Independent Media Should Use Their Words As Weapons – Never Back Down

As the final popular vote count for the 2016 presidential election by the Cook Political Report shows Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump, since the election, America and the world are still trying to make sense of the jolt they experienced with him winning the electoral college vote, setting off America’s first dictator alert. The weekend news round-up shows that followed attempted put everything into perspective, one of them being WAMU’s highly-rated and respected The Diane Rehm Show from Washington. For two hours they spoke about the week’s issues; the first hour covers domestic and the second is always on international issues. Even in the second hour there was no escape from acknowledging a new world with Donald Trump.

Echo Chamber Used To Disarm Protests Against Trump

NOW: @tgjelten at the mic putting the week in context with @laurameckler @HotlineJosh @ktumulty https://t.co/NnIPPR3o4i

— The Diane Rehm Show (@drshow) November 11, 2016

Guests for the first hour included Karen Tumulty — a national political reporter for the Washington Post, who weighed in with the other pundits as to why they could not predict the wave of populism that rolled over them as it did that Tuesday. When they began to speak about the anti-Trump protests — which were in their third day at the time — it was Tumulty who blamed the “echo chamber” where voters from both sides become selectively indoctrinated in their views, from where they get their news.

“Yeah, and ironically, a lot of those people who are out there protesting are the very same people who were horrified when Donald Trump said that he may not accept the results of this election. So I just think that, you know, everybody’s in their own echo chamber here and that — there’s no unification until people can step out of those.”

After she pointed out the irony, there was mild laughter in the room before she offered the solution that unification was only possible if people simply stepped out of their closed-in echo-chambers. But her reasoning is frustrating as it no longer applies as a valid solution as we were all thrown into a hellish new world, after passing the threshold into a horrific fascistic dimension on Election night. For the old guard in media punditry to resort to lame solutions as if nothing traumatic had just happened, is like putting a band-aid on mutilated corpse. She would do this again later in the program but this time with a caller.

The Old Guards Of Mainstream Media Under Threat?

More specifically, what is clear here is that the mentioned old guards of the media still won’t acknowledge that social media is relevant to their industry. Currently, social media giant Facebook is reportedly trying to solve the problems around the distribution of fake news which is being blamed for why Donald Trump won the election. On the surface — which I will not dive past — this might very well be true as mainstream media was consistently trying to fight off Donald Trump’s fake news by shifting into fifth-gear to fact checking everything. Tumulty makes it seem as if people are willingly taking residence in their own echo chambers, but she neglects to point out when it was obvious earlier this year that we didn’t have a choice. This was when Trump’s surrogate Corey Lewandowski penetrated the walls of CNN, where they eagerly gave him a soapbox to spew out his own “facts.”

Echo Chamber Needs To Be Reinforced, Not Weakened

Obviously this isn’t the topic they were discussing, but she should pay more attention and acknowledge that this echo chamber she was talking about is unavoidable because Donald Trump’s has increased in size. Overall, that being her “go-to” to explain the cause for the country’s divisions is lazy. As if she stopped paying attention to what she was saying and had already given up on giving the matter any more thought, leaving her mouth on auto. And while the echo chamber reasoning isn’t necessarily referring to fake news but rather more about the biases enforced in searching for news that supports the reader’s view, these rival bias is broad. Now with the guaranteed frequent daily insight of a President Donald Trump, there echo chambers are actually become scarce. All of the biases in media will now be determined by what Donald Trump dismisses and what he accepts as true because throughout his campaign, he has accused the media of lying and conspiring against him.

All of Donald Trump’s surrogates — Lewandowski included — have done what has never been done before: they’ve used the same media on which they’re being interviewed to attack it, or to deflect the attacks on them, aggressively. Or they continue to hammer away at how unfair they feel the media is against them until they settle it, exhausting the reporter’s determination against the clock, before they have to move on. If the echo chamber is supposed to be a safe haven for biased points of view, it should no longer be seen as the reason for our divisions and why we can no longer move forward. Rather, the echo chambers that we have left should be reinforced against the constant assault the mainstream has normalized because it is the only way we’re going to be able to defend and protect progress, in the era of Donald Trump.

Featured image by Mathias Wasik via Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0