Time To Step Up

It is time to remind every American of their obligation as citizens to inform themselves on the issues of the day. At the top, I’d like to acknowledge that it is harder than in the days of mass media. With media so fragmented, users must now be their own editors. It is our individual responsibility to understand both sides of the argument. To do that, you need at least two sources—one right and one left. If you read the Wall Street Journal, you should also read the Times or the Washington Post. If you're hooked on Breitbart, also read the Talking Points Memo.

We used to have political opponents; now we have political enemies. We used to dislike our opponents ideas; now we hate them because they emanate from our enemies. How did this happen? Opinion media, that to the uninitiated can look and feel like straight news, was weaponized with the cancelation of the Fairness Doctrine, the FCC regulation that imposed on broadcasters the requirement that opinion must be counterbalanced by competing opinion. Mea culpa: at the dawn of the Internet Age, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, I foolishly argued in favor of ending the Fairness Doctrine, naively believing a new era of “democratized, citizens’ media” would come to overshadow the traditional gatekeepers at the Big Three networks and the nation’s stodgy newspapers. Instead, the internet and social media turned out to be the Trojan Horses of democracy, and a facts-not-required free-for-all ensued. Tsunami like, it swamped us, forcing us into our safe silos where we would never again have to hear reasoned opposing arguments. We could safely bathe in the propaganda our side promoted.

As Arthur Brooks recently wrote in the New York Times, this newly born mutual contempt is poisonous. We need to disagree, for the best ideas come from the give and take of debate. We just need to disagree better.

I wish to avoid false equivalence here and state plainly that 99.9% of the blame for this weaponizing of opinion lies squarely at the feet of the late Fox News creator Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the cast of right wing radio and Fox News television hosts. They alone have played to the worst instincts of the underinformed, gullible and angry. The people for whom social and technological progress has proved emotionally and financially disruptive cling to the life-preservers of Talk Radio and FNC as their ship of social and economic stability sinks out from under them.

“What-aboutism” is a fashionable rejoinder, but the facts—the real ones, not the current administration’s “alternative” ones—show beyond a shadow of a doubt that Global Climate Change is real, that Hillary Clinton didn’t kill Vince Foster, that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, and that Benghazi was a tragic accident, not unlike those that have befallen many of our other diplomatic outposts, some as recently as during the George W. Bush presidency, when, I hasten to add, progressive media did not pile on by laying partisan blame at his State Department’s feet. The goal of objective journalism is to uncover and disseminate the truth, no matter whose ox gets gored. As I was formulating Air America Radio, I recruited former Senator Al Franken to be our midday host. He had but one demand: the network can’t be attached to the outcome; we must be dedicated only to the truth.

Study after study shows that Fox News viewers are the least well-informed. You may say, “What about the liberal media,” but I would submit that reporting things exactly as they are does not make reporting biased.

Our fragile democracy depends on an informed citizenry. Years ago an important (and universally ignored) book was published. Its author, Neil Postman, predicted our demise would come not at the hands of Orwell’s Big Brother in the dystopian novel 1984, but would be delivered in much more subtle and deadly fashion, as predicted by Aldous Huxley in his dystopian novel, Brave New World. Postman’s book was aptly titled Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Look around. Everyone has their face buried in a smartphone. Maybe they’re playing a video game or shopping. Maybe they’re texting, or are on Facebook. Maybe they’re watching cats cavort on You Tube. Odds are they are not searching for facts and truth. It’s easy to live in our infotainment silos, inured to the real news of the day.

It is time to pay attention, and to stop amusing ourselves to death. Our bonds and our institutions are under attack and are fraying at the hands of those who would do us actual harm for ideological and/or financial gain.

We have to pay attention now or it will really be too late.