Before the Massachusetts left can take action on the Trump administration’s concerning agenda, getting accurate information is critical
As a journalist and editor, I spend my life endeavoring to separate fact from fiction, signal from noise, and truth from falsehood. For over 100 years, masters of my profession have developed tools based on the scientific method to help practitioners like me and my crew at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism do that as effectively as possible.
As someone on the political left, I’ve also spent my life doing my level best to make our nation and our world more (small d) democratic and push back against forces that seek to make it less democratic.
The second inauguration of President Donald Trump a couple of weeks ago and his administration’s many swift actions since to mold American government to his liking—and more importantly to the liking of the billionaires behind him—are having the predictable result of freaking out Democratic Party stalwarts and people to their left alike. Especially in (so-called) blue states like Massachusetts.
So readers might logically expect me to immediately weigh in with prescriptions for action against Trump and his forces.
But I’m not prepared to do that yet because even though I’m an experienced journalist and a former academic besides, I’m still sifting through the massive tidal wave of misinformation that we’re all being flooded with of late. Said misinformation coming, sadly, from nearly all directions. Republicans, Democrats, the harder right, and the militant left are all spewing out millions of words and images about the current political situation. Most of which is patent nonsense layered with the most obnoxious propaganda conceivable when looked at critically and with the broad public interest in mind.
Left-wing political action based on such misinformation is about as pointless as one might imagine—missing forests for trees with every jerking lurch this way and that.
I will get more specific in my next missive, but for now I encourage fellow Bay State liberals, progressives, socialists, anarchists, and Greens (oh my!) to: a) read extremely widely on issues of the day to get out of whatever “information silo” you’re trapped in, b) learn to think like the people whose views you dislike to better understand their perspective, c) use reason and logic to analyze what you read (and watch and listen to) to the best of your ability, and d) always ask journalists’ favorite question “cui bono?” (who benefits?) when trying to judge whether some happening, person, or institution is good, bad, or indifferent by your increasingly refined standards.
Do this every day for the next many days and as you gradually start to get a clearer idea of what’s actually going on, then you can start thinking about what moves might lead our society toward more democracy and away from less.
Then I suspect that the actions you and your friends take will hit harder with much more positive effect.
In the meantime, independent journalists like my BINJ colleagues and I will redouble our efforts to report the news fairly and accurately in hopes of providing readers as much signal and as little noise about current events as possible. Despite the decks of politics, economics, technology, culture, and law being increasingly stacked against us.
This editorial was produced for HorizonMass, the independent, student-driven, news outlet of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service.
