When Political Hatred Runs So Deep, Reality Doesn't Matter
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One of the big challenges Republicans are going to have to face in the coming years—something they should have been addressing all along—is the growing bias in the new media.
Oh, they know all about bias in the legacy media. They’ve been battling that for ages, but most journalists at that level were still trying to pretend to be unbiased. They were subtle about their jabs.
Then social media became a thing and Republicans still aren’t really addressing it, and here is where the media takes off the mask. Here, in the new media, they roll so far into their biases that they can’t recognize reality.
Take this tweet from Huffington Post’s Jennifer Bendery, who is apparently also president of the Washington Press Club Foundation.
Now, I’m clearly not a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination, but let me do a little math here.
2.1 million/2 = 1.05 million
1.05 million + 1.05 million = millions
I know, plurals are especially difficult for some people, even if they’ve spent most of the last decade writing for the Huffington Post. Yet they’re not exactly rocket science either.
Bendery, like so many others in left-wing journalism, has done is warped her reality around one idea above all others: The Trump administration is wrong.
In this case, because it was just 2.1 million, it didn’t count as millions because…well, I don’t know why. It’s clearly more than one million, after all, but because Vice President Mike Pence was the one to use the word, it takes on a different meaning.
And that’s a problem.
Journalists use words to convey ideas. That’s what words are there for, after all. Yet in order for words to work appropriately, they need to have clear meanings. They can have more than one, but those definitions still need to be clear.
What we can’t have is an ever-shifting miasma of definitions that only apply when certain people use those terms, even if that’s not what they meant either.
Yet Bendery is far from the only one we’ve seen this from. This is just a recent example.
For four years now, the media has used a different set of rules for the Trump administration and the right in general when compared to the left. Armed citizens merely standing around were a violent protest while cities burning were “mostly peaceful,” for example.
Many argue the left is lying, that they’re intentionally making up stuff to make the right look bad, and sure, there’s probably plenty of that going on, but that’s not all of it.
No, these people are warping their perceptions of reality so much so that literally everything their opponents do is wrong, even if it’s something they’ve been doing for years.
Take sanctuary cities, for example.
For years, cities have decided they wouldn’t enforce immigration laws in their communities. They opened the doors to illegal immigrants and have made it clear they’re not going to do a thing about it.
That was fine.
Then some cities decided they were going to do the same with gun control. Pass all you want, but some cities will simply not enforce any of those new rules. They became Second Amendment sanctuaries.
Yet somehow this was different, this was wrong. The reality warped in such a way that they could claim it and tell themselves they weren’t hypocrites when they looked at themselves in the mirror at night.
They believed it.
And the right has no real counter for this. Oh, you’ve got people like me who write stuff that counters it, but the people who most need to see it will dismiss us because we’re not writing for the New York Times or talking on CNN. We simply don’t count.
Meanwhile, the ones that “count” are deluding themselves to such a high degree that the ordinary rules of the English language no longer count. Not for them and not when they’re talking about the Trump administration and his supporters.
For them, reality distorts into something completely different, something none of us would begin to recognize, and if we don’t figure out how to counter that, we’re going to have even bigger problems in coming years.
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