So, if you would, I'd like you to take a little trip with me. I want to show you something. I want to show you that what you see, and what you understand to be true, many times is just not true. I'd also like to show you how the world got this way.
Now for the fun part:
I have a few friends who hate President Donald Trump.
I mean they hate everything about him. His look, his personality, his tone, his manner of speaking, his family, his red ties, his orange hair, and especially his politics. To be more precise, I should say the politics they think he believes and follows.
They will tell you, without a doubt in their mind, that he is a racist, a homophobe, a Russian operative, a denier of science, a conspiracy theorist, a white supremacist, and every other bad thing you could name.
They have heard Trump say all these terrible things, they've seen the videos! They've watched all the news anchors and pundits list all these bad things he has done. Outrageous things, that prove he's all those terrible, awful stories, rolled into a tangerine colored piñata to beat on.
I usually chuckle at my friends. Why? Do I think Donald J Trump is a great man, and a true patriot bent on saving America from its enemies? No, not really.
I didn't vote for the guy in 16', and I have been aware of his shortcomings long before he became president.
I can give you chapter and verse on where I disagree with President Trump. Spending is the main one for me. He spoke a big game, but delivered higher spending each and every year.
His style? Let's just say that populism is not what I'm looking for in a president, I want leadership.
Now, I do like his leadership on some issues. His leadership on breaking our crippling dependance on communist China for instance. Making peace deals between Arab nations and Israel has been great. I could go on, but let's just say that he has done some things very well, and failed at many others.
So, why is it I can see the good he's done, and also see where his populist, speaking off-the-teleprompter, outrageous Queens personality makes him seem like a giant A-hole? I think I know.
Maybe it's because I've been a democrat, and a republican. I'm now just a quasi libertarian, who wishes everyone would just calm down, let other people have their own opinions, and even be wrong, without becoming A-holes themselves.
Some of this has come with age, and learning I was wrong about a lot of things when I was a younger man. Most folks don't want to investigate if, let alone why, they are wrong. I do.
I want to know where I'm wrong. I want to fix my understanding of that issue, so I don't get it quite so wrong next time.
Now, you may say, but I'm not wrong! I watch CNN and they say the same things I believe. Or, I watch Fox News, and they say the same things I believe. How can this be?
I would say I understand the world around me today better, because I understand the news media better than most.
The news, or at least what calls itself the news these days, is not what I grew up with in the 70's, 80's and into the 90's.
The 'news' was driven by two forces back then; Newspapers, and the 5:00 nightly network newscasts. If it wasn't on those two media outlets, it did not exist as news.
Newspapers, for you younger folks, were giant sheets of printed paper, folded up neatly and delivered to your door every morning. You could also buy them for a quarter in metal boxes on the street.
Newspapers had the big world news stories, (a Volcano blew up someplace you never heard of) National news, (what law was passed out of the House and is now headed for the Senate) State and Local news, (what your local Mayor and City Council were fighting over) followed by Sports, Arts, Editorials, and the big Cash Cow: Classified Ads.
That's right, before the interwebs, Craigslist, and smart phones, if you wanted to sell your car, your guitar, your poodle puppies, or your house, you took out an ad in the newspaper. Or if you had a job you needed filled, you posted a Help Wanted ad. Business specials and coupons were huge money makers as well.
All those ads were spendy too. The Sacramento Bee Sunday Edition was almost and two inches thick, folded. Half that bulk were all the Classified ads and business flyers. It would take you an hour to read through them.
Classified Ads are where the newspapers made their money. Sure, some folks subscribed just for the news, but most people wanted both; news and ads.
If you don't understand why most newspapers are bankrupt, online only, or extremely thinned out, you're not paying attention. Competition, plain and simple.
What about the Network Evening News? The internet and smartphones strike again.
The same thing happened to those guys too, but something else changed the networks.
The news departments at CBS, ABC, and NBC didn't make money for the networks.
They had a huge number of reporters, staff, crews, remote gear, satellite uplink costs, studios, and they paid their news anchors big money to read the news to you.
Back before CNN, FOX, MSNBC and all the digital news, the Big 3 networks had 43% of American viewers watching the evening news every single night. By 2005, it was down under 20%. It's much lower today.
What kept these news division afloat? It was the TV network shows. When NBC had the Bill Cosby show going, 16 million households watched it every week. They were making tens of millions, back when tens of millions was a lot of money.
Now, the big 3 TV networks, along with cable channels are being drowned by digital aps, and streaming media. Again, competition changes everything.
This is what I want you to understand. The 'News Media' does not operate under the same financial model it once did. Advertising dollars are much harder to come by. In today's digital age, you need 'Clicks' to make money. Subscriptions too, but even that is going away. People are hacking paywalls, or they just grab what they can off the headlines and don't read the full story.
It's all about the clicks baby. The 'news' sites need them badly. Clicks are what drives their revenue.
So, how do you get these clicks? Well, back before Google's and Facebook's algorithms sent stories to your newsfeed, perfectly tailored to what you already think is true, you used to have to click on three or four different stories to see who was saying what. You had these things called ' Bookmarks' that were links to the pages you clicked to get to the websites you wanted. It was kind of fun.
Over the years, you could see whose side the reporters, or news sites, were on politically, as you looked at their stories, and how they covered them. Also, by what they didn't cover.
They would leave out certain information that made their side look bad, and slam the other side with anything they could. If they didn't have anything solid, they would throw wild speculation at the other side.
As David Burge once wrote oh so well:
Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.
One thing that made me really change my idea of the media, was understanding how 'journalists' reported their stories.
A college media teacher once asked me to think of something I knew a lot about. Some industry or story where I knew the facts about it. Then he would have me find, and read, a news story about that industry.
He wanted me to compare my knowledge to what was written in the story. The news story was always wrong on several big points. He asked this question; "Why do you you think they are any smarter about any other story they write?"
He closed with, "They just write crap well, and as long as it follows the AP Stylebook, they will always have a job."
There's a lot of truth in that.
So, let's get back to you Trump Lovers, and Trump Haters.
Let's roll back the clock to last year. To 2020, when according to the news media, Donald J Trump did nothing correctly. As they reported, Trump was an unmitigated disaster.
So, now that we have a lot more actual information, real information, who was wrong on the big stories, Trump or the media?
Let's start off with the biggest one, shall we?
Where the COVID-19 virus came from? Was it natural, did it evolve into humans from bats? Or was the single biggest killer of humans we have seen in my lifetime caused by people? People in a certain country, and did they try to cover up that fact?
The first reports out of China, told by the Chinese communist government, was this virus came out of a 'wet market' in Wuhan China. They even let a few minutes of video come out showing how nasty that market is with dead animals, and animals in cages slaughtered right on the spot with no refrigeration, no hygiene, it was pretty gross.
Okay, I thought, viruses do hop species, very rarely, and not very effectively, but maybe that's what happened.
The World Health Organization, an organization with about as much credibility as the International Olympic Committee who picks which city will host the next olympic games based on how many bribes they receive, said that the virus came from the wet market.
It could not have come from the only Level 4 Bio-Safety Lab in China. The one right down the road from that 'wet market' in Wuhan...
The media went with that story. China didn't let this virus loose. China is our friend. They make all our cool iPhones and TV and laptops. Besides, Trump is always fighting with them, and we hate Trump, so...
Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark), to his credit, was first to see the danger of this virus hitting the US.
No one else was interested, or at least they were preoccupied. He could only get 14 senators to show up to a hearing about it in January 2020. Most senators were busy with impeaching President Trump.
Remember that whole made-up Russiagate nothingburger nonsense?
Cotton spent three hours talking with President Trump about this virus threat while the impeachment hearings were going on. Trump decided to close air travel from China shortly after that. Holy Cow, what a racist thing to do, according the democrats and the media.
President Trump said pretty early on, in April of 2020 that he had seen information that stated that the virus may have come out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Oh boy, the press went wild again.
The White House has shown no credible proof to back up claims that the coronavirus was either manufactured at or accidentally leaked from the lab, and neither have any other sources. But Trump continues to fuel the blame, often through racist rhetoric, by regularly referring to the pathogen as the "China virus," the "Wuhan virus" or "kung flu." NBC News said.
The media attacks went on and on, for over a year.
Anyone, from an actual scientist like Bret Weinstein, an Evolutionary Biologist who studied virus in bats, to ordinary politicians, to a tug boat captain, who dared say that the virus may have escaped from the Wuhan lab was passing on 'conspiracy theory' rhetoric. The media was 100% sure.
If you posted a Facebook story about the lab-leak theory, Facebook banned it. Flat out banned it and you as well.
So, was the Lab-Leak theory a conspiracy theory? No. It's almost certainly how the virus got out into the world. We will never be able to absolutely prove it. The Chinese have destroyed the evidence, and even 'disappeared' some of the early doctors who reported the virus.
Now, even the 'media' outlets are having to change their stories and say that Lab-Leak most likely happened. Whoops.
So one of the biggest stories of my lifetime, certainly the biggest story in 50 years, one that was front page news for months and months last year, was false.
If you said the media was wrong about it, you were ridiculed. That is saying something. Not only did they get their story wrong, but they were so busy being 'right' that they crushed and mocked any information to the contrary.
That should not only give you pause, that should scare the hell out of you. It should also make you angry.
Today, the media, almost silently, changed their minds abut the lab-leak theory. Seemingly overnight. They just could not find anyone to refute the evidence that the virus had been engineered through gain-of-function research.
Did we get an apology from CNN or the New York Times, or the Washington Post? It's the least they could have done.
"Sorry, we really screwed up a very important story about the origin of this virus. We also called many of our fellow Americans, and the President of the United States, conspiracy theorists. Our bad." That would have been something...
Now, take that volume of mistakes, that amount misreporting, that level of vitriol and hatred for the president, and half of the country, and then take a look at most other large news stories from the past year.
Remember my old college teacher's example of a story you know a lot about. Are you starting to see something?
The not so funny part of this is when the media decided to do this. During an actual pandemic.
So remember when CNN, MSNBC, and all the network newscasts had New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on in the early part of the pandemic? Remember how they were praising him for his 'leadership' in this crisis? Especially compared to the Tangerine Tornado, with all his stupid theories, cooky remedies, and drinking bleach, right?
Yeah, how's that looking now?
Governor Cuomo's decision to move Covid-19 positive patients from the hospitals, into nursing homes, where the most vulnerable population of people lived, was monumentally stupid. It costs thousands of lives.
Literally, that decision killed thousands of American citizens. Yet, he was celebrated by our media, and even wrote a book on his 'leadership' in the pandemic.
That story, about that decision, and the fact that his administration tried to hide the numbers of deaths in nursing homes, is something that did not get a lot of attention. Well, aside from Fox news and some honest journalists.
I don't want to let the Fox crowd off the hook either. That same, my side/their side, hatred works both ways. If Trump said something, for some of you out there, it was one hundred percent true.
Even if someone showed you actual evidence that he was wrong, you would never admit he was wrong. If he was wrong, you are wrong, and you can't be wrong, you listen to Sean Hannity!
What is going to be crazy is in the next year, we are going to start seeing some honest journalism come out. It will be swept under the rug to the Trump haters.
Yeah, well, at least Trump lost, and that's all that matters! Okay....
For some of us, we're just trying to find what is true, what is spin, and what is just plain stupidity. We will have lots to talk about.
Wait for the evidence to come out about how we could have saved tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of American lives by using a few preventative treatments before, and in the beginning, of the vaccination process. Once President Biden's team got in office, it was all vaccinations, and only vaccinations, that would be talked about in the media. That was the only way to stop Covid-19, according to President Biden and the media.
Was that true? Was there a much easier, and much, much cheaper way, to hold off Covid, for those waiting for the vaccine, or for those who had reservations about the vaccine? Something that has been used for decades all over the world. A medicine that is safe, generic and cheap?
You are going to hear about medicines like Ivermectin, that can keep you from getting Covid-19, and if you become positive, have a pretty good treatment record if taken early.
You are going to hear how lockdowns, mask mandates, and stay at home orders, did much more harm than good. You will hear the closing of in-person schooling, and the economic impact that had on single parents, along with the kids will be with us for a generation.
You will hear about the jump in teen suicide and other huge mental health epidemics. Along with the huge jump in drug overdose deaths during the pandemic.
Folk, I'm just talking about the pandemic. Don't get me started on race, crime and climate. (hint, the very same thing is happening there too...)
This media-politics cluster at the heart of our news and social media is not interested in facts, or truth, or honestly. They need clicks, and they need to report that sensationalism, fear, and panic, to drive people to those clicks.
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