I don’t know about you, but my life’s complicated. My days are complicated – usually because I have more than one thing to do. Being an adult with a little life experience under my belt, I’ve learned how to multi-task on a macro level. For instance: I can earn a living AND raise a family – both at the same time!
The way our MSM seems to think of us, we can only focus on one of those two things. Either we’re going to worry about getting and keeping a job or we’re going to worry about having kids and getting them into adulthood in one piece without killing them. Good thing we’re all equipped to do both.
Are journalists incapable of doing two things at once? That’s the impression they give when, Chicken Little-like, they run around squawking that the Democrats can’t impeach Trump for high crimes, misdemeanors, extreme corruption & treason while also governing. If those journalists would put down their smart phones for two seconds and looked at the world, they’d SEE Democrats passing legislation (that Grim Reaper Mitch McTreason proudly kills) while also actively investigating the most corrupt POTUS in the Republic’s history.
Frankly, I wonder sometimes if most journalists can even do ONE thing at a time (that one thing being JOURNALISM). That Donald Trump is corrupt and a criminal with deep ties to Russian mobsters should not be a surprise. In fact, THAT should have been our collective starting place for Trumpism – it is nothing but a criminal enterprise, a mom n pop money laundering shop..
When the Republicans first tried to undermine the integrity of the Steele Dossier, they hauled Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS before the Senate Judiciary Committee on August 22, 2017, Simpson testified about Fusion’s process. Fusion was hired initially by the Washington Free Beacon, a right wing publication whose owners were Jeb Bush fans to do oppo research on Trump.
Simpson explained how Fusion first did their due diligence. They got their hands on every book, every magazine article or newspaper story, every TV show, every interview, every snippet of video with Donald Trump’s face in it and they read or watched it. They got it from Amazon and used book stores and ebay and even the Public Library. The picture of Trump that emerged from all this publicly available material convinced Simpson that Trump was a long-time criminal who’d used his Atlantic City casinos to launder Russian mob money.
That, Simpson explained, was why they contracted out to Chris Steele, former head of MI6’s Russia Desk. No one in the west knew anywhere near as much about Russia or had the network of connections that Steele had.
Due diligence shouldn’t be seen as “extra credit” that journalists can take or leave. Due diligence provides not only background but context. Due diligence provides perspective.
Having perspective allows you to see a subject from multiple points of view – not as in “everyone has an opinion”, but as in seeing the WHOLE picture (or as much as one can), one can see much more clearly what is and what isn’t.
That’s really the question. WHY doesn’t our press have the necessary perspective to report the biggest story any of us will ever be part of?
When we get to the post mortem part of the exercise, in addition to examining how the Republican party became this corrupt, we’ll need to inspect how and why our news media repeatedly normalized not only immoral behavior but outright CRIMINAL behavior.
We The People will have to do two things at once. Imagine.