We Are Losing a War of Words
It doesn't matter if we're right, we have to be heard. And then believed.
Issue #766 The Choice, Thursday, November 14, 2024
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“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
The origin of this philosophical phrase, whoever said it first, is murky at best. However, whoever that thoughtful person was may well have been prophesying what led to the devastating results of last week’s election and the return of Donald Trump.
OK, maybe not prophesying. Maybe it was just a crystal ball.
Here’s the thing: no doubt there is more than one lesson to be learned from Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris. The most important lesson, however, is that in today’s political climate, it doesn’t matter whether you’re right if most folks believe you’re wrong (it also doesn’t matter why they believe you’re wrong, even if their judgment is based on incorrect information, because the effect is the same). It also doesn’t matter what your record of achievement is if nobody saw it, and it doesn’t matter what you said if nobody heard it.
The best chance to win anymore is to make more noise louder and more consistently than the other guy and to be better and quicker at Whack-a-mole, batting down opposing viewpoints when and wherever those viewpoints dare to show themselves. This is a war of words, and only the most dominant, meaning those still ringing in voters' ears when the dust settles, will win the day.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris accomplished a list of victories that should have been celebrated non-stop nationwide as nothing short of miraculous (no one in their right mind could have foreseen in 2020 that by 2024, the Biden-Harris team would somehow manage to create an economy widely recognized as the envy of the world). And when the mainstream media wasn’t obsessing over Biden’s age or other irrelevant trivia, they sometimes squeezed those miracles in.
But mostly, we were bombarded with the trivia, and that’s when we weren’t busy being bombarded by the misinformation and disinformation. Meanwhile, the far more dominant right-wing media twisted and disfigured those accomplishments to such a degree that it seemed like the mainstream media began to question their own judgment.
In the long run? Sure, our side needs to figure out a way to better educate the population so they can make better choices. There’s no doubt about that. But no way happens if our side doesn’t find a way to punch a hole through the right-wing/MAGA mastery of media manipulation and control. Politics is an entirely new game now that has little to do with right and wrong – or at least far less so than it did before.
It’s all about making the public believe what you’re saying, and this time, the majority of Americans chose to believe MAGA. MAGA is better at making itself believable to more people, as hard as that is to digest and believe.
The best article I have read so far that explains how far behind we are in adapting to this new terrain was authored by Michael Tomasky in The New Republic. It would be well worth your time to check it out. Here’s a quote:
“Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.”
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backward to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. All the outlets I listed in the above paragraph set the agenda. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.”
This doesn’t mean we fight fire with fire, which would only mean being as ugly and manipulative as MAGA. What it does mean is bringing a hell of a lot more water to the fight to drown them out when and wherever we can in the coming years. Our voice needs to become the loudest voice in the room.
This needs to happen not only to amplify our accomplishments but to accurately and loudly assign the blame where it belongs when Trump and MAGA begin to screw up, which will be shortly. But it won’t be enough to shout and point because we have been doing that for more than eight years. We will have to shout, point, and then make our words stick so hard that no amount of disinformation will be able to distort or peel them away.
If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, then it doesn’t matter whether that tree makes a sound or not. We need to be about what matters.
I can only marvel at thinking you’ve been unheard. It’s been a roar in my ears for years, and unfortunately your nicely written article only reinforces that you think that more than half the country are ignorant, willfully misinformed & dupes of the right. The MSM, which I’ve watched, alongside the other outlets you named, has been hopelessly biased. The lies, ON BOTH SIDES, persist. it makes me sad that both are so entrenched. I’m of the opinion that we all have more in common than we do not. Perhaps we could all work on healing the breach and understanding each other, rather than wailing about the perceived injustices? However, given the record of the last 20 years- I don’t see that happening. Here’s the big question- would you rather be right or happy?