The news isn't getting much better. Except that Trump seems like he doesn't really understand what being POTUS actually entails. And that he seems obsessed with making sure he can do as much of it as possible from Trump Tower in NYC. People in rural communities: you just voted for a jackass who would literally rather spend his time in that bastion of "the wicked city," than doing his job properly.
But I'm going to talk about something different. There's been a lot of bandying about the culpability of the media, and it's failure to properly educate the American public about just what kind of person they would be voting for. People also blame the way news is delivered on the Internet so that it creates an echo-chamber where we only see opinions we agree with.
Kyla showed me this: Edward R. Murrow warning of the dangers of radio and television news as a commercial and entertainment vector rather than an informative one. Some 20 years later, a film called Network would make a similar argument through cynical fiction. People forgot about it thanks to the Truman Show, but in high school I watched a film called EdTV, predicting how the constant surveillance of a reality show could ruin an ordinary person's life. And reality TV is the reason the POTUS elect was a household name.
I got to be on TV once. So far, all I've managed to find on the internet is a reference to the segment in this book. So, I'll tell you the full story from my perspective.
I have depression, and I sought it counseling for it at various times through out my life. I first sought it in high school, and my psychologist at the time called me one evening to let me know that ABC's News Magazine program 20/20 was doing a report on kids with mental illness and/or a history of bullying were able to overcome their problems. He wanted my permission to refer them to me as a possible subject because I was one of his most normal patients.
So a producer contacted me and met me for a series of interviews over the next several months. It eventually emerged that I was just going to be one subject for this segment; I was going to be the star. I'll admit it, my teenage-soaked brain was overwhelmed, and I felt pretty good.
That fall, they took some footage of me playing video games at home, walking in my school's hallway, and even acting in the school's fall play that year. Then, one night, after our dress rehearsal, I got to be interviewed by Chris Wallace. I'll admit, he was a charming enough man in person. Mostly, I remember eating mediocre room service and falling asleep on the couch in the hotel suite the producer had rented.
Everything wrapped and the producer let us know to wait a while. It ended up airing February 9, 2000. It was entitled Boy on the Brink. About an hour or two of interview time with me, a similar amount of time with my dad, the vice principal of my school, and some random kid that lived down the street from me was edited down to the worst and least flattering picture 20 minutes could paint. In short, it made it look like I was going to be the next Columbine shooter and that our school was just crawling with them.
There was a small, mostly local, outcry that lasted a few weeks afterward. It died down. No permanent damage was done to my reputation, my dad's, that kids, or that schools. So that's why we never sued for slander.
Why is this a big deal? There was a Simpsons episode that aired in 1994 that showed the same thing being done to Homer and played for laughs. People barely remember the outcry from Bill O'Reilly and other reporters lying about wartime correspondence. I guarantee by next week, people will forget how one meme made a brilliant, hilarious news commentator look like a jackass and a tragically stupid person look tragically stupid in the wrong way. Hell, I probably have to remind some of you that are old hats at internet about that time a writer for a website outed Stephen Glass.
It's the Broken Window Effect, but for journalism. We accept the little lies and half-truths and they snowball into bigger lies and half-truths. Even the truly colossal ones we'll rant about for 15 minutes, then everything goes back to business as usual.
No wonder conservatives have been so eager to believe absolute bullshit for decades. They see the small mistakes and the slaps on the wrist and nothing being done, so they assume the worst. Gee, kind of like police forces circling their wagons around their worst officers and how that angries up the blood of liberals, who sometimes also believe stupid things.
We have some hope. The Internet is finally taking some responsibility as a news source, in ways that even TV seems to have ignored. Google, Reddit, and Facebook are cracking down on abusive users and fake news.
Also, since I always like to remind those rural poor how truly conned you were, I've been keeping an eye on this Carrier Factory nonsense.
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