The Opposition Party

This week Don Trump and his right-hand man, Steve Bannon, have decided to label the media as "the opposition party." This makes sense from their point of view, and in fact it may be a more profound observation than they realize.

I have said on this blog many times that when history is written about our era, the main topic will be the media. The newspapers and networks take sides, often without seeming to realize it, nudging our understanding to favor one conclusion or another. Simultaneously blogs and social media have given a media voice to every citizen and the roar from the bleachers has occasionally overpowered the commercial media but the almighty dollar wins in the end. The story of our times will be about who got to tell the story.

There have been plenty of times when I have thought of the media as "the opposition party." When our suburban county of a million good, decent people was attacked by a dozen or so rightwingers over a sex-ed class, the media turned their cameras on the small group and amplified their narrow-mindedness in a way that made it seem that they were a significant force in our bluest-of-blue community. What should have been a simple adjustment to a health curriculum became a "culture war," due entirely to the presence of the media. So I get that.

At any moment, in any place, there are an infinite number of things going on. We choose, as social beings, to focus our attention on the details that are relevant to us. And we interpret those details in whatever way serves our needs. A single thing may be a blessing, a threat, or we might ignore it. When something happens right in front of us we interpret it and deal with it.

Some things happen where we can't see them. We only hear about them. And that's where the media come in.

Have you ever seen something happen, and then read about it in the paper or seen it on TV? It's shocking, isn't it! The media have to boil an event down to a narrative, they have to make a story out of it, and that means they focus on certain facts and ignore others. That's just how it is, they do the same thing we do as individuals and groups, they make a story out of an infinite sea of information -- but they might not make the same story we would make if we had been present. We give up the ability to control our attention in exchange for some condensed information about events that we do not personally witness.

Part of living in the modern world is understanding the media. You cannot take a media representation as a truth, it is only a story. It may contain facts, and you need to know something about the source and the topic in order to evaluate that. If you are not sure about how to understand the original incident that is reported, you might want to look at alternative tellings of the story. Reading about an event or seeing it on TV is not the same as being there, and actually -- this is important -- "being there" is not the same for you as for some other person. I mean, you know this already, but it is important that two people can attend the same event and see it two entirely different ways. This phenomenon is magnified when one of the observers has a TV camera and sponsors who want the numbers to be big.

The media have loved Don Trump. He is everything that draws a big audience, flashy, brash, personable. He says the craziest things and expresses ideas that are so obviously wrong-headed that you just want to see what will happen next. Remember when Charlie Sheen went off the rails? Don Trump is like that all the time, and the TV cameras and newspapers love it. There is always a story, some crazy thing will come out of his mouth.

But the media, like the rest of the country, had an epiphany that Tuesday night when we watched the returns coming in, and those red states did not turn blue. It turns out that the requirements for reality TV and the requirements for being President of the United States of America are different. Who woulda thought? The media, pursuing their own business goals, pushed this charismatic lunatic out in front of us hundreds of times through the campaign. Jimmy Fallon patted his hair, Saturday Night Live made him the host, CNN cut into their regular programming to show his antics of the moment. MSNBC obsessed with him, even the "liberal" talk-shows talked about nothing else for months. They're just trying to sell soap, but people sitting at home forget that.

Don Trump is a media creation. He is an ordinary, vulgar, hometown gangster in real life, but you put a camera on him and he is every bit the equal to Snooki or Honey Boo Boo, or Dog the Bounty Hunter. He's good TV, the media lifted him and he rode that wave of attention right into the White House. But as President he is a buffoon. He doesn't know what he is talking about. He is a clown. The media still love him, the story sells a lot of soap, but the story line has changed. Where it was "Brash Millionaire Takes on the World" it is now "Ignorant Bigot Signs Executive Order Screwing Millions of Innocent People," "Thin-Skinned Old Man Argues Against Proof About How Big His Stuff Is." The media still love him, but now they are loving pointing out the character defects that they aggrandized in the past as lovable quirks.

So, yeah, the media have become the opposition party for him. We have a noble narrative of journalists investigating and checking public figures, but they don't really do that very much, or very well. These days they report tweets, if somebody doesn't call them with leaks. What we call "the media" are mostly huge corporate entities that serve their stockholders, and there is neither a mechanism or incentive for them to be truthful, honest, thorough, or fair. They aren't for you or against you, they sell soap.