Editor’s Note: This is the third in a three part series on the death of the American Dream and the one last chance we have to save it.
Part I: Death of an Empire – Did Trump’s Reality Show Presidency Finally Kill the American Dream?
Part II: The Early Days of the Internet – What Went Wrong
“If you consider the great journalists in history, you don’t see too many objective journalists on that list. H. L. Mencken was not objective. Mike Royko, who just died. I. F. Stone was not objective. Mark Twain was not objective. I don’t quite understand this worship of objectivity in journalism. Now, just flat-out lying is different from being subjective.
– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
By Glynn Wilson –
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — In the months ahead, sometime when it seems we have the COVID crisis under control and the Trump insurrection story dies down, there are going to be Congressional hearings on how to regulate the so-called “tech giants,” mainly Google and Facebook, but also Amazon and Apple.
The problem is, the news about this is going to be dominated by crazy Republicans in Congress complaining about discrimination against conservative thought.
This is a totally false narrative and does not even come close to the reality of the problem. In fact, it is quite obvious that the content you can reach with Google and other search engines, the YouTube video channel, as well as Facebook and Twitter and the rest, are so full of fake news, lies and conspiracy theories that it’s utterly ridiculous to say otherwise. This cannot be fixed with bots and algorithms. It is going to take educated, human eyes to fix it.
It’s true of human nature anyway, so it is a hard problem to fix. As Mark Twain once said, “A lie will travel around the world before the truth can put on its shoes.”
Sensational clickbait on the web and social media vastly out performs truthful straight news. This is a fact and a conundrum.
But wait, that’s not the end of the story. While a New York Times columnist recently wrote that the problem is separating news from opinion, that’s not it.
Any content analysis of news stories over the past five years would show that stories put out as straight, “fair and balanced” news, reporting “both sides” of every story, only repeated Republican and Trump lies over and over again, all day long, on EVERY channel. So the problem is not just conservative talk radio and Fox News, then Breitbart and NewsMax and Parler. Every single news story in every newspaper repeated on every broadcast news channel, with video, shared on every social media app, spread the Trump lies deeper into the human psyche and the public consciousness.
Is it any wonder that the average American with barely a high school education and an IQ of 95 had no way to avoid believing the lie? It was everywhere they looked, including all over the Facebook pages of their family and friends. The peer pressure was enormous for people to buy into the propaganda. So it’s not all their fault. They were fed the lies from the highest levels of the United States government, and those lies were spread not just as memes on social media, but by every news outlet in the land that anyone might have seen as credible.
So here is our answer, which we have written about before.
Objective Journalism
Someone needs to go back and do the research on the original definition of objective journalism. I have proposed producing a documentary, but so far it has not been funded.
I will spare you all the details here, but back in 1896, newspaper publishers starting getting away from sensational “yellow journalism” and invented this thing called “objective” journalism. It was a term from science, but after the big newspaper chain publishers got done with it in the 20th century beginning around the time of the Great Depression, it just became another tool of capitalism — to make the most money possible by treating news as a commodity.
William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, Si Newhouse and others went around buying up all the small, locally owned newspapers around the country. They used the Associated Press wire service and created an economy of scale and homogenous news product that looked the same everywhere, like McDonalds created a fast food hamburger joint that served the same burgers everywhere. Call it Fast News.
They sold people on the myth of a journalism that publishes “both sides,” and got Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, libertarians and anarchists, socialists and fascists, reading the same paper — and profited from them all. That’s what they did, and it worked for decades. But it’s not working anymore, and there may be no going back. All the experts now acknowledge that most people now seek out news sources they agree with and ignore those they don’t. But at least we could try by telling the story honestly and getting it out all over the place.
As reported in part two, Google alone is sitting on cash assets of $319 billion with $40 billion in net revenue. If we could get our hands on some of that money we could do this research and tell this story in a film that could be promoted far and wide and at least get the elite public to know and understand the real story. If it was handled correctly the social media “influencers” could then get it out all over the place. This could change the public dialogue we have on a daily basis about how news outlets cover news. We have been operating under a misframed definition of objective journalism for 100 years.
The prime example I use to illustrate this in my book involves global warming and climate change. If you listen to the scientists, no matter what we do about global warming, the planet is already on a warming trajectory we may not be able to stop anyway. The real problem is that we have been wasting time arguing about this in politics for the past 20 years — precisely because of the definition of objective journalism we have been operating under in news for 100 years.
What if every credible news outlet in the country and the world just stopped reporting “the other side” from political conservatives and fossil fuel PR men who call it a “hoax” like Trump simply to keep the cheap oil flowing? The science is overwhelming and undeniable. This is objective truth. There is no credible other side.
What if every student was taught what I learned in Philosophy classes 40 years ago? There are matters of fact, and there are matters of opinion or belief. Facts are objective. Opinions and beliefs are subjective. What if the job of the objective press was to draw the lines, not politicians?
If we want to do something, it will take a law firm willing to take up this fight to change the web advertising game. The New York Times can’t save us all by itself. It needs our help to reach those people who are going along with the Qanon Shaman, following him like the Jews supposedly constructed a false idol out of gold in the form of a calf, back when Moses allegedly went up on Mount Sinai and got the Ten Commandments directly from God.
If only someone in a high place would tell them they are following a false prophet, yes an anti-Christ, maybe they would stop following this myth and get back to helping their neighbors.
Isn’t the Golden Rule a better principle to follow anyway?
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Altruism should be the watchword of the day in the era of the coronavirus, not more selfies on Facebook or lies spread in news stories.
Related: Can Altruism Trump Selfishness to Save Democracy and Planet Earth?
Lessons Learned
We have learned a thing or two just since the 2020 election. Will these lessons hold going forward? Or will the mainstream media just go back to doing business as usual, making millions off this confusing story where there are always two sides?
For starters, just since November 3, 2020, after the election, when Trump first started challenging the results, we noticed a sea change in the faces of broadcast journalists on virtually every channel, from ABC, NBC and CBS to CNN, MSNBC and PBS. Even on NPR, where you couldn’t see their faces on the radio, the reporting took on a subtle change. In every story about the election that quoted Trump’s lie about it being stolen, the producers starting telling the on air talent to add a line to the story: There is no evidence to support the claim that there was fraud or that votes were stolen from Republicans by Democrats.
At first back in November this showed up as strain on their faces to say this, even though it still seemed to fit in with the fair and balanced, both sides account. The president said it was stolen. Democrats say it was not. But as time went by, and Trump kept pushing the lie, the reporting got more and more persistent. Experts were brought in to counter the lie.
The fact that they called it a lie was a breakthrough. Not that long ago there were arguments on cable news talk shows about whether to call the words of a president a lie.
But none of it seemed to make any difference, because over on Fox News, NewsMax, Brietbart and Parler, the stolen election lie was prevalent. Trump said it every day on Twitter and put out another video of him saying it on YouTube, and every news outlet ran it like it was gospel. Even in the comments on Facebook and Twitter, it was an all out war with the Trump lie vying for and getting all the attention in the popularity algorithm. It was even being shared by Democrats, thinking they were countering the lie, when all that did was spread it even further on social media, in the search engines — and deep into the frontal lobe of the American people.
But at least it established a precedent. You can call the president of the United States a liar in the newspaper and in prime time news on TV.
There were calls all over social media on the left for the media to just stop reporting and showing the Trump lie. But apparently the New American Journal was the only news organization in Christendom to actually stop doing it, so our traffic dropped back in the late spring and summer. The Trump unreality show was just too compelling. People had to watch. We stopped covering the daily White House press briefing, or even sharing news of it on Facebook. When they stopped doing the briefing completely, other news outlets kept reporting Trump’s daily tweets, showing and quoting his daily video statements, and countering with the evidence on the other side. We just stopped reporting the lie completely.
That’s the lesson going forward. If you know something is a lie, why report it at all? Why give it credence?
Social Media Censorship
Another lesson learned was that the First Amendment’s Freedom of Speech and Press clauses do not give any anonymous moron the right to say whatever they want. There is no free speech right to spout lies as a troll in comments on news stories, blogs and social media comment threads. Facebook includes the tools to delete comments and block trolls. There have always been limits on free speech and press, going back to the famous case of screaming fire in a crowded theater, where people could be injured and die.
As we reported last year at this time, to create successful pro-social groups to build a better democracy and have an honest debate about the best way to keep life livable on planet Earth, the comments must be moderated. My solution is to simply block the trolls. I literally do not have time to deal with them and adjudicate the truth in the comment section. I just write it and people can either believe it, or go somewhere else and find the fake news they are looking for.
If every news outlet did that, they would eventually have no where to go with their lies.
We cheered when Twitter first started highlighting Trump’s tweets as misleading, and then banned him from posting altogether. But it was a bit late in the game. That was after the damn insurrection. The same can be said of Facebook. But the lesson and the precedent is there. A private company can limit free speech, even the speech of a sitting president, and there is nothing he or the government can do about it.
If you don’t want lies to spread and pollute free speech with information that is damaging for democracy or the planet, you don’t have to publish or share it. Period.
DO NOT PUBLISH THE LIES AND THEY CANNOT SPREAD!
Sure there will be platforms that do it anyway. But if the vast majority of the press and media in America made this decision collectively — and if the technology companies got onboard with stopping the lies from spreading like a virus meme in the body politic — we might save democracy yet.
We could even apply the standard to environmental reporting. Trump was able to convince his white, rural following that government policies to regulate oil companies was bad for the economy, even though we know this not to be true. Creating new, high paying green jobs will be better for the economy and the environment than keeping the old jobs in the fossil fuels industries. This is not just one side, the side of the Democratic Party, in a fair and balanced news story. It is the only side that matters.
Don’t believe or spread the falsehoods of the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists. Tell people the truth decisively on all channels and we might have a chance to keep life livable on planet Earth.
Ignore this advice at all our peril. There is not much time left and there is much to lose — not just our rich lifestyles but our entire way of life. Either we change how we tell this story now, or we can kiss the American Dream goodbye forever — and doom life on Earth.
People can believe a god will save them in the end of they want to. They have that freedom of religion under the First Amendment too. They can pray anytime or anywhere they want.
But for those of us in the know, we can’t let those people stop us from saving democracy and the planet. Trump fed them the lie and got them to vote for him. We don’t have to perpetuate the lie, on every channel, and let them get away with killing us all, in Jesus name, Amen.
Is the almighty dollar really worth it to attract this audience and make money from advertising appealing to them? They’ve got the religious channels on cable and radio. Let them get their fake news and false narrative there, not on every freaking mainstream channel.
Either we stand with science and objectivity based on evidence or we all lose. It’s now that simple. Can you see it? Are you on board yet?
If so, share it with all your friends and let’s get busy changing this narrative.
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Editor’s Note: This is the third in a three part series on the death of the American Dream and the one last chance we have to save it.
Part I: Death of an Empire – Did Trump’s Reality Show Presidency Finally Kill the American Dream?
