The news media is not the enemy

The summertime has given me a necessary break from having to pay too close attention to what’s going on in the world, but nevertheless I can’t help but think about the issues of the day. As part of my myriad of assignments to get done, I needed to complete a critical discourse analysis on a given topic. Fake news very quickly became a part of my daily thought process and now I simply don’t look at communications in the same way. I’m constantly analyzing the subtext, the implications, and the words left unspoken in a given pice of text. My focus was not on the rise of news generated simply for the purpose of deceiving the less than discerning masses on Facebook, but rather what fake news had become as a tool for attacking the traditional news media. Naturally, I utilized the tweets of Donald Trump to perform this analysis and to find evidence for this particular way of using fake news.

I suspect Trump’s rhetoric as a whole really came to a head with that shooting down in Maryland. For months on end, the President has relentlessly attacked the news media, lobbing a host of insults and further intensifying public distrust. He has even gone so far as to call the news media “the enemy of the people.” His use of fake news spans a number of different uses, but he has taken to labeling any news organization that publishes politically inconvenient articles in this way.

We certainly don’t yet understand the motives behind the shooter at the Capital Gazette, but given the intense rhetoric being used against the news media, should we be surprised tensions might escalate to a point where violence is used? We’ve already seen lies spread on the internet escalate to a man entering a D.C. pizza shop with a loaded rifle asking to know where the child slaves are being held.

These thoughts ended up sounding way more partisan than intended. Those close to me know I seldom hide my opinions, but when it comes to the basal institutions which keep our democracy functioning, can we not come together and agree that the news media is just plain not the enemy of the people? This shouldn’t be confused with blind allegiance to the flow of information as I fully support a healthy amount of suspicion and critique being paid. Especially as media conglomerates have become ever more concentrated, a degree of skepticism is needed to keep them in check. The people have it in their best interest to openly question and to dive deeper into a topic to make an informed conclusion. To say the news media is the enemy is simply a bridge too far.