The sheer numbers of Americans who have serious trust issues with our broadcast and print media is staggering. However staggering it may be, at this time the justification for not trusting our news sources is extremely high.
I see where our President, 45, has excluded CNN from his working list of broadcasters with whom he will permit participation in covering news coming out of the White House. 45 does not trust CNN.
Personally, I find CNN somewhat easy to see through. Although bearing a tradition of news broadcasting that in the 198o’s took the news industry by storm and almost overnight became a cable equivalent of the ABC, CBS and NBC as major television news sources. In recent years, CNN’s credibility toadied down as its audience share was itself overtaken and left behind by Fox News. Being able to see through CNN’s attempt to compete with the sensationalized bias of Fox, I only trust CNN – as I do the 3 majors – to a degree that allows me to check other sources. I don’t trust Fox News at all, except to be the broadcast flagship of Kindergarten Konservatism and the Republican party at their worst.
I wrote the above paragraph as an explanation as to why my “news” bookmark folder on my browser has more than 50 links. When I need news I have to sift through the biases, right and left to get news and then use my link list to find secondary and tertiary verification. So goes the news business in this country.
Truthdig is one of the sources I use. The are a “News site providing expert coverage of current affairs; thoughtful, provocative columnists, presented from a progressive point of view.”
Chris Hedges is a columnist at Truthdig. I own two of his books, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America 2007 : and Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle 2009
Hedges’ current article is American Psychosis, something I seriously recommend you read. My experience with Chris Hedges is that he has a progressive outlook but the two books of his that I own also bear seriously genuine conservative overtones as he laments the loss of perspectives and values which we ought to have held but did not.
American Psychosis reads to me in that same vein. I have posted a brief excerpt to encourage you to read it.
The lies fly out of the White House like flocks of pigeons: Donald Trump’s election victory was a landslide. He had the largest inauguration crowds in American history. Three million to 5 million undocumented immigrants voted illegally. Climate change is a hoax. Vaccines cause autism. Immigrants are carriers of “[t]remendous infectious disease.” The election was rigged—until it wasn’t. We don’t know “who really knocked down” the World Trade Center. Torture works. Mexico will pay for the wall. Conspiracy theories are fact. Scientific facts are conspiracies. America will be great again.
Our new president, a 70-year-old with orange-tinted skin and hair that Penn Jillette has likened to “cotton candy made of piss,” is, as Trump often reminds us, “very good looking.” He has almost no intellectual accomplishments—he knows little of history, politics, law, philosophy, art or governance—but insists “[m]y IQ is one of the highest—and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.” And the mediocrities and half-wits he has installed in his Cabinet have “by far the highest IQ of any Cabinet ever assembled.”
It is an avalanche of absurdities. – Chris Hedges, American Psychosis – Truthdig
Curmudgeon at Work 