Miner Queries: Who you gonna believe?

This last Friday’s weather forecast offers a cautionary tale. For the entire week, we’d been warned about the blizzard approaching. Yet all week long, the various forecasting models had diverged widely.

Come Friday morning as the storm moved closer, school superintendents, among others, were faced with the decision to open as normal or to close. In our household, my husband’s school district opted to close for the day. Meanwhile, our daughter had gone to her school two hours early to practice for her district speech competition. Her school opted to stay open.

At home, I monitored weather all day, periodically checking various stations and web sites. And as the day wore on, it became clear that our location in Southwest Iowa was going to have very little precipitation. My daughter’s school got in a full day.

Monitoring our government is a lot like monitoring the weather. If you’re not checking multiple sources constantly, you probably don’t have the best overview of what’s happening.

I was surprised to see Paul Krugman describe this situation in politics in his Thursday New York Times column: “Why can’t Republicans govern? It’s not just that their party is committed to an ideology that says that government is always the problem, never the solution. Beyond that, they have systematically deprived themselves of the ability to analyze policies and learn from evidence, because hard thinking might lead someone to question received doctrine.”

That in a nutshell is America’s and, closer to home, Iowa’s problem.

If you rely on one or two news sources, you have no idea what’s really happening. The only way to get adequate information to cast informed votes, or even develop opinions about current events, is to monitor multiple media sources. This includes reading long running news sources like the New York Times or the Washington Post.

That’s not to say such sources don’t occasionally get it wrong. On the same day Krugman’s article appeared, Eric Boehlert, a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon Magazine, posted an editorial on Daily Kos titled, “The New York Times is overdue for a Russia reckoning. What went wrong in 2016?”

In this post, Boehlert outlines the fate of former Times public-editor Liz Spayd. In that role, Spayd acted as an internal watchdog, monitoring news coverage, answering reader questions and addressing their concerns. But in May 2017, Spayd’s position was eliminated, forcing her out of a job. Why?

According to Boehlert, in late 2016 and early 2017, Spayd had been criticizing the Times’ minimal coverage of the emerging Russian story. Boehlert writes, “She claimed readers had been ‘shortchanged’ on the Russia hacking story, while the Times newsroom seemed completely ‘turbocharged’ in covering Hillary Clinton's emails during the same election cycle.”

As we have learned since, Spayd correctly accessed the situation; however, no one at the Times has acknowledged their role in misinforming the public regarding both stories.

If I’d been relying solely on the New York Times for information, I might have missed the information about our president’s Russian connections, too. But I choose to read from a variety of sources as well as monitor public radio and multiple television news broadcasts. I compare these various sources daily to parse the truth.

No single source will ever give me that. I must seek it. No one source is going to pour truth in my ears.

So, who you gonna believe?

Why am I so angry?

After the 2016 election, I had a long conversation with one of my Trump-voting friends. “Why are you so angry?” he asked. I’ve heard it again since then.

Why am I so angry? Because for nearly 40 years – or my entire adult life – I’ve watched friends and family fall for economic and policy bunk to vote against their own best interests. I’ve struggled alongside them and had to listen to their puzzlement about why their lot keeps getting worse. Yet when I try to share facts and information that explain it, I am tarred as “liberal” and written off. Or I see their eyes glaze over, leading next to a shrug and the excuse that nothing they do will make a difference.

Meanwhile, we’re all working harder for less. So why do they think I’m angry?

I’m angry because these voters’ willful ignorance – whether because they refuse to acknowledge facts they deem “liberal” or because they find politics boring – costs us all daily.

This week Robert Reich came out with a column that explained this 40-year-plus marketing blitz. Salon Magazine published it under the headline, “The Big Economic Switcheroo.” In it, Reich explains how the rich have swindled Americans by lowering tax rates.

He writes: “The rich used to pay higher taxes to the government. Now, the government pays the rich interest on a swelling debt, caused largely by lower taxes on the rich. Which means a growing portion of everyone else’s taxes are now paying the rich interest on those loans, instead of paying for government services everyone needs.”

While Conservative Republican messaging has convinced voters that poor, black, brown people and anyone else they can tag as “Other” are robbing us, they are passing policies that increasingly strangle services we all rely on.

Paul Krugman at the New York Times described the problem more pointedly as “Trump’s Big Libertarian Experiment,” and he asks in the article’s subhead, “Does contaminated food smell like freedom?”

In the article, Krugman points out the division between the libertarian-leaning GOP base, that bought Reagan’s rhetoric about government being the problem, and the GOP establishment, whose goal has been shoveling money to the rich. As he concludes, “If a party is going to claim, year after year, to believe that government is the problem, not the solution, then complain bitterly when the government stops handing out checks, attention should be paid.

“And if you have libertarian leanings yourself, you should ask whether you’re happy with what’s happening with government partially out of the picture.”

During Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, I saw all this coming, thanks to a politically astute father. I’ve paid an economic price for Reagan's election. I paid more for my college education and loans, joined the workforce when starting wages were lower, and may be forced into retirement earlier while continuing to work part-time to make ends meet. So, is it any wonder I’m angry?

A willfully ignorant citizenry swayed by cheap and easy taglines and myths, created this mess. First, they fell for broadcast media distortions via cable news and talk radio pouring lies into their ears. Now they are falling for messages swirling through the world’s biggest grapevine aka the Internet.  

So yes, I’m angry. I may even be angry at you. But what I really wonder is:  Are you angry with yourself yet? And if so, what are you going to do about it? Because we’re the only solution to this mess.