It’s Never Going to Happen, But…

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

During the Viet Nam war, David Halberstam and Sam Donaldson were on the ground. They were taking sitreps and sending them back to the AP Wire or to whichever newspaper for which they worked.

There was a publication time, and if you missed it, either your story was scrapped or it went in a different issue. If I could un-invent something, it’s the 24-hour news cycle. It is a breakneck pace, and it is unsustainable; our population has proven to be uneducated, in larger measure than we thought possible before 2016, and then it got worse. Few people trusted government advice on what to do about COVID.

Without a publication time and leaving things for the next day, you get sound bites. By instituting a hard out, you give a reporter more time to actually understand a story, and it’s something that the US has gotten away from over so many years; I believe scrapping The Fairness Doctrine was our first mistake. I got this from The Reagan Library web site:

The Fairness Doctrine, enforced by the Federal Communications Council, was rooted in the media world of 1949. Lawmakers became concerned that the monopoly audience control of the three main networks, NBC, ABC and CBS, could misuse their broadcast licenses to set a biased public agenda.

So, if you think about the fact that now Trump has beat out DeSantis and Haley in Iowa despite high crimes and misdemeanors (and shitty business deals, and tax evasion, not to mention racist as FUCK), I think we can point to the dismantling of this law as patient zero.

It’s certainly a disease. We cannot solve this by being quick. We have to solve it by being thorough….. which is something a 24 hour news cycle doesn’t allow you to do. Networks would rather repeat the same four minutes eighty times than give reporters time to research before they’re on the air. You want someone who can orate like Edward R. Murrow (“Good Night and Good Luck” is in my Top 10 List), but now there’s no time for it.

You get the news as quickly as it gets to the wire, and if you have the AP Wire app installed on your phone, I feel your pain…… I put my phone on “Do Not Disturb” in large part because of this…… and yet, I don’t want to not read the wire every day, either.

I’m a conundrum.

There’s no one like Will McAvoy that has the latitude to do in-depth pieces that explore both sides of the issue, except when you’re on a biased cable channel. Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes are the people I turn to the most often, because they lay out history and the present just like I do, acknowledging patterns. They will also actually tell you when Democrats have been wrong, and don’t have the infallibility complex of a Republican. If you can’t look at what you need to do differently, you won’t. With a Republican, it doesn’t matter what the facts are. They’re going to be louder than you, and in their minds, that counts as power.

If Fox News was what it said it was, a news channel, they would have anchors that are capable of admitting that Trump is a disaster, because many, many, many books have already been written about how the party internally combusted because they had absolutely no idea what to do with Trump and wondered why they ever thought he could be president in the first place…… the thing the Democrats asked themselves, constantly.

The right has gotten too far right, but I don’t mind people like Mitt Romney, Will Hurd, Mary Cheney (I can’t wait to see what she does next.), etc. I start to have a problem with their “family values.” If we could leave it to talking about money without making it dependent on my rights as a woman or a queer, that would be great.

There are no sound bites here, but I wish more people would dig deep and find out the truth from reputable sources. It is a cult-like status to believe everything Trump says despite all facts to the contrary, because to those people facts aren’t real. They are the same as opinions, because when we said, “that’s just, like, your opinion, man…” they came up with the phrase “alternative facts.”

We are falling deeper and deeper into a sinkhole because the longer we look unstable to the rest of the world, the more we lose any favors we’ve acquired. We’ve done a lot of favors for other countries, but it’s very hard getting those countries to pay you back when they’re broke.

We do not want this man representing our interests overseas. I don’t believe he thinks Greenland is the only country up for sale. He’s a billionaire. If he throws money around, he gets what he wants. This makes him volatile, narcissistic, and unreliable (because he might go into a meltdown if he feels disrespected). That may be the choice for the majority of the American people again, but it is not the wish of any world leader at all, except for the ones we don’t like.

Remember The Cold War?

Do you really think that every president from Kennedy to George H.W. Bush would love seeing all their hard work undone? And what about CIA? H.W. Bush was Director of CIA before he was president. I would give an arm and a leg to know what he thought of Trump telling CIA employees that he trusted Russian intelligence more than them in front of the wall with all the stars commemorating lives lost. He didn’t die that long ago, so I know he was furious even if I didn’t get to see it.

We are going to elect a puppet and run our country into the ground. Trump has the potential to change the new world order by slipping money to Russia instead of Ukraine. Trump also likes to cozy up to China and North Korea, which in my estimation, is a bad thing.

Opinion pieces like mine come out on the web A LOT, because even if they’re writing for The Washington Post, they’re not stating anything but what they believe. But by stopping the 24 hour news cycle, we could have researchers and fact checkers on basic television again….. someone who could speak from an intelligent perspective on local and global issues. Give reporters more time….. not because they need it. We do.

This is too complicated for a one minute story. Hopefully, if anything does change, it will be to get someone like Will McAvoy on ABC, CBS, and NBC.

The problem right now is that half the country wouldn’t trust that archetype anymore, because The Fairness Doctrine has been gone so long……. and it has deteriorated our attention span for thorough understanding. We need to get in-depth issues on television, because few people have access to a top tier news source (not because they can’t, most of the time). Never let it escape your attention that really conservative “news outlets” don’t have a paywall, and both the New York Times and The Washington Post do.

If you would like to read the newspaper every day, you can do it for absolutely free. My public library gives me access. For people that have the means, most of the time it’s that paywalls are annoying and you can probably find something similar for free.

Sure you can. The Post and The Times have the best stable of journalists in the entire world, but YouTube is easier, right?

I also think that few people like to read as much as I do, so that’s another reason why YouTube clips are so popular and yet don’t actually get the point across because there’s no nuance. People are swallowing what Trump’s America looks like left and right, without even asking themselves if they like the food. If we do this again, we’re going to find out just how much we lack; Putin and Trump have designed an American Trojan Horse. Russia interfered with our election because they were invited.….. and everyone else stood around and said, “maybe if we built a big wooden badger?” There are too many of us standing around. If we all banded together, we’d be able to say this as well:

Will: America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.

Mackenzie: (holding up a sign in marker) But it could be.