America Won’t Agree on Solutions if We Don’t Share a Common Understanding of the Problems

Rob Meyne

  • Dec. 3, 2020
  • 4 min read

The discussion about 2020 vote fraud mirrors, in many ways, the status quo on public affairs more broadly. And that isn’t a good thing.

If you are reading these words, you are more than likely a very well-informed citizen. That isn’t a compliment to us. It’s a compliment to you. And not because our site is special. But if you have found your way here, in a maze of thousands of options, you must be fairly interested in the health of our nation. It also means you must not take much of what you see on tv or read in the papers at face value. Again, good for you. Our intention here is to raise questions, invite scrutiny, and offer opinions with which you may or may not agree. We are all about free speech, even as one of our major political parties no longer champions it.

But back to the election. It is not even debatable, at this point, that the election was fraught with illegalities and outright fraud. And evidence to that effect has been filed in courts across the nation. Yet many Americans believe there simply isn’t any such evidence, because that is what they have been told by media outlets whose main objective is promoting anyone but Trump.

What you believe is nearly entirely a function of two things: where do you get news and how critically do you consume it? There is a bifurcation in the body politic. It presents a nearly insurmountable challenge. And it is why we increasingly seem to be two nations.

It is impossible for Americans to come to agreement on what to do about a problem when they do not share a common understanding of it. If one side is working from a different set of “facts” than the other, what are the chances it will lead to a common conclusion?

Imagine you are in the hospital, and a team of doctors is reviewing your case. You’ve got half a dozen great medical minds discussing it. Three have one set of facts summarizing your situation and the other three have a different, contradictory summary. What is the chance they would agree on the path forward? Add to that the possibility that half the doctors are looking at information that confirms what they already believe, and the other has the same mental and emotional investment in their own facts. Would you want to put your health in their hands? That is exactly what we face. America has little chance of finding unity, cooperation, songbirds and unicorns when half the country doesn’t know what you do.

Examples are plentiful of how media outlets treat information differently. An outlet like Just the News, Newsmax, or Reuters might cover a story differently than CNN, NBC, or The Hill. It may mean they report the same information but put a different spin on it; it may mean they report information but one outlet says it is gospel while another says it is unproven; or one may report a story while another ignores it completely.

If you consider major political events, issues, and developments, you find this disparate treatment happens not frequently, not occasionally, but all the time. It isn’t much of an exaggeration to say more conservative outlets always cover major stories differently than more liberal ones.

Technology has made it easier for us to get information on public policy issues. It has also made it easier to order shoes, watch tv shows, or surf your favorite porn sites. Those of us who have high hopes for humanity imagine groups of Norman Rockwellish families using the Internet to read congressional testimony, learn about candidate’s backgrounds, or look at Treasury Department data to see whether tax cuts work. In reality, they are many times more likely to be looking at cat videos, You Tube celebs, or naked images of their favorite movie star. Useful political information is more accessible, but unless people seek it out, and are able to discern which outlets are biased and which are not, these sites are as likely to mislead as to inform.

This week, Joe Biden, who has proclaimed himself “president-elect” even though he is not, and who reports from the non-existent “Office of the President-Elect,” announced his senior communications team for the White House. Various sycophantic media outlets breathlessly, proudly reported this is the first time that a White House has had an all-female comms team. The absurdity of this exists at a minimum of two levels. First, if we are to believe that gender is irrelevant, that men and women are the same, and that sex is a matter of choice, rather than biology, it means having a one-sex staff means absolutely nothing. Second, even if it is important, it is not true that it hasn’t happened before. Trump had an all-female team. But it wasn’t widely reported. The blackout of good news about Trump, in fact, is so total that outlets can report the non-story about Biden having the first female team with virtually no risk of it being contradicted. The boot-licking media mouthpieces are Biden fluffers before all else, so they give him credit for things true and imagined that they refuse to even discuss in relation to Trump.

At this point, if one does not understand the corruption, bias, and dishonesty of the media, then they just aren’t paying attention. It is no longer deniable or even debatable. The media largely do function as enemies of the people. Trump’s criticism seems less outrageous today than ever.

More to come.

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