe their propaganda. If they can trick a reporter, they will. That’s why you never, ever turn off your B.S. detector. Even when it’s people on “your” side. Heck, especially then.
No, it doesn’t mean I’m brainwashing-proof. People lie to themselves all the time, and if you wanna believe in your candidate really, really bad, you can psyche yourself into denying reality, and accepting everything they tell you. I’ve read confessional autobiographies by journalists who left politics, disillusioned by the people they used to work for, ’cause they finally realized they were drinking the Kool-Aid, and stopped. If I wanted to believe America sucks, and that only Donald Trump can fix it, I could cut out all the other media in my life and stick only to the conservative stuff. I just don’t see why I’d wanna adopt that worldview. There’s a hymn about how I place my trust in Christ alone, so placing anything in Trump (or Kamala Harris; she’s not Messiah either) immediately strikes me as idolatrous.
Conversely, if I wanted to believe the liberal fiction of an America that oughta let anybody do whatever they please with no consequences—heck, with the government paying for everything—I could, but I don’t see the point in that worldview either. It’s really hard to believe everybody is basicallly good deep down… after we reelected the rapist.