How conservative pundits helped break reality

[applegrove]

Leonard Pitts Jr., Tribune Content Agency, Detroit Free Press

http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/contributors/2016/08/25/conservative-pundits-helped-break-reality/89338072/

"SNIP..............


Last week, a prominent conservative pundit conceded a point yours truly and countless others have been making for a long time. Namely, that in their constant assaults on mainstream news media, conservatives have wrecked the very idea of objective, knowable fact. In effect, they broke reality. And Donald Trump came oozing out of the ruins.

“We’ve basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers,” Wisconsin radio host Charlie Sykes told Oliver Darcy of Business Insider. The net effect, he said, is that Trump will say some stupid thing Sykes knows to be false, but that his listeners still expect him to parrot. And if he doesn’t, “then suddenly, I have sold out.”

“When this is all over,” he mused, “we have to go back. There’s got to be a reckoning on all this. We’ve created this monster.” He added that, “At a certain point, you wake up and you realize you have destroyed the credibility of any credible outlet out there.” As a result, he said, conservatives “are reaping the whirlwind.”

.............

The result has been nothing less than the unraveling of the American mind. We have become a nation of junk history, junk science, junk fact, junk logic, junk thought, a nation where not knowing things is no longer a bar to high office and may even be an advantage, a nation where it is necessary to debate whether a birth certificate is really a birth certificate and Donald Trump followers think the election will be “rigged.



..............SNIP"

[Bill USA]

1. recommended! (could have gone on GRs)

[The Polack MSgt]

2. K&R nt

[Canoe52]

3. Sometimes I feel like it's 1970

And I'm tripping on acid again.

[Frank Cannon]

5. Except news was still news in 1970.

We have the public's outraged reaction to Vietnam and Watergate, along with the ensuing frantic media consolidation, to thank for ensuring that kind of irresponsible reporting never happened again.

[Overseas]

4. News For Profit... Another case of the failure of privatization

[bucolic_frolic]

6. Pro

found!

[Skittles]

7. assholes

they're ALL assholes