Christmas is over, but I’m still watching sappy Christmas movies, especially those Hallmark Christmas love story type movies. And if that isn’t enough good cheer, I’m still reading Christmas historical romance novels too. Last night’s movie had a newspaper reporter as one of the main characters and in the storyline the reporter’s editor lectured the reporter about fact-checking and sidelined him to fact-checking other people’s stories, after the reporter wrote a story where he presented the “facts” out of context. There I was watching a sappy romantic Christmas story thinking about our American news situation again.
Two weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the rash of drone sightings and that story seems to have disappeared from the national news headlines for now and all the politicians, pundits and journalists, who were ramping up the alarm about drones over NJ, just moved on. This media behavior of hype, then just moving on without any actual explanation is typical and most Americans just go along with the constant media dramas and dutifully get worked up about whatever the media hypes next. I often wonder how many of these sensational media stories are hyped just to get viewers engaged and keep them watching.
In April of 2024, there was a total eclipse of the sun, which was visible across a wide swath of North America. I flipped between CNN and FOX News that day and the coverage was so over-the-top hyping this eclipse as some monumental, life-altering event, replete with reporters staged around the country, talking to experts and “man on the street” interviews to report on how people were feeling and how this eclipse was changing their lives. The coverage was absurdly dramatic for an eclipse of the sun. Sure, it was an interesting event, but it was far from life altering or some sort of spiritual event, which is how it was being hyped by the media.
Since this is the last day of the year, I think manmade events were more monumental than the total eclipse of the sun or the drones over NJ in 2024 – especially the 2024 presidential election in America. Donald J. Trump not only won the US presidential race, he won the spin information war against Democrats and liberal media. Democrats and liberal media lost their spin war and Trump won. How the American news industry reworks itself matters a great deal for all of us.
It’s not only events like the drone hysteria or overdramatizing an eclipse where the media – across the spectrum fails at getting the basics right – presenting the facts and putting those facts into context.
Liberal media invested so much effort in being Democrat #Resist warriors that Trump winning the 2024 election has left them in complete disarray. The liberal media spent decades promoting Democrat and liberal talking points and narratives, long before Trump entered politics. During the Obama years, the liberal media made a dramatic lurch leftward and began ignoring journalistic guardrails. Obama was spun up as an almost messianic figure, beyond reproach within liberal media circles.
While the right fumed about all the liberal media dishonesty and hype about Obama, a large swath of right-wing media jumped on board the 2016 “Trump the GOP Insurgent” bandwagon and embraced the right’s savior come to make America great again. Neil Cavuto, the only FOX host who was not a big Trump supporter, has just left. FOX’s primetime line-up is filled with slavishly devoted Trump supporters. While liberal media ran endless Trump smear stories, which were false, right-wing media largely has taken on the role of dismissing all negative reports about Trump and often doing damage control to spin negative Trump stories in a more positive light.
This news bias situation will likely get worse.
Trump, like all presidents, should face rigorous scrutiny, just like Biden should have faced rigorous scrutiny. After all the liberal media cover-up efforts about Biden’s cognitive decline and the epic corruption via his son, Hunter Biden, it’s not just the media that’s failed us – our federal government is filled with many corrupt people – even the National Archives and Records Administration.
Since Biden ran for president in 2020, Democrats and liberal media dismissed allegations that Joe Biden ever met with foreign officials involved in Hunter Biden’s lucrative foreign deals. In 2022 a right-wing legal group requested photos from Hunter’s trip to China with Biden, when he was VP. A few days ago, the National Archives finally released photos and they show VP Biden and Hunter together meeting with top Chinese officials, who Hunter had business with. Why did it take two years for the National Archives to release these photos? Here’s CNN’s report: Newly released pictures show Joe Biden meeting Hunter Biden’s Chinese business partners. CNN spent so much effort covering up all the allegations about Hunter Biden’s pay-to-play corruption pedaling his father’s influence, the infamous Hunter laptop, and Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, that their sudden effort to do unbiased news reporting again looks like desperation to me.
Elon Musk envisions X as being the world’s news center, but assuredly the pitfalls of “instant” news going viral and X being the entity controlling the algorithms that control every user’s feed give me pause, just like I was wary when it was Twitter run by a very liberal guy.
I feel certain, that while the Dem spin information war, where all the liberal news media venues regurgitate the narratives and buzz words sent to them by Dem operatives is over, America is still in the midst of an evolving larger “information war” where the big news media, the big social media platforms and new technology are fiercely competing for our attention. Then there’s the vast foreign info war efforts too.
As for the drone stories of a couple weeks ago, in 1947, Gordon W. Allport, a Harvard psychologist, published a study, The Psychology of Rumor Or How the Flying Saucer Phenomenon Spread Throughout the Nation. Allport studied how rumors in society start, how they spread and implications from rumors run amok. This drones over NJ hysteria hit as I had just gotten into this Allport book, which I bought from Amazon at the beginning of November. This 2024 drone hysteria sounded much like the scenarios Allport studied long ago -not just flying saucer scares, but events like Pearl Harbor rumors and WWII rumors that were false and spread rapidly. Allport’s study is still relevant to how rumors spread. Even as our digital age technology changes, human nature remains the same. Distrust of the US government and uncertain big geopolitical events heighten fears and fan rumors. Partisan politics were also closely tied to these episodes of widespread panics caused by rumors.
In the sappy movie I watched last night, the journalist got reprimanded by his editor and was trying to regain his editor’s trust. He was chasing down a feel-good Christmas story about a wealthy secret Santa helping people in need and tried to convince his editor to let him pursue the story. In the end, he decided to write a story about something else, rather than betray the trust of the secret Santa and people who inadvertently divulged information to him. He had the facts and the context, but he opted to not write that story. He gathered information over weeks and agonized for days about his story.
Most people spread information online instantly, by clicking repost. Even Elon Musk and Trump do this too – no fact-checking, no time to think about it – just spread it via social media. This is not a good model for improving news or providing accurate information. It’s also an irresponsible behavior for top leaders. Plus we have many content creators on social media whose bread and butter is “reaction” videos, where they go on and on about something reported in the media or by partisan pundits. Creating drama and controversy generates clicks and money.
I decided when I started this blog that I don’t ever want to make money from this. I had other motives – mainly trying to expose and defeat the Democrat/liberal media spin information war. Trump refusing to back down from the left’s efforts to destroy him defeated them – not anything I’ve ever written about the the spin info war and he deserves credit for that. However, America’s information problems are now more critical. That liberal media (the mainstream/legacy media) had credibility and the ability to gather and disseminate information to Americans in an orderly manner. Most Americans over 30 were taught to trust mainstream media, so this liberal media credibility crisis has created a large news vacuum. Many right-wing news media organizations have increased viewership since the presidential election, while liberal media tanked. Liberal news media are in the throes of trying to come to terms with their demise.
Elon Musk is pushing hard to sell X as the replacement for liberal media. Musk is trying to fight the global censorship effort pushed by the UN and liberal elites, not just change American news media. That’s certainly his prerogative, but I don’t believe X is the answer to our American news media problems. I also expect the present Trump-Musk alliance to fray quickly and I expect our American news crisis to get worse, before it gets better.
As 2024 comes to a close, despite the challenges ahead, I remain optimistic for America’s future and in 2025 I’ll be writing more about early American history. 2026 is America’s Semiquincentennial – our 250th anniversary. I remember our bicentennial in 1976, which fueled my lifelong love of studying early American history and interest in reading about our founding fathers. I’m already excited. Of all the topics to read about, I’m currently reading a book, A Celebration of Bells, by Eric Sloane and Eric Hatch to ring in this focus on America’s upcoming anniversary and our American story.
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