NAVIGATING THE SHOALS OF MEDIA BIAS

Photo courtesy Winston-Salem Journal

When I was a child my family went camping on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the “graveyard of the Atlantic,” where I would amuse myself chasing ghost crabs around the blackened jutting timbers of old shipwrecks on the beach. It is a fond memory.

Today I’m thinking about Nags Head-not the town on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but the origin of its name.

In earlier centuries devious ship wreckers would tie lanterns to the necks of old horses (nags) and walk them along the beach at night. Helmsmen on ships would see the bobbing lights and assume they were from other ships at anchor, giving them a false sense of position with adequate sea room. This frequently resulted in their running the ships aground on reefs or shoals, giving the unscrupulous salvagers the opportunity to seize the cargos.

Today’s media is fraught with ship wreckers of a different sort. Fox News, Breitbart, One America Network and Newsmax, along with talk radio jocks like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck, walk the nags of ridiculous conspiracy theories, red herrings, whataboutism and outright lies and obfuscation to promote the right-wing agenda. Their corporate owners pay them well. Sadly, as a result a large portion of the American electorate and the totality of the Republican Party have struck on the rocks of authoritarian propaganda.

How do we avoid being hoodwinked by media bias? It’s simple- use a navigation technique called “triangulation.”

Chapman’s Piloting defines triangulation as “a process of pinpointing your location by taking bearings from 3 remote points.” Simply put, using a bearing compass and a chart, you fix a line of position (LOP) from three different points. They could be lighthouses, familiar landmarks or buoys. Where the LOPs intersect marks your true position. This method helps pinpoint exactly where you are in the sea, thereby avoiding rocks, reefs, shoals or other obstacles that could sink your boat.

When gathering news, I like to “triangulate” by viewing different independent networks such a CNN, PBS and BBC America. It also helps to read different newspapers like the Boston Globe, New York Times and magazines such as The Atlantic, Vanity fair and The New Yorker. Nowadays you can’t just assume journalistic integrity; you have to cross-check for accuracy and point of view. It’s sometimes exhausting and time consuming but unfortunately necessary to get at the truth in the current political environment.

People tend to want to get their information from echo chambers that mirror their personal views. This is especially true of trump supporters. These media echo chambers exist now largely due to corporate owners and the revocation of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, a gift from the patron saint of right-wing oligarchy, Ronald Reagan. The extreme right, which unfortunately includes prominent Republican lawmakers, governors and popular media personalities, spew their plutocratic, often white nationalistic venom and “alternate facts” to a willing, gullible portion of the populace whose latent racism, homophobia and xenophobia have been given a green light to appear in the open once again. Sadly enough, these folks aren’t interested in triangulating their information.

If we don’t alter our course soon, our nation is heading straight for the rocks of fascism.

The Corona Reset Button

People who know me often remark that I radiate positive energy- my glass isn’t just half-full, it’s brimming with the sudsy beer of optimism and hope for the future.

Just kidding. Honestly, no one who knows me has ever said that. But even a disgruntled curmudgeon like me has to believe the future holds some faint promise of human salvation. And I’m not talking about salvation in the religious sense- religion is one of the main reasons we’re in such a mess today. Not that all religion is necessarily evil; just like science, it has the capacity for both good and evil. It’s human nature that perverts religion, philosophy, science, technology, art and just about anything we stick our grubby little opposable thumbs into. We are the worst of the primates, a cadre of raging chimps, flinging our atomic poop on a planet that has had just about enough of us.

Now we have Covid-19 spreading like wildfire across the planet, with no prospect that it will be controlled or even evolve into something less lethal anytime soon. In the 1960s the California group Spirit sang, “It’s Nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong.” They could have been singing about this pandemic. Is it really a coincidence that, after a millennium of human expansion with its war, overpopulation, industrialization, environmental destruction, nationalism, racism, sexism, fascism, Communism, Zionism, Catholicism, Protestantism, jihadism, (is that a word?) hedonism, nihilism, and global narcissism… nature has finally sent us an eviction notice?

Actually, it’s not an eviction notice- it’s a warning. An eviction notice will be when plankton no longer exists in the oceans to send us unlimited amounts of oxygen and we all choke to death. That’s what science (the good science, not the hydrogen bomb-making science) tells us will happen if we don’t take immediate action to reverse global warming.

This is not our first warning. The gas lines of the 1970s, record monster hurricanes and the shrinking polar ice cap should have spurred our governments into action long ago. But corporate greed and pliable, buy-able politicians have succeeded in quelling any attempts to wean us of our addiction to fossil fuel and runaway consumption. Religious leaders have run a somewhat successful campaign against meaningful population control. Only China, with its draconian law, has done anything dramatic to limit population growth. Sadly, while many countries had taken bold steps to reduce greenhouse gasses, the United States has moved in the other direction.

This has been a horrible year so far. Normally, murder hornets would be the most troubling thing we would have to deal with; now they’re just comic relief from all the misery, mayhem and political horror we have endured. I say “political horror” because nothing else describes the dystopian nightmare we are in. The absence of judgment and leadership and the continued denial of science have allowed the pandemic to flourish unrestrained throughout our country and thousands of lives have been needlessly lost due to the willful ignorance, narcissism, corruption and deceit of the so-called president and his obedient bovine followers. And, as the number of cases continue to spiral upward, the torrent of lies and lunacy from this creature has only increased.

But out of this chaos and tragedy there is a glimmer of hope. As the failures of our political institutions have become glaringly obvious and the pandemic has all but shut down our economy, there could be a paradigm shift in the way we live on this fragile planet. Like the two-sided coin of crisis and opportunity, we now have a chance for dramatic, positive change- a “reset button,” if you will.

During the initial lockdown, oil prices collapsed and gasoline prices sunk below two dollars a gallon. Roads and city streets were deserted; only a few people were driving. As a result air pollution dropped 5%, astonishing even some scientists. Folks in Kathmandu could see Mount Everest for the first time in decades. Beijing had blue skies. It became obvious that the Earth could heal itself, if given half a chance.

Here in the United States, many who had fought against universal healthcare suddenly saw the glaringly obvious deficiencies and inequities in our healthcare system. Lackadaisical registered voters who stayed away from the polls in 2016 saw the horrific results of their apathy. The plutocrats who have been running this country into the ground since the Reagan era have now exposed their self-serving, toxic agenda for anyone willing to take the blinders off and look. All these things spell OPPORTUNITY, if only we seize the moment.

First and foremost, we have to get our democracy back. This means electing politicians who would break the stranglehold these oligarchs of big oil, big pharma, Wall Street and their neocon propaganda mills have on our government and airwaves. Our lawmakers would  finally be free to promote an aggressive agenda of reform, starting with repealing Citizens United, abolishing the electoral college, restoring the myriad regulatory entities dismantled during the current criminal administration and bringing to justice the thugs, grifters and hoodlums unleashed by this despotic reality TV huckster who play-acts at being President while destroying everything he touches. One person, one vote and no more of this “corporations are people too” nonsense.  We need to pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act and ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. 

When the economy restarts, it should include a “Marshall Plan” that supports and encourages domestic production of clean energy, a bold shift in public transportation (including bringing back rail travel,) programs promoting sustainable, local agriculture and small businesses. A truly comprehensive healthcare plan should become a right, not a privilege reserved for those with great benefit packages or unlimited wealth. Public education should expand to include advanced technical training and free tuition should be available to those attending state-sponsored universities. Anyone who wants to become a doctor should be given the opportunity to go to medical school, if they have the desire and aptitude. And while we’re at it, we should emphasize and intensify arts education. Time to turn back the ongoing Reagan-era hostility towards the arts that has been responsible for much of the dumbing down of America.   And it’s past time to end systemic racism with a more multicultural approach to education. 

Normally these sea changes would be difficult in a thriving economy running full steam; but in the current state of affairs with so much industry and commerce being on lockdown, what better time to make bold moves? Nothing will happen overnight but why not make the concerted effort, as we did in World War II?

Can you imagine such a country…where We the People really do get to decide who’s in charge?   Where high-speed rail takes the strain on our over-burdened highway system and light rail connects every city, providing an alternative to clogged roadways; where coal and fossil fuels are replaced by cheap, clean solar and wind power, fed into a protected, modernized grid. No longer dependent on foreign oil, our electric cars fill their tanks with sunshine and fair winds. Skies continue to become clearer; global warming is halted in its tracks; food insecurity becomes a thing of the past.  Racism only surfaces in history books.  (Real history, not the sanitized, Caucasian colonialism-style history.)

All people, regardless of economic status, have access to the same doctors, hospitals and pharmaceuticals, paid for by a more equitable tax system, freeing small businesses and their employees from crushing premiums charged by greedy, for-profit healthcare networks and insurance companies. Free preventative medicine is readily available to all; health and fitness replace many chronic, avoidable diseases. A new wave of medical professionals serve their communities in return for their tuition-free education.

There are many other things we can do to reform the government and restart the economy but these ideas would go far in reducing the inequities in our society while helping environmentally. Of course the oligarchs, plutocrats and their brainwashed followers have long cried “socialism” at most of these ideas. But clearly the pendulum has swung too far to the right for too long and supply-side economics have ravaged our middle and working “classes”for decades.  I know all this is specific to the United States but honestly…the rest of the world is already way ahead of us.  In the last three years we have really lagged behind Europe, Asia. and even what was euphemistically known as the “third world.”  In fact, the United States has become somewhat of a pariah on the international plane.

We now have an opportunity to clean house and push that “reset button.” A part of me is hopeful that this will happen.  And it has to happen.. those in power have been peddling hate and ignorance for too long.  They have used the distractions of racism, xenophobia and fear to keep us from seeing the real enemy- widespread industrial destruction of the planet, greed and corruption, modern fascism, perpetual war and economic slavery.  We desperately need a new wave of reform and to finally put the people in charge.  I mean all the people; at least those who care about the planet and all of its inhabitants.  If saying that makes me a socialist, then paint my sorry ass red and call me “comrade.”

Too many have died and too many families have suffered during this pandemic and it appears that the models predicting 200,000+ Covid-related deaths may be proven right. Let’s not allow those deaths to be in vain. Let us create a phoenix to rise out of these ashes.

And VOTE in November!