Our heads are buried in our tiny screens for hours every day. Many of us think our electronic view of the world is more real than what we and our friends see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears. The mainstream news media was supposed to inform us about the world. Now, the media has blurred the line between news and fantasy. In truth, the talking heads feed us a wildly distorted picture of reality. Of course, we can test this with headline events, but there is also a deep-culture test as well. The saying from the health food industry is that we are what we eat. We are also the media we consume. I worry that many of us have swallowed too many lies.
Some of us are skeptical of the news media. As of September 2022, only 34 percent of us trust the United States news media “a great deal” to “a fair amount”. The rest of us trust the media “not very much” to “none at all.” The US news media has given us plenty of reasons to distrust them.
Looked at from the other perspective, 34 percent of us, and 70% of democrats trust the media a “great deal” to “a fair amount.” That discrepancy between democrats and non-democrats is growing and becomes more important every day.
Why are so many of us reluctant to believe the pretty people on the tiny screen? In the last few years, the mainstream news media has fed us distortions that are indistinguishable from lies. Many democrats now believe the “mostly peaceful riots” of 2020 and 2021 were legitimate political protests. The news stories deliberately ignored the billions of dollars in damage the rioters and looters caused. If history remains a guide, then many of the damaged buildings will remain empty for decades.
Many democrats now believe that it is perfectly normal for individuals to show up at early voting drop boxes and dump stacks of ballots… all while wearing disguises, dark glasses, and surgical gloves. It is just a coincidence that they photograph their stack of ballots with their cell phones… night after night after night. Many democrats think it perfectly acceptable for unexplained anomalies in the voting records, and for votes to suddenly change in the middle of the night after the polls closed.
In contrast, more than 40 percent of us think Biden’s election was illegitimate.
I could go on with other examples, but for me, the final proof of our divergent worldview is found in the right to bear arms. Are guns mostly used in mass murder or in armed defense? For many of us, the answer depends more on the media we watch than on DOJ statistics. Artificial fear breeds artificial solutions.
Watching a scary movie isn’t the same as being attacked in real life. Watching as the media reports a mass murder is vastly different from having an attacker break down your door. We responded in sympathetic horror as we watched the news more often than we responded to an actual attack on ourselves, our family, or even our friends. Note that almost all of us have seen and felt the news in the last year, but less than one percent of adults were the victims of violent crime. We have lost touch with other people and with real events. Fortunately for all of us, real violence is both rare and localized.
The nightly news brings violence into every home night after night. The entertainment industry delivers synthetic violence at the tap of a screen. People who are only exposed to this stylized media violence come up with theoretical answers as if they were re-writing a movie script.
“If criminals obeyed our gun laws then we wouldn’t have criminals using guns.
See, problem solved. The rest of you would have thought of that if you were as smart as I am.”
That fantasy simply falls apart when you realize that we have over 23 thousand firearms regulations already on the books. Violent criminals violate our existing gun laws millions of times a year. If robbers, rapists, and murderers obeyed our laws then they wouldn’t be robbers, rapists, and murderers.
I want to be crystal clear about one point. The victims of violent crime convinced me to protect myself and my family. I do not want anyone to become a victim of violent crime to learn that lesson. Instead, I want everyone to dig deeper. Learn from other people’s experiences and find real solutions that make you and your family safe.
Sources:
The idea of synthetic violence is from a comment by author Dan Wos.
Trust in the US media
Massive insurance losses after 2020 riots
Long term losses after 2020 riots
Study questions election results in six states
Poll questions election results
More than 40 undercover law enforcement informants leading January 6 protests
FBI data on 2019 violent crime
Murder is rare and localized
Stories of armed defense
