Dear American Main Stream Media:

I’m going to give you “the benefit of the doubt” here and assume that the REASON you employ “benefit of the doubt” journalism isn’t because you’re malicious assholes but because you suck at your jobs.  While I know that, on the surface, “benefit of the doubt” journalism is just you trying to be fair, you’ve confused “trying to be fair” with being a total moron.

If you walked into a room with no knowledge of the room itself or anything that’s gone on inside of it, you would be justified (and even applauded) for NOT drawing any conclusions about the room (or what’s happening in it) until you’ve learned enough TO justify whatever conclusion you reach.  In that instance, you SHOULD “give the benefit of the doubt” — because there is doubt.

However.  If you’d been in the room many times before… knew most of the people “in” the room and “why” they were in it (in order to do…), you wouldn’t have many doubts about the room; you’d have context for the room.  You’d know enough to NOT give the benefit of the doubt — cos you’d have no doubt.  I believe in journalism it’s called “background”.

It’s my understanding  (and I’m not a journalist by trade though I’ve become a “quasi-journalist” via Life Path (I’d heartily recommend my series BLUNT TRUTHS at Weedmaps — even if I wasn’t completely and totally biased) that background is supposed to “inform” the writer’s view — give it nuance, detail, flavor — and context. The kind of context that would make giving someone like, say, Donald Trump, the “benefit of the doubt” foolish.  Or stupid.  Or naive..

Or complicit?

The “benefit of the doubt” is what that frog blithely swimming in that slowly heating water gives to the guy in the chef’s hat.  A time will come however when that frog won’t give the chef the benefit of the doubt anymore — but only because the frog will be dead (boiled alive) and on its way to someone’s dinner plate.