In college I was lucky enough to study journalism under some great professors. Second to none was Don Murray, a Santa Claus look alike with experience and wisdom to spare, and he was not stingy sharing it. A Pulitzer Prize winner, he dispensed lessons in a conversational manner, encouraging both participation and the ideas it produced. I continue to be amazed by how prescient he was by raising topics that at the time seemed ancillary and not particularly relevant.
One day he brought up exactly such a subject out of the blue, asking us what we thought of all the burgeoning sources of news and information cable was providing. To a person the answers were much the same… it was an absolute good, a boost for democracy and the fourth estate that undergirds it. More sources meant more access to information and truth. As Mitch McConnell announced on the Senate floor yesterday… case closed. It bears noting that this was a class of serious students, some headed to highly successful careers as reporters. Jackie McMullen, for example, is now a preeminent sports opinion writer and ESPN regular; we were a focused group. Anyway, upon hearing our version of groupthink, Professor Murray begged to differ and posited his reservations about cable’s explosion onto the market place of news gathering. Information and truth are a democracy’s most valuable commodities; perhaps the manner they are gathered and distributed should be elite and rigorously protected, lest they are taken for granted and devalued. I remember receiving his insight with a slight nod of affirmation and acceding that his point made sense; yet I continued to be underwhelmed by the topic’s importance and soon enough we were on to something else.
Truth in America has never been cheaper, and the President of the United States works feverishly to further lessen its standing. Don Murray was spot on in his concerns, and the US citizenry is engaged in a cold civil war as a result. One cable creation owns most of the responsibility for this…. Fox News of course.
From its first day on the air Fox has aimed to abase the best practices of American journalism and cloud the very idea of truth as the foundation for news gathering. The audacious lie it put forth from the start – that almost the entirety of American journalism is biased and corrupt – has gestated and been fully digested by millions, eventually spreading like an unchecked cancer to infect the foundations of our national life…. and the aorta of our civic heartbeat.
Fox News is a totalitarian entity, that is it always has to be moving forward and intensifying its behavior. From oddly distasteful to more relentlessly misinformed to shrilly partisan and now rabidly reckless, the Fox snowball must keep rolling down the mountain; the nihilist zealots its diehard viewer base has become won’t permit any pauses. Nor, it seems, will its first American President.
Yesterday, the New York Times came out with devastating news; it had received 10 years of Trump tax returns, dating back to the 80s, and the truth about his business acumen that hard numbers reveal. At the very time he had a bestseller out cultivating the fiction he was a self-made business prodigy, Trump was in the process of losing over a billion dollars, much of it money from his father, Fred Trump. The data can’t lie because Trump himself provided it, and its findings are clear….everything Trump touched failed miserably, often leaving banks and investors – and his father – on the losing end. According to the NYT, the Donald wasn’t simply a bad businessman, he was literally one of the worst businessmen. How bad was he? The article notes that in “….multiple years he appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual taxpayer.” Now that’s failing bigly! Fred Trump seems to have endlessly indulged his manic son’s desire to buy enterprises and ruin them, most prominently Eastern Airlines shuttle for $365 million and the Taj Mahal and other Atlantic City casino properties to the tune of $800 million. It’s not hyperbole to say simply everything Trump headed up went south in a hurry. More than hapless, far worse than incompetent… disastrously horrible.
In a sane and modestly vibrant democratic entity these revelations would constitute a death knell. After all, the Donald is really nothing if not the self-made business titan prepared to foist common sense on a nation gridlocked by gray scale indecisiveness. Ask any of his wretched core what most appeals to them about Trump and they will surely cite the fiction he has nurtured from day one as a business success, now fully destroyed by raw data. But of course we know this isn’t it for the President, not even close. Instead of a decisive blow to a congenital liar, a critical nexus in his public disgrace, yesterday’s scoop is but another example of the cautionary tale Professor Murray worried about near 40 years ago, when truth began to lose its value.
The President’s twitter feed always accurately indicates how concerned he is about a particular topic. So his near immediate multi-frame gibberish attacking the article’s veracity betrays it struck a nerve. It’s worth reciting in full because it provides such a sterling sample of the crisis at hand:
“Real estate developers in the 1980’s & 1990’s, more than 30 years ago, were entitled to massive write offs and depreciation which would, if one was actively building, show losses and tax losses in almost all cases. Much was non monetary. Sometimes considered “tax shelter…you would get it by building, or even buying. You always wanted to show losses for tax purposes….almost all real estate developers did – and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport. Additionally, the very old information put out is a highly inaccurate Fake News hit job.”
What’s stunning is Trump’s unabashed willingness to admit criminal dishonesty in service to protecting the lie of his business acumen. Of course, it’s doubtful he has to worry about either with regard to his wretched core, who won’t entertain the revelations as anything other than MSM lies… just another attempt to destroy their duly elected President. Fox/AM will both bury the story and attack it with the same presumptions. And the GOP? How will it respond to more overwhelming evidence that the POTUS elected under its banner is a colossal liar and fraud? Clown question. “Hot off the presses!…” sure ain’t what it used to be.
The codependency of Trump and Fox/AM has one primary target…truth. This President lies without thought; he is the autonomic nervous system of deceit. Fox/AM now has no brand other than as Trump’s primary support structure; its consumers will accept nothing else. Virtually nothing from either entity is honest or in good faith; that’s where we are. Make no mistake, the well being of truth, and the willingness of the US public to appreciate it, will mirror our nation’s survival as a going democratic concern. Right now we have three main groups: those in thrall of lies; those cognizant and respectful of the truth; and those who don’t care either way, and despise the entire issue, demanding only to be left alone. A society indifferent to truth or its revelation deserves what comes its way….. and, tragically it seems, that’s surely what’s heading toward us. BC