Alternative Facts

Like many I’m saddened by the finger-wagging and brow-beating the media is taking nowadays.

For I wholeheartedly subscribe to the Thomas Jefferson dictum, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

But with newspapers under attack from all angles in these digital days, we are now all part of the media. One only has to crack one’s Facebook page to be exposed to a host of views – temperate and otherwise.

It was a much more efficient world when you bought your Times, News, or Post, and read the considered words of giants like Breslin, Hamill, Kempton et al.

They didn’t just keep their opinions for their columns - I once overheard Pete Hamill discussing the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. 

“We’re Americans, we don’t do torture.” He said quietly, and no one dissented. 

I wonder what Pete is saying about President Trump right now? For after a month of almost constant mistruths, one has to question the president’s judgment, at the very least.

These erroneous statements range from crowd size at his inauguration, to the rising murder rate, onto the number of people affected by his immigration executive order. And I’m only skimming the most obvious.  

Almost equally questionable are the president’s diversionary attacks on the media in phrases such as “dishonest press,” and “lying media;” neither does he stint on reporters and columnists labeling them “lying disgusting people.”

Now I’m not, as you might gather, a Trump supporter, but I’m far from a nihilistic hater. He did win the Electoral College vote, so unless he abdicates or Tubbercurry’s Mike Pence locks him up in the Oval Office and throws away the key, we’ve got four more years to get through with this man. 

And not to beat around the bush, if he were to bring millions of manufacturing jobs back to the Rust Belt and Coal Country, I might even vote for him in 2020. But that’s highly unlikely given the tides of history and technology.

Donald Trump is not the first president to lie. In fact when faced with the choice of a lunatic or a liar with his finger on the nuclear button, I’d go with the latter any old day of the week. After all we survived Nixon and Clinton.

But we’re faced with something different here. What will four years of constant “alternative facts” do to us?

Every journalist and columnist I know double checks their facts – the most embarrassing thing is to be called out on some “misstatement.” Opinions are one thing – we’re hired to offer those – but playing loose with the truth is quite another.

Now like the president I come from the world of entertainment where massaging facts is rarely frowned upon. It’s not life or death, after all. And reality television is about tied with professional wrestling at the bottom of the entertainment totem pole.

But c’mon, Mr. President, that was then; you’re now leader of the free world. People take what you’re saying seriously. They’re working hard paying off mortgages or bookies, they don’t have time or energy to come up with an answer to, “why is the president lying, Mom?”

There are boundaries to taste, discretion, and above all truth, and 99% of politicians pay lip service to them. Most of these pillars of probity are familiar with the name, George Orwell, even if they’ve never opened their high school copy of 1984. 

Take a read of it, sir, the next time your cable goes on the blink. It’s actually somewhat calming compared to your first month in office. It’s also becoming a best seller again, thanks to you. 

The message in this classic book is clear. A constant diet of “alternate facts” is anathema for a healthy and sane society. A journalist’s job is to point this out.

Besides those of us with half a brain can already predict your endgame – “the dishonest media has sabotaged my agenda.”

Well, so be it, you’re the one calling the shots. Did it never occur to you that running a country was always going to be harder than strutting around reality TV?