News doesn’t have to be fake to be a lie

Recently, I took one of those silly online tests. I don’t do it often as most are inane (and I suspect are skewed to make the subject seem smarter than in reality so he will click on the ads and re-post the link) but this one looked interesting as it purported to estimate your vocabulary. I can’t remember the exact results but it was something like my vocabulary was 30,000 words which was more than 97.7% of people. I just retook one of those tests and this was the result – fairly similar to what I remember from the first time:

I’m not surprised by the results, although I think they are a little high, as I was once even lauded by a journalist at the South China Morning Post with the accolade that I was the “Charles Dickens of Asia” for my investment reports on global banking giant HSBC. As Lewis Carroll (best known for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) proved in his nonsense poem the “Jabberwocky”, you can create an entire prose using completely made up words and a reasonably intelligent reader can still understand the meaning through context. So it isn’t often that I read something with a word that is so obtuse and archaic that I have to run to the dictionary to find out what it means. In this case, CBC opinion writer Neil Macdonald managed to confound me in a way that made “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves” make complete sense by comparison.

Taken as a photo, a moment in time, what’s about to happen on the steps of the U.S. Capitol is concussive; a palimpsest from a rougher, crueler era that was merely painted over, rather than transformed, by the progressive advances that so many people assumed would continue, inevitably, with every passing year.

What in the world is a palimpsest? I’m not even sure how to pronounce it. Apparently, it is “a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.” This word is an artifact of an age when parchment and canvass was rare and costly; when writers would reuse the paper and painters would reuse canvas by erasing or covering over the original work. But Neil has this message for his fellow Canadian lefties: “So, liberals, tone down the snark. Because while every starchy little condescending shame-tweet might help you feel superior, it really just empowers Trump’s Canadian pretenders… There are millions of people out there who aren’t terribly interested in a lecture about the difference between “cisnormative” and “heteronormative,” and how both words supposedly describe something shameful”.

OK, I get it Neil. You have, in Trump terms… a HUUUGE vocabulary of arcane words and love to use them constantly in a pathetic attempt to show how intellectually superior you are. You’re a clever liberal who has correctly assessed that there is a large group of fellow citizens that are tired of the over-educated urban Toronto liberal elite bashing them for decades and calling them racists, xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists and bigots while condescendingly mocking their ignorant, uneducated, rural, hillbilly, upbringing. You’re unfortunately not smart enough to follow your own advise.

This is what Neil has to say about Trump supporters. “Trump nation then jumps in, angrily raining down filth on social media and comment sections. To them, the facts are what their hero says the facts are. Up can be down, the sun can rise in the west, a sparse crowd can be the largest in history.” In other words, to Neil, Trump supporters are a bunch of ignorant, lying, frothing-at-the-mouth, rabble. Here’s what Neil has to say in another article. “But it is true that urban liberals regard Trump-nation conservatives as coarse, offensive, mildly defective mouth-breathers… They’re not just ascendant, they’ve beaten the living daylights out of liberals, urinated on their bruised bodies, sliced off their ears and poured sugar into their gas tanks.” I’ll give Neil this, he sure can turn a phrase with his pen. But if that’s his idea of “toning down the snark”, I’m afraid he has failed miserably.

Why is there this widespread and increasing distrust of the media? The growth of the internet and social media is probably the one overwhelming reason. In the old days, it took a lot of money and infrastructure to build a nation-wide media platform. You needed studios and reporters everywhere across the country and affiliates, equipment and broadcast rights. Today, you need a laptop (which you can buy on eBay cheap) and a high-speed internet connection (which you can get at Starbucks) to reach the same audience. People’s preferences are also easier to pander to in the modern internet era. The conservatives like neanderthals huddling around a campfire finding safety in numbers, frequent their own right-wing platforms like Drudge Report, The Blaze, and Beitbart. The liberals, like the “herd of independent thinkers” that they are congregate around their watering holes like Huffington Post, Slate, and Politico. Neither side seems interested in even exploring the possibility that the other side might occasionally have a point resulting in further alienation from the other side and group-think within each side with a constant feedback loop of back-patting self-admiration and congratulations.

My personal social media feed is heavily dominated by liberal newsfeeds being “shared” by my “friends”. That shouldn’t be surprising since my background is deeply embedded with the urban, highly-educated, latte-sipping, liberal elite crowd. I just happen to not agree with their views on most of the topics from environmental protection to social justice and economics. I also have one rural friend who serves to bombard me with daily Christian and right-wing propaganda. Occasionally while reading through that quagmire of nonsense, I start to understand why liberals are arrogant and condescending when they view the right as being a bunch of uneducated conspiracy-theory loving rednecks.

What about the mainstream media? As society has fractured into their own enclosed and self-sustaining camps, being in the centre is not a good place. In the First World War, they used to call the area in between the trenches of two opposing forces “No Man’s Land”. While media in general (and especially print media) has been in decline for some time given the advent of the internet, the centre has been hardest hit for viewership/readership as people want to see and read news that suits their tastes and biases. I knew this years ago when I saw a survey showing CNN was declining rapidly as the primary televised news source as conservatives flocked to Fox News and liberals went to MSNBC. Given what I have seen more recently (especially with coverage of the US election), I think that CNN gave up trying to be impartial and decided to tack left instead of fade into oblivion. Nobody wants to be in “No Man’s Land” when the machine gun fire lights up and artillery shells start falling.

Most of the mainstream media I would say has chosen, like CNN, to go to the left and at least be “liberal-lite” in their coverage. Again, that’s hardly surprising because journalists, like myself, tend to be well-educated (if you consider journalism school an education… OK that was a cheap shot, I apologise), urban dwelling, low-fat lactose-free latte sipping sophisticates, which makes them far more likely to be lefties. Again, my problem is not with the bias itself, its with the smug way that journalists like to portray themselves as being independent and impartial reporters of the news with a solemn fourth-estate duty to protect society from the avarices of government and evil corporations – when they are not. Here’s what my newsfeed sent to my iPhone while I was watching the Phoenix Open in Arizona:

Notice that my clickbait feed to CBC reads, “Nexus cards revoked on both sides of border following U.S. executive order.” Well that’s a problem given that I am sitting with a bunch of drunk Americans around the 16th hole at TPC Scottsdale in Phoenix and have to fly back to Canada in four days. Better check out what that is all about after Phil Mickelson hits his tee shot. Whack! On the green… Click… Oh wait, the article itself has added ONE WORD to the front of its title and it has now become (emphasis added) “SOME Nexus cards revoked on both sides of border following U.S. executive order”. What a big difference one little conditional four letter word can make. Nonetheless, still better safe than sorry and so I go to check to see if I’m affected. Wait a second, the article goes on to say, “Less than one week after U.S. President Donald Trump’s travel ban against citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries, two men  — one a Canadian resident and another an American resident — suddenly had their Nexus cards revoked, both on the same day.” Within a minute, the news has gone from all Nexus cards were revoked, to some were revoked, to two men had them revoked; and they’re Muslim so Trump’s a racist Islamophobe. What I don’t get is why so-called smart and clever journalists are still wondering why people are increasingly distrustful of the media; I suggest a good look in the mirror while you’re scratching your puzzled heads. Just as every video-taped vicious beating of a black civilian erodes the public faith and trust in our police force; every politically-correct slant, omission of facts, and downright information manipulation and selective reporting erodes our faith in the media. I tell my kids not to be journalists. Its a dying industry and a dead-end career. They’d be better off pursuing more noble endeavors like sanitation engineering.