The News Isn't Real

Everybody is lying to you... except me.

Just spent a frustrating twelve hours or so discussing the following tweet from Dilbert creator and self-certified genius, Scott Adams, who wrote a couple days ago, “It’s impossible to have a political conversation with someone who thinks the news is real.” It’s a sentiment I see a lot on social media, especially from those on the MAGA side of things and, well, I find it confusing.

Clearly, the people arguing with me on this topic feel as though they’re well-informed. I know that because they keep telling me how stupid I am. Also, that I don’t deserve to live, as one commentator told me after I posted that, according to the FDA, ivermectin is not a valid treatment for covid.

Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

The FDA is lying to me, I was told. As is every single mainstream media outlet. As is the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and every other traditional news source. When I ask how they know, they tell me “critical thinking.” They tell me “do your own research.” When I ask for sourcing, for example, on the “common knowledge” story that “FDA officials and several Fortune 50 CEOs stepped down right before covid,” they tell me it’s easy to have Google scrub stories from the internet because Google is on it, too.

(Yes, that conversation happened.)

When I ask which stories the mainstream media has gotten wrong that these guys have gotten right, I’m provided a laundry list of topics including “Russiagate, covid, Jussie Smollett, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and a bunch of other, more esoteric stories.

The stories they point to are all obviously controversial because they’re confusing and often contradictory. Was covid actually a bioweapon leak covered by the mainstream news? Was Russiagate a fabrication? Jussie Smollett sure had the media fooled, right? And they’re just letting Hunter slide, aren’t they?

The problem is none of their claims are true. Outlets DID cover the bioweapon theory, and that coverage continues. Russiagate was covered – some might argue overcovered – by every media outlet. The conclusion that the whole thing was a hoax was not reached by the Mueller Report; in fact the conclusion they came to was that Russia did interfere with the 2016 election and there were multiple contacts between Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign, but that collusion could not, in Mueller’s opinion, be proven. The Jussie Smollett story is another good example of the media relying on Smollett’s account and the police account of that night to report the initial story, and then continuing to follow the story as it unraveled. In other words, they did their jobs.

It seems like the main complaint about the mainstream news is that their reporting doesn’t always align with their preferred narrative. An example: one of the stories I was told the media got wrong was Trump declaring “there are very fine people on both sides” after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” protest. They say, if you read the actual transcript of what he said (below), you will see that he condemned Nazis and white supremacists in the group, but not the group as a whole.

Very fine people.

And you can see that he absolutely does go out of his way to condemn neo-Nazis and white supremacists – “they should be condemned totally.” The problem with this statement is that there actually were not “very fine people” on both sides. The march was organized to unite white supremacists; that was its entire purpose. To condemn the neo-nazis and white supremacists in one breath and praise them in the next is exactly why the media, correctly, pointed out that he was expressing sympathy for the very people he was “condemning.” Never mind the false equivalency of comparing the counter-protestors to the protestors.

Again and again, what I’m encountering is that people are angry that the information they see in the mainstream news doesn’t comport with their truth, and so rather than question their assumptions, they disregard the media. Perhaps that feels like a valid strategy except it forces you into an ever-shrinking box of “reliable” news sources. How somebody can trust Scott Adams over the entirety of the combined legacy media is beyond me, unless you have conditioned yourself to believe, as people have been telling me, that the CIA and/or the Jews and/or corporations control the information we are being fed.

To be clear, I do not trust any single news organization about any single news story. Nobody should, but the idea that they are all – as I have been told – in league with each other not only feels false, it also doesn’t make sense. Why would competing news organizations align to peddle government-approved messaging when the government itself regularly changes? The only conclusion must be that the people who are really in control operate outside of the government. And once you start thinking that, you’re down a rabbit hole that cannot be easily escaped.

Scott Adams himself did eventually respond to me, writing

My level of awareness may be low, but my question suggests I’m seeking a path out.

It’s so vague as to be meaningless, which is maybe the entire point. Nothing is true anymore, and so we need to rely on vibes, intuition, and paranoia to discern the most viable of all the competing false claims out there.

A good indication that somebody is full of shit, in my experience, is when somebody claims to know a hidden truth. That may sound hypocritical coming from a self-described UFO enthusiast, but my claims are confined to the knowable, and I’m open to the possibility of a larger truth or that the entire story may be a fabrication or misunderstanding. Isn’t that the purpose of critical thinking?

Don’t we navigate our way through the world with the best information we have at our disposal? I’m sure the Adams’ of the world believe they are doing that, but it seems to me that choosing a preferred narrative with little credible supporting evidence is not as likely to be correct as accepting a narrative you may not like that also has voluminous, credible supporting evidence.

That’s what news organizations do. They seek out the credible supporting evidence and report on it. I’ve known many journalists over the years from many organizations. Without exception, that has been my experience observing them and, occasionally, working with them. While I have not always agreed with the characterization of myself in the media, I have never been substantively misquoted by anybody I would consider credible.

Obviously, journalists get things wrong. The biggest, and worst, example, in my lifetime was the run-up to the Iraq War, in which the mainstream media tended to accept the Bush administration narrative that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But did they lie? Or were they merely too credulous? Did they cover the opposition? They did. Did they cover dissenting voices? They did. Were they as aggressive in pushing back against the conventional wisdom that the Bush people were telling the truth? They did not, and that was a tremendous failure on their part. Did I write off the entire media after that? I did not.

I’ve asked Scott Adams if I can come on his show to be “deprogrammed.” We’ll see what he says. In the meantime, my word is the Truth, the Law, and the Light.