From an early age Presidential elections were imprinted into my brain. Perhaps there was something in the way my parents read the newspaper every day, and watched the nightly news every single night. They treated the news as serious daily consumption, not as a sideshow, or for amusement. And the tension seemed to rise when the news turned to either the nightly body counts coming out of Vietnam, or news about elections. Try talking to the parents during the news when images of the jungle came onto the screen, as a general was interviewed in the overdub, or to ask a question as they were dissecting the big election and discussing polls, got you shushed big time. All focus was on the information beaming into our home.
I found it fascinating that my father, a man who never graduated high school, and my mother who never got as far as high school in her education, were voracious readers of the newspaper, and were just glued to the nightly news. If they took these things so serious then it must be important to scour the newspaper, and listen to the nightly news for myself.
In Baltimore in those days, though I only caught the tail end of the golden age of newspapers, we had two competing dailies, “The Sun”, and the “News American”, and my parents subscribed to them both. “The Sun” came in two versions, morning and night, and we got them both. For a welder and his stay-at-home wife to subscribe to three papers meant they must be a good investment. Money was mostly in short supply yet they didn’t scrimp on the news. Without saying it directly it told me that all of this was important, and that I should follow their lead and try to read the newspapers the same as they did. Cover-to-cover. They read the front page “above-the-fold” thoroughly, skimmed other articles inside. But they went through every page. Sometimes stopping to converse with each other, “Did you see what Goldwater said at that rally”, or “LBJ is going to keep us in Vietnam no matter what”. Information blurts said in either a tone of admiration, or disgust.
So in our little household in the suburbs news was king. You read two papers daily, you watched the nightly news. And of course you stayed up until eleven and watched the evening news, because you had to watch Carson’s opening monologue. If a real favorite was on, a Don Rickles, a Dean Martin, dad stayed up past the monologue, otherwise it was Carson’s monologue and then bed. Which meant that in addition to the two newspapers read daily there was both the six o’clock and eleven o’clock television news. Baltimore’s own Jerry Turner an absolute star in our house on ABC local, WJZ. I can recall about once a month dad pointing to the television and saying “he was offered big money to go to New York, but he loves Baltimore, so he stayed”.
Jerry Turner was beloved in our family, as were the men who broadcast the football and baseball games. Chuck Thompson did double duty, though best known for baseball announcing. He was a living legend in our home, and dad would smile from ear-to-ear every time Chuck uttered his catchphrase, “Ain’t the beer cold”, as someone on the hometown team did something good. I can hear Chuck Thompson’s voice even now all these years later, clear as a bell ringing in my head, his deep resonate clear and concise play-by-play coming through the transistor radio tiny speaker.
When Jerry Turner announced live and on air he’d contracted cancer, and was going to face the fight of his life, but would still be on nightly to bring us the news, everyone in the room watching him caught a tear in their eye. We’d never met the man, we didn’t know him, or anyone who knew his family. But he felt like family, beaming into our home every night, his friendly demeanor and relaxed manner bringing us the news in a way that we could comfortably digest. We teared up upon hearing that this strange was ill, the familiarity of television making a stranger feel like family.
Today I cringe whenever I hear that the leading sites where people find their news is “Facebook”, or “Instagram”. And I really get upset when I hear that people are relying on “Bloomberg” for news. Good God in the last election cycle Bloomberg himself admitted that “Trump” was such an existential threat to the nation that he ordered his news purveyor to slant all coverage against Trump, because he was such a threat to the county to cover him “fairly” would not be right.
Can you imagine relying on such a source for “news”?
I mean we all knew growing up that the news was biased from the left, sometimes slightly, sometimes severely, but we factored that into the viewing. But a bias so deep and far Left as to admit to all that you’d slant coverage against a major Presidential candidate as far as you possibly could, well, I just prayed that people could see through such bunk, and not rely on Bloomberg for any information. If they’d slant the news on Trump that hard Left what did that say about their coverage in general?
Mark Zuckerberg spent four hundred million rigging the election for the Democrats in Wisconsin an pretty much taking over the office of elections there. And yet the average person in America was getting their information from “Facebook” which he owns? Good God again, how biased a coverage can one expect if he’d spend four hundred million rigging the election in Wisconsin?
Right now Mark Zuckerberg could tell me to my face the sky was blue and I’d still look up to make sure he wasn’t lying. The same holds true for Michael Bloomberg. Their bias is too great, they have broken all means of “trust” in whatever they have to say about our politics, our elections, and even our “news”.
Make no mistake the decline of daily newspapers in America has indeed led our current problems with “misinformation”. The bias right now is as far Left as it has ever been in America. Two of the sites I read daily, the “New York Post”, and “Fox News” are easy reads, but it doesn’t take too much thinking to see both are so pro-Israel and condemn the Palestinians at every turn, so that in reading either publication you just need to skip over Middle East coverage. The bias is just too slanted in favor of Israel. It is like reading AIPAC daily. At least you get a more realistic coverage of crime, and illegal immigration than you would from the “New York Times”, or especially the Left wing “Daily News”. Holy Hell the “Daily News” is communist for Christ’s sake. No sane being would read the crap they produce.
I worry for a nation that is left to consume their “news” from a “Facebook”. “Facebook” is a site where you see that your friend from college is in Europe this week, or that your cousin’s daughter is in Florida on spring break. And you follow up and view her “Instagram” postings to see how big a wild child she is because every post she is drinking from a red solo cup and almost naked in a sea of rowdy characters.
That isn’t the place to get “news”.
I don’t even have a “Facebook” though I’d like to promote this column there if I could. I just refuse to get involved with a site that promotes a false reality. Your cousin eating that steak, and drinking wine in that fancy restaurant isn’t living the “good life”, she missed the car payment last month and has days where she wished her husband was dead. No need to get all jealous because you are at home eating two dollar spaghetti as she appears to have the “good life” downing a steak at The Capitol Grill. “Facebook” to me is all one big lie, I cannot imagine relying on it for actual news.
Perhaps today we are all seeking a confirmation bias. It is possible that we have segregated to the poles. The Left going toward MSNBC, and CNN, and the Right going to Fox News, and the information we all consume a bias that soothes. That confirms our own pre-held beliefs.
I try to seek out “truth” where I feel truth is being served.
I enjoy Tucker since he left Fox. But the people I really rely on for unvarnished, unfiltered “truth” are Jimmy Dore, Matt Taibbi, Glen Greenwald, Walter Kirk, Sasha Stone, Joe Rogan and a handful of others. I don’t always agree with them, but I know I am going to get the least amount of bias in their coverage from any source out there.
As an example, I disagree vehemently with Jimmy Dore and his stance on universal healthcare. But that doesn’t mean when he isn’t trying to spend our tax money on healthcare as recklessly as we are Ukraine I don’t find some truth in his coverage of other subjects.
I especially love to listen to reformed Left Wingers, their “red-pilling” is often accompanied by some level of shock and disbelief in how they’ve come to discover the truth that is refreshing.
Listen, back around 1968 when Jerry Turner stopped giving the color in the description of all suspects in crime on the nightly news we instinctively knew that in Baltimore City that could only mean the perpetrator was black, otherwise they would have mentioned they were seeking a white guy, and we knew why they failed to include that information. First they were trying to lure black viewers who didn’t want to hear about black crime every five minutes on the news, that stuff hit home, somewhere in the extended family they had a misunderstood relative that had gone afoul of the law. The statistics on that were off-the-charts. And second, the left leaning WJZ didn’t want to infer that crime in Baltimore was a black problem, they wanted a racial reconciliation, not a natural fear of black people from white suburbans entering the city. We knew what the bias was, we kept watching anyway, just with a jaundiced eye. If they won’t announce they are looking for a black man six foot one and two hundred pounds, but just a man six foot one two hundred pounds, what other information are they leaving out?
But today the bias is so great, and we are actually living in a world where the perpetrator is out on the street before the paperwork on his crime is done, that not only is there no discussion about the race of the perpetrator, they hide the crimes committed completely. News as if it never happened at all.
I fear for a world where the news is consumed on a platform like “Facebook”.
That my friends is an “unserious” nation.
I cringe when I tune into the “New York Post” and just below the very serious coverage of political events, coverage of the upcoming Presidential election, coverage of the unrest on college campuses, right below were are treated to article after article about the Real Housewives, or the Kardashians, or some other piffle as if it is news.
It degrades the message above the fold. It says look, we cover the Kar-trashians with the same seriousness as the next election.. And that is seriously fucked up.
The source of news today is so far from where it was in 1964 as I sat on the carpet in the living room of the family home that there is no comparison between the two. And I don’t believe that bodes well for us as a nation.
I knew as a very young child that “news” was important, gathering to oneself all the news one could was an important task, a civic duty. To be well-informed paramount.
With the level of propaganda in the mainstream press today, the extreme level of bias, the news is completely dead. Journalism is completely dead.
Absent a very real and unbiased place to find news as truth, we as a society are doomed. If all the information being fed to us has an extreme bias, we are doomed.
It took forty years more than promised, but “1984” is here, at least where information distribution is concerned.
Our own lived reality, and the reality the “news” delivers to us daily, have no connection anymore at all.
Whenever I hear someone on TV say “my lived truth” I cringe. Because I know a slew of lies is about to follow.
We better get back to some semblance of real news being beamed into our homes, either via newspapers online, or through the media at large.
Or all hope is lost.