JANUARY 4, 2021 – Four days into 2021 and the craziness continues: Naked Emperor twisting the arms off democracy to a groundswell of Republican cheers. This assault is nothing new for the Party of Trump, for which raw power is the sole objective.
On one hand, I’m as disgusted as any democrat and every Democrat. On the other hand, I’m fascinated by the dynamics that fuel every news cycle. “News cycle”? I meant “constant news barrage.” Oops! Not “news” but opinion.
A by-product of our times is the mountain range of prospective PhD theses that will draw future scholars. Among the “peaks”: “journalistic psychology,” overlapping but in many ways distinct from “propaganda psychology.” (A sampling of other new fields: “infotainment economics,” “socio-religious political science,” and “mad-cap looney-tune history.”)
Yesterday on the drive home from the Red Cabin, my wife read aloud the latest NYT headlines regarding Trump’s shenanigans in Georgia—exhorting the secretary of state to “find” 11,272 votes in favor of . . . “crazy.” Our son, an eminently moderate Millennial, took issue with the Times characterization of the “likely criminal” action. A lively discussion propelled us well down U.S. Highway 8 from the hamlet of “Range” (main attraction: the always open “Straight 8 Bar”) to the Minnesota border.
Byron’s point was that without reading the full transcript of Trump’s notorious phone call to Raffensberger, and without understanding the larger context of the call, a person can’t judge potential criminality. That question, Byron argued, is a matter for prosecutors, not journalists, and certainly not consumers who read nothing more than the headline and possibly first few lines of the story.
Mind you, Byron’s no fan of Trump and can’t stand the mean, evil goofball any more than my wife and I can. But for Byron, Trump’s guilt or innocence within the law governing election interference wasn’t the issue. It was journalistic integrity.
Reluctantly I had to agree with Byron’s assessment of nearly every headline/article that appears in The Times or CNN (the “go-to” sources for my wife and me). My counter argument, however, to criticism of the heavy editorializing within “news reports” was this: Trumpian behavior is so relentlessly egregious, journalists who report it can’t avoid editorializing any more than a reporter describing the gory details of a heinous corporeal crime can eliminate “moral bias.” Depravity is depravity!
But Byron pressed his point. After accounting for the economics that drive all commercially based “news and propaganda” outlets of our age, he argued that swing-voters are more likely than not to be consumers of CNN than of FoxNews. Accordingly, such voters will be more influenced by CNN’s editorializing than by FoxNews propaganda. I say, “Good.” He says, “Not so, because journalism and its consumption tend toward pure ‘up or down’ opinion, without most consumers assessing and analyzing information.”
At that point, I switched gears—even though Byron was behind the wheel. I blamed everything on elimination of the Fairness Doctrine. We then crossed the border, whereupon someone in the car asked, “What should we have for dinner tonight?”
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
