News from an Alternate Universe

Image by Kai Stachowiak at Public Domain Pictures

Political commercials weren’t the only aspect of television that I found bizarre.

Some people gather news from a variety of sources, but many people settle on a very narrow set of news sources. Many people still prefer to watch television news in the evening or listen to news on the radio. Getting news online, sifting it from a deluge of chaos, is not as comfortable for them. They are accustomed to tuning in at a regular time and getting a curated report of what’s important that day, often locally first and then from a major national network about the national and international stage.

Television news has been heavily relied upon as far back as I can remember. I grew up with Walter Cronkite delivering it through major network TV every evening, always calm, always coming across as the ultimate trustworthy reporter. He signed off every evening with the tagline “That’s the way it is.” People generally believed him. If he said it was so, it was so. After him came a generation of news anchors who also commanded respect: Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and so on.

Two of the main local TV channels in southeast Texas are Sinclair stations. One local Sinclair station is affiliated with Fox, but Sinclair content has that flavor anyway. I used to follow the Fox-affiliated station’s Facebook page. Even though I’m so far away, I wanted to keep up with what’s happening where I started out and how Sinclair is covering it. If you know me personally, you know that in my early twenties I started getting onto a few subscription lists for material from the other end of the political spectrum to hear what they say among themselves without anyone else filtering it. The station’s content was often uncomfortable. That’s normal. But comment threads under their articles and videos spouted more hatred, ignorance and pride in those traits than I could stand. I haven’t looked at their page for a few years.

We watched two of the three biggest local channels consistently. One was the Fox-affiliated station (which has especially good weather coverage) and the other was a non-Sinclair station.

The non-Sinclair station now looked like the Fox affiliate. Story after story hit populist hot buttons. Anytime either station touched on a topic where I have solid knowledge—every time they did so—the material they presented was… There’s no polite way to put it. At best they twisted the truth. At worst they presented falsehoods as truths. News reporting was not tethered to reality.

Before you ask, I’m not willing to cite examples. I don’t want to give further air time to bad material.

It isn’t just that the Fairness Doctrine is gone. There is nothing resembling what the UK would call a duty of candor. (British mainstream media has tilted badly in recent years, but it isn’t like Fox or Sinclair.)

I took a lot of psychology and sociology electives at university. In the first introductory course we learned about multiple studies that prove if you drum falsehoods into people relentlessly, the falsehoods become believed. Today it’s often called gaslighting based on the play and then the movie Gas Light. Ceaselessly telling someone a lie is the truth can make a person doubt their own perceptions, their reality, their memory, even their sanity. Universities used to assign students to do their own limited exercises to see how this works. They stopped before I got there. Some of those student exercises had done serious harm.

In southeast Texas the craziness of the political campaigns is spreading its poisonous seeds on ground that has been groomed to welcome toxic populism as sweet ambrosia, at least among voters who get much or all of their news from stations that gaslight their viewers.

The area has been through a hell of a lot. Storms Rita, Ike, Harvey… Floods, wind damage and an economic roller coaster. A lot of that damage is still being repaired. People there buckle down and get on with whatever needs to be done, not whine about it. But fixing all of that doesn’t hold a candle to this. When life gets difficult, community is the most powerful thing we have going for us. Disconnecting swathes of people from reality tears the very fabric of a community. I wanted to shout at the television news for ripping at that fabric.

What have we done, allowing the presentation of news to devolve like this?