The power and vulnerability of journalism
The simple fact is that the Republican Party, and the conservative movement that gave it life for the past 50-odd years, has mutated into something alien and dangerous. Whatever that chimeric creature is, there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop its growth. But one way to ensure that it gets larger and more dangerous is to deliberately ignore the reality of it when it’s right in front of your face. Half of our political ecosystem has gone irreducibly renegade, and to pretend it hasn’t is to fail journalism’s constitutional powers worse than Richard Nixon failed his.
Too often, we fail to be wounded by the stories we tell. Or, worse, we feel the wound but hide the pain. We hide it with cynicism. We hide it with cleverness. We hide it with easy repetition of nostrums and conjuring words that keep us from facing the overwhelming reality of the threat. We choose to operate on the same level of unreality that’s created for us. Perception is reality? That’s bunk. Reality is reality, and the job of journalism is not to pretend that perception is reality, but to hammer the reality home until the perception conforms to it.