The Mainstream
I’ve been watching a sort of political harmonic convergence between my really right-wing, HIllary-hating, conservative friends and family, and my radical left-wing Bernie-hugging friends and family, and the Dark Matter pulling the two sides together appears to be a distrust of mainstream news sources.
Just a word of caution: in 2008, John McCain supporters thought he was going to win because the right wing only listened to right wing news sources and fooled themselves into believing the echoes of their own prejudices. All through 2009, the Republicans said they were going to re-think who they were and how they approached elections, and then in 2012, they ran exactly the same campaign, appealing to exactly the same voters, alienating exactly the same broad demographic with Mitt Romney, and congratulated themselves once again that the voices bouncing off exactly the same wall of the same echo chamber from 2008 were telling them they had a winner.
In the 2016 election things shifted just a bit – the Republicans ran another set of exactly the same kind of weak, angry, narrow-minded candidates only this time they were so weak and narrow that the media machine that is Donald Trump easily steamrolled them. Now the Republican machine is back to the same strategy of telling themselves that their polls are more true than all those silly mainstream polls, and there are still people this late in the game who believe that they actually have a shot with The Donald.
Well, it’s not true.
The reason the mainstream media is the mainstream is because it has the pulling power of the center of the river. The main-stream of news is the main-stream because it draws from many sources, weeds out falsehoods and faulty thinking, employs the bests minds and does the most legwork. For my friends on the right: The mainstream is too big and too diverse to be gamed by what you think is some Clinton cartel. To my friends on the left: The mainstream is too powerful to be driven by falsehood and conspiracy. There are too many good people out there in the strongest part of the currently working to make things right.
You can pull for whomever you want in this election. You can vote your single issue if that’s the only thing you care about. You can choose to be narrow. But we’re a big complex country with a big, complex population, and the best representation of it is not narrow or weak or small-minded. It’s not bigoted or angry or racist or misogynistic. We are the farthest thing from a single-issue country. America is a Mississippi River of humanity, pushing toward a more open, inclusive, strong, intelligent and sensible society. You can cling to the muddy bank of your narrow little news source or your screechy, single-issue blog if you like, but you’d be better off opening your eyes and seeing where things are actually going, grappling with that reality – because if you don’t, that reality will happily leave you behind.
Namaste
