IN A TRUMPED UP WORLD

I’ve become a news junkie, mad, compulsive since the first debates over a year ago. Right now, as I try to write in my office, with the door shut, literally every pet in here making a racket because Leah is asleep and they want to be on the bed like they usually are in the morning—right now, I feel a moment passing over me. Reading the news with a critical eye is politically active. No, it’s not going to protests, writing letters, calling senators, but it’s a step towards a world we need.

Lately there’s been a swarm of content about “Fake News,” which some think brought Trump to the bully pulpit. Honestly, those people who voted for Trump were going to vote for him regardless. Without “Fake News” they’d have seen Times and New Yorker and Post et al articles about the reality of Trump’s taxes, friends, secrets and they would have called us a bunch of liberal muckrakers. “Fake News” isn’t just on conservative sites. It’s all around us. The news that comes in, even through places like I mentioned above, has tiny cracks of bias that it’s important to have conversations about. There are stories between the stories that only some are bringing to the forefront.

We should all be exhuming our news rather than ingesting it. The news is dead once it leaves the lips of any journalist. And it’s our job to look at the death and discuss possible motives, talk amongst ourselves on buses, on twitter, with grandparents, etc.

Recently joining Twitter has me looking at the roots of conversations and maybe this is what sprung in me but I wish I had more capability to see the layering, the minutia. But maybe others do and maybe just uttering that wish will help me have the conversations I want to have, the digging.

E