I'm Naming It

What year did we have Civics* in high school? That's the year I sat in one of those uncomfortable chairs with the attached desk and listened to Mr. Berger talk about the propaganda techniques that allowed the Nazis to murder millions of Jews and then he told us of the propaganda techniques being employed in the Soviet Union, with its state-run media and silencing of dissenting voices.

I had just read The Diary of Anne Frank. Anne Frank a teenage girl like me, hidden away in an attic for years, writing in her diary - she even named it - before being snatched away to unspeakable horror after someone reported their hideaway. She died, never to have a chance to make real the dreams she shared with "Dear Kitty."

People - folks like us baby boomers sitting in Mr. Berger's classroom in the 1960s - shook their heads and thought it can't happen here. We had Walter Cronkite on the news every night. We had The Buffalo Evening News and The Bradford Era and The Olean Times Herald delivered to our doors every day by the paperboys and papergirls, some of whom were likely in that classroom. We had The Potter Enterprise for our local news and I knew that was dependable because my mother and my aunt and uncle and grandfather worked there.

In fact, my journalist grandfather wrote this in  1948:

"True facts." There is one that gets Golly down. If the fact is a truth, as our dictionary states, what other facts are there except true? Golly would like to know.

Remember when the news media were hesitant to brand any politician as a liar? A radio piece** I distinctly remember, featured various NPR correspondents and editors discussing the terminology, finally giving Trump and his minions a pass on what appeared from my vantage point to be blatant lies. And I wondered at the time why the media was so hesitant to call lying people liars. It was the time of Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts."

Now it's commonplace for Trump's lies to be called out. Lies about the economy, lies about 'domestic terrorists,' lies about liaisons with Jeffrey Epstein, lies about Greenland and lies about tariffs, lies about the 2020 election, lies about the East Wing, lies about the Kennedy Center. But is it too late?

Have you put your attention on a federal government website lately? The White House site welcomes us to the Golden Age. Then we're directed to January 6: The Real Story.

And if  you want to be truly chilled, take a look at the Media Offenders tab on that White House site: "A Record of the Media's False and Misleading Stories Flagged by The White House. Scroll for the Truth." There's even a link to "submit a tip."

We've been told and continue to be told by our government that the media - journalists charged with keeping an eye on the workings of the people's (yours and mine) elected representatives  – is 'fake', 'dishonest', 'biased', 'liberal.' And not only are we instructed to disbelieve that which we've seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears, we're asked to report the truth-tellers.

I ask, as a former public relations person, and more importantly as a thinking, observant human being, how can this be? Are we really going to allow this to continue - this artifice, these distortions, these lies?

*1960s American public high-school students were typically required to take three courses in civics—Civics, Problems of Democracy, and U.S. Government.

**I had to look up that piece to check my memory and I link it here. I believe it wasn't until shortly before the 2020 election that liar was regularly used to describe Donald Trump.