September 30, 2021
Pentwater, Michigan
The other night I was watching a movie from about ten years ago with what used to be a familiar theme--the scrappy newspaper reporter burrowing into a scandal in order to take on and expose corruption within the U.S. political establishment. Movies along this line go back at least as far as the black and white days of Humphrey Bogart. Typically, the final scenes are of the reporter, after many travails, secret meetings with informants, and arguments with his editors, putting the final touch on the Big Story--the one that's going to bring down the crooks in city hall, the House or the Senate, or even the White House. I suppose this hard-hitting theme was best represented, and perhaps elevated to durable genre status for those in my generation, by the film All the President's Men, about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's exposing of the Watergate scandal.
As I said, that used to be a familiar movie theme, all the way into the second decade of this century. But as I watched it, I was struck by the thought of how little difference the exposure of the crooked political behavior, as bad as it was in the movie, would make today. Papers that used to be the gold standard of journalism--the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc., while still respectable and well-thought-of the world over, are now considered by a great big chunk of the American populace to be mere propaganda tools of the mythical "radical left," less believable than the National Enquirer or the shit they read on Facebook. That change has been so recent in the political history of the U.S. that it's almost a blink of an eye. Most of it has happened since the election campaign of Donald Trump in 2016 and his steady, relentless, and very effective efforts to undermine the credibility of any newspaper, television station, or social media platform that would dare to criticize him. Granted, there was some roll-up to the Trump approach by the Tea Partiers, and even Nixon hated the Post for its coverage of him, but the level of simple deniability of the truth of, well, the Truth, was perfected by that most recent King of Lies.
It's not simply that Trump is such a consummately compelling crook, which of course he is, with a political message that brings out the worst in so many people. Other presidents have done that and probably will do it again. It's much worse than that. The sea change that has taken place in the country in this tiny bit of time since 2016 has not been so much about the existence of the beast that Trump is, as it has been about the practical elimination of anything we might call the Mainstream Media (the papers named above and a few others from big cities, plus the original three TV networks and CNN), which the bulk of the public for the most part believed was the bearer of the more or less objective truth about things in general--earthquakes, diseases, murders, and so on.
Cynics will say that the Mainstream Media I just described never was really objective--it told us what the government spoon fed it most of the time. Maybe. The only departure from that was for a very brief interval from the middle of the Vietnam War through Nixon's impeachment, after which the Mainstream Media went back to reporting on things pretty much the way Washington told it to, all the way up until 2016 or so. Sure, there were political overtones, and you could always tell a Democratic from a Republican paper based on what it chose to emphasize about what was going on. But what, exactly was going on, whether it be a scandal or a hurricane, was pretty much reported the same way across the board. Yes, they were often government shills; for example, without the active participation of the Mainstream Media, the September 11, 2001 hijackings would not have been absurdly elevated to the status of Pearl Harbor Day, and the endless military adventure known as the War on Terror, including the imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction, would not have been dignified with those names, as silly as they were.
Others will say that there never was such thing as the Mainstream Media, and that the media has always been politicized to some extent. For centuries in this country there have been Democratic and Republican newspapers, and they were a lot more partisan than they are now. These folks would say that the fact that we got our news for a long time from the likes of Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley, and later Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, and that they were deemed trustworthy by practically everybody, says as much about our gullibility as it did about their objectivity, and that furthermore, it was mid-20th century aberration. But today there's just a whole shitload more broadcast news time than there ever was before. Everybody knows that MSNBC unashamedly represents the slightly left of center viewpoint, while Fox News brazenly represents the deep red right. And for a long time most people saw CNN, NBC, CBS, and ABC as falling pretty much in the middle of things, and hence more objective, if not more accurate. These latter outlets constituted the Mainstream Media, for what it was worth.
The trustworthy thing about that Mainstream Media was that it was viewed askance by both the left and right in about equal measure, which meant that it probably came closer to the objective truth than one might think. Okay, okay, it didn't promote progressive ideals very much or delve too deeply into the nuances of institutional racism or the military industrial complex or the triumph of the elite capitalist oligarchy that controls the nation's wealth, not to mention the vast social media data bases that have us all in their thrall. But it also did not lie outright, or shy away from the presentation of violence and unrest in the streets or on the battlefield, or misrepresent the right wing as the saviors of the American Dream. And most importantly, it did not preach.
But, as with any sea change, there was a major series of events that precipitated it. Trump of course always had a soft spot for Fox News, and early on in the 2016 campaign, when the more moderate, Mainstream, networks such as NBC and CNN began to call him out publicly for his blatant lies, he countered by calling their criticism of him "fake news." The irony of this was rich indeed, due to the fact that it was actual pro-Trump fake news--emanating mostly from Eastern Europe and making its way onto social media platforms such as Facebook, that began to emerge big-time during the campaign, spreading negative lies about Hillary Clinton and positive lies about Trump himself, replete with utterly outrageous National Enquirer-style bullshit like stories about the Pope endorsing Trump for president, Clinton harboring pedophiles in pizza shops, etc.
Then, as the Mainstream Media began to hector Trump even more, especially after he was elected, keeping track of how many lies he'd told that week, or doing then-novel things like "fact-checking" presidential statements, something hitherto considered unsportsmanlike for a news outlet to do to a sitting executive, Trump reacted by throwing a CNN reporter out of the White House press corps. That event, and the tensions that led up to it, with Trump criticizing CNN and its coverage, did a strange thing: instead of having the desired effect, from his point of view, it turned CNN into a bitterly anti-Trump network, and other elements of the Mainstream Media either followed suit, or continued to criticize Trump in a way that old-time Mainstream Media outlets wouldn't have done even a decade earlier. Tit for tat. Well, pretty soon after Trump took office newspapers like the Los Angeles Times were running articles with headlines like, "Trump Lies Again About [fill in the blank]." Refreshing, for those of us who hate Trump and possess the basic intelligence to see a pure lie for what it is, but also disturbing in terms of the necessity for such daily reporting.
The result of all this is that a significant segment of the public has pretty much abandoned the idea that they can get their news straight from the shoulders of the average national broadcaster. For the Fox News types there's no credibility in anything but Fox, and for the heavy duty Trumpers, even Fox isn't reliable, because that network has had the temerity to occasionally disagree with him. That would leave nothing but the Volkischer Beobachter to report the news to Trump's satisfaction, except that it went out of print with the fall of the Nazis at the end of World War Two. Conversely, for the MSNBC and other left-of-center types, there's hardly any truth unless it comes from the Here We Go Again wisecracking mouth of Rachel Madow, or the whiny wagging head of Bill Maher.
With the devaluation of the Mainstream Media has come the loss of interest in such a concept as nationwide objective truth. So what? you might ask. Well, here's what. The loss of even such a comparatively small thing as the distribution of more or less objective truth on a nightly basis has been the reason the few fairly consistent touchstones we have by which to run a decent society are under scrutiny. It's all well and good to have opinions on things--politics, music, entertainment, whether or not squirrels and pigeons are a nuisance, whether dark roast coffee tastes too bitter--and even fringe issues like whether God exists or if we have been visited by aliens. But there are some things on which we should NOT have differing opinions, even in a free-thinking society such as the one we imagine we live in. For instance, the benefits and the necessity for all people to receive a lifesaving vaccine against Covid 19 should not be up for debate. We shouldn't have differing opinions on how far inland a hurricane has gone or whether the polar icecaps are melting. And there's no room for disagreement about whether genocide or racism or child molestation or female genital mutilation are bad things. They simply are bad, period. And hell, I admit that the Mainstream Media don't always reinforce all the values they should, but at least they don't contradict them and try to say that bad things are good things, and vice versa.
The loss of a centralized source of more or less objective truth in favor of lots of individual smaller sources of polemics, baiting, and sometimes outright lies has encouraged the diffusion--the Balkanization if you will--of the news, and engenders a general sense of entitlement by EVERYONE to have their own opinions about nearly EVERYTHING, even things that shouldn't be up for discussion. There's an old saying that opinions are like assholes--everyone has one. But when we hold too many opinions on really nondebatable issues we risk having not one, but many assholes. That's essentially the problem we're stuck with at present--too many assholes.
