It behooves Americans who care about the future of democracy, decent governance and the fate of their most vulnerable fellow Americans to understand the fundamentally different media reality that envelops a substantial number of voters.
Jen Rubin
In a recent article, Jen Rubin called out the need to reclaim reality from right-wing disinformation. As is generally the case she has a lot of good information there although I think the claim that Democrats need to reclaim reality is slightly off the mark. Genuine conservatives also need to reclaim reality from a party that has redefined “conservative” to mean “willing to go along with whatever MAGA says.” (It‘s also important to recognize that a willingness to believe disinformation and conspiracy theories is not limited to Republican voters. I’ve been disappointed to see educated Democratic voters consoling themselves with faulty explanations about the outcome of our elections this year.)
In truth, it is American democracy which cannot effectively function in a culture where fact and opinion are given the same weight by an underinformed populace that doesn’t understand the critical role that a genuinely engaged and accurately informed populace plays in making our constitutional democracy work.
While it is important for Democrats to win elections so long as the alternative is a Republican party untethered from facts, we must recognize that such electoral victories will be fragile if they are based simply on getting more voters to choose Democrats rather than on getting better information to voters and winning elections based on voters who can distinguish fact from bluster and fear mongering.
The work that must be done is 1) to teach people across the political spectrum to examine their existing beliefs honestly, 2) to train people on how to validate the information they are receiving, and 3) to get them to buy into the importance of basing their voting choices on facts rather than emotions.
We must also work to build up a new media ecosystem that will do what traditional media has largely abandoned, doggedly pursuing truth in an effort to help people be informed rather than clinging to a mirage of treating all viewpoints as equally valid regardless of their factual basis. Journalistic opinion needs to be easily distinguishable from factual journalism and the media industry must rebuild trust with a populace that has come to believe, not without cause, that no media outlets are more interested in the truth than they are in swaying their audience.
