Last month, I wrote a piece for Patreon patrons in which I posed the idea that, increasingly, Americans no longer share the same reality. The impetus for that piece was the Harris-Trump debate and how people’s political views and preferred narratives shaped how people saw the debate and who they deemed the winner. I had no idea when I penned that piece that in mere weeks America’s inability to share a baseline for reality would have real-life impacts beyond the election season.
I believe that the main reason we no longer share a baseline of reality is in part due to the shifting media landscape, which has been replaced by social media, which is essentially the Wild West of Media.
Once upon a time, we received our news from journalists in the form of the daily newspaper and the nightly news. If you are old enough to remember, your local news came on at 4-ish and 5-ish, then we had the world news around 6. We picked up the daily local newspaper in the morning and, in some markets, you even had an evening edition. If you wanted to know more about national news, you had papers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, etc.
Of course, the old world of news was flawed, starting with the fact that it wasn’t inclusive. Journalism was largely the purview of white men, and it was not an industry that welcomed difference—which meant those other voices and stories were much more rarely shared. “Minorities” (even when their numbers were actually pretty sizable and calling them such was kind of laughable) and the marginalized got token attention at best, or attention that often misrepresented them.
It’s what initially made social media a democratizing tool; all kinds of people could bring their voices and stories to the public square. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, stated many times that he saw sites such as his as a kind of public gathering place and area for community connection and awareness. After all, revolutions and major social justice movements were essentially launched and broadcast using such platforms. Remember the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter?
Alas, social media has changed and what was once viewed as a tool to lift voices has become a series of chaos machines that have destroyed traditional media and left us at the mercy of unscrupulous people—hello Elon, influencers, misinformation, bots and everyone looking to hustle! And that wouldn’t be so bad if traditional media hadn’t morphed into an a la carte plan that requires monthly subscriptions to access the news and if independent media hadn’t largely been erased. As people have moved away from cable television and move to streaming, that means many don’t even get the benefit of watching news programming. Granted, what network you watch matters too, since if you are watching Fox News—well, they have their own reality.
So why does any of this matter? I mean, is it really a big deal if folks are presenting their altered version of reality—oops, I mean, point of view—and speaking to their audience? Yes, it does.
Several weeks ago, Hurricane Helene hit the mountains of North Carolina and parts of Tennessee and other states that aren’t anywhere near the coast. Areas that had no reason to assume that they would be hit by a hurricane, much less have rural towns wiped out.
If you live in the mountains of North Carolina, you aren’t familiar with federal disaster relief programs for a hurricane. That would be like a freak snowstorm hitting Florida and expecting Floridians to know how to navigate the aftermath of a massive blizzard.
Due to the extent of Helene and the impact it had in places where it should not have had an impact, it took FEMA several days to get boots on the ground in some of the more remote places that were impacted. From a planning and logistics perspective, this makes sense—again, these are not areas normally impacted by hurricanes.
Well, in that time, influencers with large platforms and others started to say that FEMA wasn’t helping with recovery and that the emergency $750 that FEMA offers in the immediate aftermath of a disaster to assist with immediate needs was all the money that people were going to receive because FEMA was out of money due to supporting undocumented immigrants.
While this lie originated on the right, with the Trump crowd, it was also being parroted by folks on the left who are not happy with Biden and his stance on Israel. If this intentional disinformation wasn’t bad enough, this past weekend FEMA received threats from a militia that led the agency to halt disaster relief efforts on the ground in rural North Carolina.
Our lack of a shared reality is no longer just a matter of a difference of political opinion, increasingly it has real-life implications. I mean, who the hell threatens the FEMA workers? Also, why aren’t people going to the FEMA website to get information? That’s right, increasingly don’t go to websites when they can get their “news” and information from their social media platform of their choosing.
Days after Hurricane Helene, Hurricane Milton hit Central Florida, and while it was originally projected to be a Category 5 storm, thankfully it did weaken and while damage was extensive in some areas it was nowhere near the original projection. With two back-to-back intensely damaging storms in a matter of days, we now have politicians on the right who are insistent that the Democratic Party is somehow controlling the weather and directing these storms.
That’s right, there are people in elected offices in this country who are telling their constituents and the world that a political party is controlling the weather. It would almost be laughable except that there are people who take politicians words as truth and, well, all we must do is look at the followers of Trump to see how well that works. Though the left is not immune from its own silo of preferred narrative.
Growing numbers on the left truly do not believe there is any discernible difference between the two candidates or parties and with growing numbers of people not grasping what exactly the president can and can’t do, it is making for a major fissure even between those who traditionally have been aligned on many things. To be fair, there are areas where the two parties are very similar—the support of Israel for starters is one of them. However, Democrats as a whole are not trying to take us back to the 1950s and strip away our rights—rights that now exist but if left to the Republicans, may not exist much longer (as the reversal of Roe v Wade should have taught us, but many people still aren’t paying attention).
In a world where factual news is harder to access and we rely on influencers and social media to fill the void, we are at the mercy of whoever’s truth we are consuming. It’s why so many pressing issues that are important are not being talked about. It’s why we have candidates making the rounds on podcasts to inform the public of what they stand for, since in today’s world, people can’t easily access that information, especially at a time when both media literacy and general literacy are low. The average American reads at a 7th to 8th grade level, with more than half lacking English literacy proficiency.
In a country where people don’t or can’t read and access to information is hard to come by, it makes social media and podcasts the perfect vehicle to consume information, which is why it’s easy for people to be duped by unscrupulous actors on these platforms. So much of the news online is presented in bite-sized, easy-to-digest nuggets with a slice of entertainment. These platforms reward those who can create engagement and, sadly, many who create the highest levels of engagement aren’t dealing in full facts or sometimes any facts. It’s a perfect storm for larger societal problems.
Including the fact that public health is being decimated by bad players online and resistance to public health and facts has gone mainstream as The New York Times recently reported. Resistance to vaccines is not new—the anti-vax movement started to grow almost two decades ago, spurred on by pre-influencers and questionable medical professionals—but the pandemic has turned what was still a fringe group into a mainstream one as vaccination rates drop and we are seeing pockets of flare-ups on diseases that vaccines had damn near eradicated. The early pandemic precautions were standard public health procedures for pandemics, but they came to be seen as overreach and were politicized and, well, it’s safe to say that we have lost the plot on COVID and by extension general public health.
Even now, how we approach COVID is not rooted in the reality of disease. COVID is still a novel disease, and almost five years into it, the data have emerged that is clear that COVID is not a respiratory disease. COVID impacts the entire body and leaves you at a greater risk for adverse outcomes such as heart attacks and strokes. It is a vascular disease. Though in the absence of a cure and the general disdain for precautions that do keep you safe from COVID, we as a collective have decided to just live a shared alternate reality where we treat COVID as a respiratory inconvenience, rather than as the ticking time bomb and mass disabling disease that it really is. We pretend that it is normal for so many people to be dying, particularly younger people, and that everything is normal and cool somehow. We have created an alternate reality that is shared by the masses and generally accepted, but that does not make it the truth.
The thing is when we don’t share reality, we are missing the things that can truly harm all of us. When we only focus on segments of reality or the reality of our choosing, we deny the fact that, often, multiple things can be true at the same time—including the fact that what is happening in Gaza and now Lebanon is not acceptable and that our own country is in deep shit and given that the world’s richest man is in a reported frenzy to get Donald Trump elected…well, you would think we should all pay attention to that. Why does a man who controls so much want to see a semi-literate buffoon installed in the Oval Office? Sure, maybe it is about just wanting access to more government contracts, but we don’t know that and given Trump’s decline and the odious and authoritarian bent of JD Vance, to not even ponder this possible reality is a risky endeavor.
There have always been a few different realities in the United States, especially when it comes to race and class. I mean, I am a Black woman and my reality is not the same as a white woman’s. But in today’s world, we are living in a time when basic things that we all used to agree on are no longer viewed through the same lens, and we are being fed these alternate realities by people who profit from our confusion and discontent. More views, more clicks, more money. It has also become harder and harder to seek the truth as the traditional tools for finding accurate information are not easily accessible or reliable as they once were—and for younger generations, they might not even be aware of the tools to find the truth.
Friends, just as Black Lives Matter and Palestinian Lives Matter. So does the truth—Truth Matters and Reality Matters. If we lose sight of that, we lose everything.
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Thanks to Bob Woodward, the truth regarding tRump, the truth that I exposed several times over the years, has broken free, has broken through the lies and deceptions he used, as well as others, to camouflage his true purpose and intentions.