I spend a lot of time reading and listening to commentators whose views I disagree with: print, online, AM radio and TV. It’s an old habit that grew to fruition writing about churches for decades. Many
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if not most
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preached a faith that damned me for stiff-necked faithfulness to my even more ancient traditions.That’s history. Here’s my problem today: Liberal commentators in diverse news media with whom I generally agree tend to suffer SSDD (Same Stuff, Different Day). However valid and persistent their hopes and complaints are, it’s SSDD. Conservatives, however, are endlessly creative when it comes to their abilities to stoke anger and fear.None is more fascinating than the common right-wing theme that the mainstream news media are linked in a conspiracy to hide the truth about targets de jour.“They’ll never tell you this” is a common mantra. Their genius is the ability to espouse this absurdity while relying on mainstream news media for stories they alone can reveal to credulous audiences. After all, there is little original reporting by these commentators; almost unfailingly, they echo what they’ve read or heard or seen from fellow travelers or in the mainstream news media. Crazier yet, rightwing hucksters have millions of listeners, viewers and readers who hold the same deeply felt contradiction. They remind me of the image of a snake curled in a circle, swallowing its tail; I almost typed “tale.” This attack on supposedly conspiratorial mainstream news media isn’t new, but it gained credibility with persistent doubts about Obama’s birthplace.Consistent with their belief in a pervasive news media conspiracy, adherents reject what mainstream news media report as facts. As a result, Americans lack a common set of facts from which we can argue. This malfunction has a name: cocooning. People insulate themselves from troubling news media and information by relying on sources that agree with and reassure them.Myriad issues are caught in this disconnect. They range from the “war on Christmas,” abortion and imagined “gay agenda” to childhood vaccinations, fantasy Democratic lies about climate warming and the Left’s alleged desire to confiscate everyone’s firearms.Then there is our nativist fear of non-Protestant immigrants — as American as apple pie — and fear of terrorists. That latter anxiety puzzles me. With more than 30,000 firearm and traffic deaths a year and who knows how many deaths from obesity-related conditions and medical errors, being unnerved by a few score killings abroad is like a lion being frightened by a mouse.I won’t even try to explain that victims of radical Islamist terrorists are other Muslims and most of the “boots on the ground” fighting them are Muslim. Hopeless.For too many Americans, nothing can shake their faith in the Republican/conservative denigration of the information that the mainstream news media present daily on these and myriad other problems and issues. For them, only the retelling by like-minded commentators or news sources is trustworthy. Reliable, nonpartisan polls tell us that the conspiracy delusion is most powerful today among aging white men and women of modest means and education who say they are Republicans or that they will vote for a sufficiently radical GOP presidential candidate.What puzzles me is the surprise voiced by mainstream commentators — think
The New York Times , NPR and other East Coast news media establishment figures — at these voters’ frustrations. If these journalists are involved in a conspiracy, it’s to avoid bursting the Beltline bubble in which so many mainstream commentators operate.They were stunned by the explosion of the Tea Party. Now, they’re grudgingly coming to terms with the millions who like Donald Trump and whatever real or imagined wrong he’s articulating at the moment. There are a lot of angry, frustrated, hurting, distrustful Americans who can’t accept gay marriage, evolution, black student militance, loss of well-paid semi-skilled industrial work, troubled public schools, criticism of police use of force and a failure to win a war since 1945.Obviously, Trump and Cruz aren’t the first to articulate what the mainstream news media find troubling. George Wallace and Ross Perot articulated discontent over economic and/or social problems faced by millions of Americans. Similarly, too many mainstream commentators don’t remember or know how others mobilized like-minded fearful Americans into “militias” dedicated to resisting federal power, UN occupying forces or everyone else after whatever imminent apocalypse they imagined. I knew and wrote about some of these folks in southwest Ohio. Laughable to some, they were deadly serious about their food caches and weapons. They saw themselves as the saving remnant of an America that abandoned them and values they found in the nation’s origins. Writing them off — whether the Brown County Militia or more distant militias in Michigan or Idaho — is as arrogant and ignorant.A sense of powerlessness and humiliation can evolve into something deadlier; it happens in our inner cities and abroad. We write about those toxic influences but fail to integrate that alienation into much of our reporting and mainstream news commentary.That leaves it to the GOP, Fox News and like-minded commentators to explain how only they are telling their readers, viewers and listeners the truth and the rest of us in the news media are the enemy.
This article appears in Dec 16-22, 2015.