Is it just me? Or is it the media? Things have gone so wonky in America lately that it seems like some evil force has gotten the best of our best selves. Or maybe I just watch too much cable news.
On Rachel Maddow’s show the other night she described an America so off the rails that we were at a point of no return. She made a pretty good case for the fact that we, America, through the media mostly, have been warning ourselves of pending doom from the inside out for years now, decades even. We talk about government corruption and incompetence, neglect. Crime in the streets. Ice caps melting, asteroids heading our way. We project. We frighten ourselves ...we should be frightened. But we elect someone like Donald Trump as president, then we go to a ‘commercial break’ and reboot, and we’re ready for more. Bring it on. Our media tolerance has become so strong that reality has become nothing less than the absurdity of the next mini-series or your next nightmare.
It’s true that many of America’s institutions are corroded. It’s true that the news media is ratings-driven. It’s true that the networks are bias. And it’s true that some media ‘stars’ are brighter than others. Some of these news hosts and hostesses, ‘news greeters’ I call them, “journalists” as they like to call themselves, look more like deer in the klieg lights when it comes to presenting a story, understanding an in-depth issue, or raising a correct awareness.
Katy Tur is another cable news hostess who for some reason tried to make an incorrect and biased ‘nightmare’ case against democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg. She equated him to Donald Trump regarding vetting and background scrutiny. She was so off the rails in her criticism of Bloomberg that I questioned her motives and honesty, and her competence as a “journalist”. In a recent segment of her cable news show she focused on Bloomberg’s “stop and frisk” policy when he was mayor of New York from 2002 to 2013. Regardless of the logic of that policy at that particular time in NYC, and regardless of the inconvenience to the people who were stopped and frisked, and regardless of the effect of the policy both negative and positive, and even regardless of the fact that it was declared unconstitutional, the basic idea was, for better or worse, to remove guns and crime from the streets. Bloomberg has recognized the fact that this was a faulty policy, that it was racist, and he has accepted the responsibility and even apologized for it. Call it unconstitutional, call it tough love, racist, call it whatever you want. It’s over. Tur turned it into a deal-breaker for Bloomberg’s presidential run putting him on the ropes.
Bloomberg’s record speaks for itself. He’s a stand-up guy by any account. Donald Trump, on the other hand is a lecherous malcontent, self-absorbed narcissist, yes, a racist, and who has stated publicly that he is such a big media star and so rich and famous that he can just walk up to women an “grab them by the p**sy” ...and he’s been saying and doing things just as wrong and outrageous all his life. Yet America elected him president ...and media hostess Katy Tur wants to look at Michael Bloomberg under a microscope and focus on an unpopular policy issue that has run its course.
Compared to 'The Donald' Goldfinger Trump, Michael Bloomberg is ...007 James Bond.
Sometimes the media tries to be so fair and so politically correct, or is so biased, that it walks us backward from logic, common sense, and safety. Sometimes they ‘get it‘ sometimes they don’t. Truth should not be random. Then there’s Fox News.
So, off the rails, out of touch, wonky America gone mad ...is this the beginning of the end? Is there any way back? ...to civility, to a kinder more gentle society ...or will this all get biblical? ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3ZOKDmorj0
America is starting to look more like George Bailey’s never-been-born fictional and demonic Pottersville world in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. Or, more closer to home, like Biff Tannen’s Pleasure Palace Casino & Hotel in ‘Back to the Future’.
The photo above says it all regarding the media. It’s from Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1971 dystopian crime film ‘A Clockwork Orange‘ based on the Anthony Burgess novel of the same name. The film uses disturbing, violent images to comment on social, political and economic issues in a futuristic society. According to Rachel Maddow, that futuristic society is here and now. She posed the question: ‘Now that we have identified and talked the problem to death ...what do we actually do about it?’
Projecting way ahead, perhaps in a galaxy far, far away in another time and dimension, where time is relative to a whole different set of rules, a new mini-series or documentary will be made called ‘Nightmerica’. Futuristic people from afar will see this film in real time and wonder how something like that could ever happen ...what was wrong with them?! ...and what they actually did about it.
John Kushma is a communication consultant and lives in Logan, Utah
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-george-kushma-379a5762
Some past articles and op-eds
https://muckrack.com/john-kushma/articles
