I’ve been reading David McCullough’s American Spirit, a collection of speeches he’s given over the years. And it has me thinking.
We’re on the 115th Congress of these United States. The 45th President. A Nation that has been trucking along for 242 years, and doesn’t show any real sign of slowing down. Yet, all we talk about in the court of public opinion is how bad one side is doing compared to the other, or how bad both sides are doing.
Look, no one has the answer. If they try to sell you goods saying that it’s the only way, don’t believe them. There is no only way. But the level of discourse in this Country has spun sickeningly out of control.
So, what to do about it? I could cite a hundred news stories this week alone that are divisive, inflammatory and (sometimes) downright wrong. I’m being conservative estimating only a hundred.
I trust newspapers more than I do television, and I trust television more than I do the internet. It’s a matter of timing. If it takes longer to get a story to the public, it seems sensible enough that it will have had more fact checking involved.
When it comes to news, we should demand more fact checking.
But it’s cheaper to have the talking heads rehashing events, asking questions to avoid defaming someone, rather than reporting the news.
In Dan Brown’s Origin, protagonist Robert Langdon muses, and I paraphrase, “I remember when breaking news was printed in the newspaper delivered the next morning.”
News isn’t sensationalism. Yet that’s what the internet and even television provide. Sensationalist stories to grab viewer’s attention and entice advertisers with the eyeballs those stories can provide. So we get more President Trump, more heated rhetoric, and more of the things that I bet comedian George Carlin would find hysterically funny, were he still alive. (I think of the 7 Dirty Words all the time when watching the news.)
We’re getting less news. Less research, and less objective analysis. And we’re suffering as a Country because of it.
Michael's Musings 