The Little Things

It’s relatively easy to play Monday morning quarterback, to explain what happened in an election a few hours or a few days or even a few weeks after it is over. Not that those things don’t deserve to be done, of course. I just feel that bloggers and other media critics should make some pointed observations before the election.

You know, put some skin in the game.

I recognize that we are collectively drowning in a sea of twisted evil coming from some crazy people who use the language of our President and who wear his hats, and who chant “lock her up” with great regularity.

Then they say it’s only a joke, or the other side does it too, or the media is really anti-American and lies all the time. You know, the kind of excuses that  six-year-olds give when they are caught doing something really bad.

So, before the election, let me look at some little things. Why? Because the big things are already right out there in front of us, written in letters of fire 20 feet tall. They can only be ignored by people who will not see, and you know what the bible says about that.

Now I will not be talking about the ugly throbbing evil that came out from under a rock when the GOP candidates started saying it was all right to spout unchecked filth. You know - don’t take the President literally when he says he doesn’t know who David Duke is.

And I refuse - absolutely refuse - to get into any discussion of what is more evil - to kill a defenseless six year old school girl and lots of her classmates or to kill a 97 year old woman praying in a Temple and lots of her fellow congregants. Or even to condemn that violence one minute and encourage it the next.

Nor will I make predictions about what will happen after Election Day plays itself out. I will leave predictions of the election results to the Sunday newspapers and really good predictors like Nate Silver’s 538.

There is more than enough to look at some of the little things that are going on, almost unnoticed under those burning letters of fire. Lots of stuff will happen because of the election, and lots of stuff will happen despite it. And little things can mean a lot. It’s a lesson we learn over and over again.

So, here’s what I see us talking about after Election Day,  in no particular order. (The numbers are just ironic internal dialogue)

                                                               And Here It Is

1 - Just who is who? We will be asking this a lot before the 2020 vote. 

The question is a belated notice that a lot of the political advertising this year didn’t really show who was paying for the ads. Oh, they were tagged with a “paid for” label at the end, but I doubt if one person in a hundred bothered to track who was behind those sponsors, or behind the people behind them. Are you the candidate of big pharma, or big unions, or the military-industrial complex? How will we ever know unless those ads sport a party label.

Right now, we live under a convenient fiction - approved by the Supreme Court - that while donations to political parties must be reported, any corporation has the right to free speech and can give as much money as they like to “independent’ groups which promise - swear to god - that they are not co-ordinating their ads with political parties.

1a - A sub-group. A funny thing happened to a lot of political campaign signs in my neighborhood this year. You couldn’t tell which party was behind some of the candidates. They didn’t have traditional campaign colors, where every candidate in one party had one color scheme and every candidate in the other had a different one. Is it just an effort to show how independent the candidates are of the party that nominated them, carried petitions for them and is financing them? Or is it just a subtle effort to promote name recognition, kind of like those pictures of an attractive model and the brand name in the corner, without even showing the product?

Are we supposed to believe that people spending big money on the candidates picked by the Republicans and the Democrats really wants to support independent candidates who just happen to be running on those party lines?

That is kind of like a big company announcing they are conducting a nationwide search for a new vice president, and ending up with the current President’s son. Shocked, we should be. Shocked.

2 - Introspection, 2.0. Two years ago, after the election of Donald Trump and the total takeover of the federal government by the Republican Party, the big media outfits started looking inward (OK, most of them) to figure out what happened. The talked about how they covered lie after provable lie without calling out the liars, and allowing any outrageous claim to stand as true, for fear of being accused of censorship of a political candidate. Sound familiar? 

I hope we don’t go through that charade again. Just go out for a sandwich, admit you screwed up, and try not to do it again in 2020.  Remember that fairness and balance does not mean giving each side of a campaign the same amount of time and space. “Gee, Mr. Hitler, why do you want to attack France?’ shouldn’t be a topic for a 30 minute debate, with each side getting 12 minutes and three minutes for opening and closing statements.

3 - Red Meat. We used to make fun of the television mantra “if it bleeds, it leads.” It’s what the news show people used to use to decide which story should get the cherished lead spot on the evening news show. An in-depth financial analysis of the state budget? Nope. A fire with a lot of firemen running around? Maybe. A plane crash half way around the world that killed 243 people? Do we have video?

Well, the red meat of elections are baseless accusations, yelled loudly and presented as fact without actually being fact-checked. Remember the pledges of the news media to check out stories for factual content before they are run? How quaint that was.

4 - Love that face time. A lot of news, or what passes for news, seems to be taken up by people saying the same thing over and over again. Now, I know a lot of this is understandable - the audience won’t line up and all watch a news show at the same time, and the people who can’t see something at 9 a.m. deserve a chance to see it at 11 a.m. or 3 p.m. - but must everyone on the show (and I don’t care which show) smile and laugh at the same thing. Every time? 

There is not one single network commentator alive today who could hold a candle to Robin Williams or Jack Benny or Sinbad, so why not just report the news. Then people can be shocked or angry about it, or maybe just do what news people are supposed to do - be objective and not comment on the content of a story in any way. Leave that to The View and The Talk.

5 - Fact Check. It seems almost quaint now, but once - a long, long time ago - the claims of candidates were actually checked by the news media. Oh, it took a while in that long-ago age before high-speed computers, but we have a new tool that could be put to use to actually see if the things a candidate is saying are actually, well, true.

Imagine if there was some really good AI program  - or maybe a half dozen human researchers - turned loose on the claims of all candidates for national office, checking what they say against a world filled with data bases. Now you can’t check claims that candidate X or Y will truly bring prosperity and increase employment, but you can ask who “everybody’ is when a candidate or a press agent says “everybody says that’s the biggest problem.”  Want to talk about health care, then when you promise everyone will have access to a doctor, the little AI program would check to see if you actually have a plan. If not, the story should say Candidate Jones says he wants to do this, but doesn’t have any idea on how to do it.

You know, a list like this could go on forever. I’ll stop it here. Read it once or twice, have a good meal. Get lots of sleep, and go out and vote.