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Our American democracy is being poisoned.
And just like my friend Pogo used to say, the person responsible for that poison is us. We are killing the greatest system of governance on the planet. We are the enemy.
For the longest time I have listened to my friends and others blame the “news media” for the ills of society. And I have, in turn, defensively blamed the “people” because if people didn’t want to read, watch and hear what the news media was distributing, well, we would print, televise and broadcast something else.
Well, Pogo was wrong in this instance, and so was I.
The culprit is the media, just not the news media. And we do have us to blame, but not for the reasons I thought. Let me explain. But before I do, read the story in today’s newspaper under the headline “The big lie: Las Vegan watches as his Reid tale takes off,” written by the Sun’s managing editor, Ric Anderson.
Las Vegan Larry Pfeifer, even with his convoluted process of calling out what ails America, has managed to prove the case. In today’s world, there are three different media. There is entertainment media, there is the news media and then there is the kind of media that calls itself “news” but is really a form of manipulation that takes advantage of a significant portion of our population by telling people what they want to hear without regard to truth or justice. And that is not the American way or, at least, the way America has lived for its first 200 or so years.
This newspaper and others like it, legitimate broadcast companies (television and radio) and any number of news magazines are what I call news media. We spend fortunes of money putting the best reporters and editors on the task of ferreting out factual news that impacts people’s lives, and we distribute that information across multiple channels so that people can educate themselves about issues important to them and their families.
We all know and love what entertainment media is about. No complaints about that!
The other media, the news media wannabes, which in Larry Pfeifer’s case are a bunch of right-wing bloggers and some well-known right-wing “news” channels that are both sly and foxy, are giving the legitimate news media a bad name.
And too many people in the public who aren’t discerning enough, aren’t knowledgeable enough or don’t care enough to really question what they are being fed are accepting the junk that spews forth as fact and, then, going about their daily lives in willful ignorance.
It is this acceptance by the public of what it reads and hears from disreputable sources that is poisoning our system of governance. We accept faulty information, we form our belief systems on faulty information and, in the end, we vote on faulty information. It is no wonder we get faulty results!
Just look at Congress.
We have people in charge of science and technology who believe the world is 5,000 years old. We have people in charge of foreign policy who believe venturing away from the shores of America is a foreign concept. We have people who talk about women in a first-class way who legislate laws about women as if they were second-class citizens.
I ask myself why that is every day. And now I know the answer.
There is an entire industry of very smart people who realize they can manipulate Americans like sheep just by telling them lies, over and over again. Lies the people are only too willing to hear. Sound familiar?
Larry Pfeifer, aka Easton Elliott, became a wing-nut sensation recently when well-known right-wing zealots took his story, which he concocted out of whole cloth, and spread it across the “conservative nation” to willing listeners and readers. And the people ate it up.
They swallowed it whole and spit it out to their friends and fellow travelers as if it were the gospel. And the country sank deeper into the muck!
Larry claims to have done all this — made up a story about Nevada’s senior senator, Harry Reid, and his unfortunate accident that has taken the sight from his right eye — in an effort to expose these people who manipulate the news — lie — for their own purposes.
Well, Larry certainly did that! Reportedly without a shred of evidence, without a corroborating fact or a scintilla of something to prove his story, Larry got the right wing in a tizzy because the story proved, once again, that in their minds Sen. Reid was lying. This time, it was about his accident, which folks were eager to believe resulted from a beating at the hands of an alcoholic brother.
Rush Limbaugh, almost to his credit, said he couldn’t vouch for Easton Elliott’s story and then proceeded to tell it all, chapter and verse. Limbaugh asked for corroboration, according to Pfeifer, didn’t get it and didn’t care because the story was so juicy that he couldn’t wait to foist it upon the public. Damn the facts, spread the rumors as truth and hook the rubes who are too lazy or too ignorant to dare question that which they desperately want to believe.
The list is long of media entertainers who couldn’t wait to spread the rumors, the gossip, the lies that Larry Pfeifer told them. The list is short of any news media that joined in.
And that is Pfeifer’s point. The Las Vegas Sun has spent a great deal of time trying to make sure that what Pfeifer says is true actually is. That was no easy task. After all, Pfeifer is an admitted liar. We may get it wrong from time to time, but a good news media company makes the effort.
Our goal is to print the facts, to tell the truth. Those in the other “news” media, the entertainers, want to manipulate their readers and listeners for their own purposes. I would guess money is at the root of their special kind of evil.
Larry Pfeifer claims to have done all of this damage in the name of proving the point that people will print baloney and others will consume it without regard to facts, just because some can and others want to.
Well, he proved it. I don’t know if he is a hero for doing so, but in my world he helped me understand a simple truth: There is news media, and then there is something else others like to call the media.
Let’s call that group what it really is — a danger to our democracy, aided and abetted by some in our society who forgot or never learned how to question that which is most questionable.
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