We’re less than a half a year away from casting our vote for the next president and the stakes couldn’t be higher. While inflation continues to be above the Fed’s target, mostly due to housing prices, we are in good shape in terms of jobs, wages, and investment. But those messages can be easily distorted by both sides. Biden has had a tendency of claiming more success than can really be attributed to him. Trump portrays things as if we never left the pandemic recession. To go a step further, the campaigns and surrogates seem to distort things as bad, if not worse, than the candidate’s campaigns. The problem is that most of us eat this stuff up like candy without really doing the legwork.
Today, the NY Times wrote about the new election industry called “clippers,” those people who watch the news and campaigns for us and clip out the things they feel we should see. Why should we do the research? They’ve supposed done all that for you and surely you can trust them – NOT! Heck, I’m a progressive and I don’t trust the campaign hacks when they push something out. I research the issue and backstory to come to my own conclusion. Sometimes I agree with them and sometimes I don’t.
One of the worst things cropping up on the Internet has been the misleading videos about both Biden and Trump by opponents. Probably the worst one was of Biden at the G7 Summit when Trump supporters claimed he was lost and walking the wrong way. It turns out they all had watched a paratrooper landing and he was walking over to greet the young men. But that bit doesn’t play for Trump’s supporters so the clipped video falsely portrays the situation.
This was highlighted this past week by the NY Times and many other news outlets. Unfortunately, some media outlets like the NY Post didn’t seem to care about the full story and ran with the “lost” narrative. Before you think this is just about misleading information by the Trump campaign, Biden’s team are no angels either. One great example was Trump’s “bloodbath” comment which the Biden team and his surrogates tried to claim was a call for all-out violence in the country. Watching the entire speech, it’s clear Trump was talking about the auto industry during that segment.
With the first debate happening this coming week, there will probably be a lot more of these misleading clips to come. My concern is that our desire will still be to gravitate to the candy shop of clips to fortify our own beliefs. While that may make it easy to attempt to make a point to others, it does nothing for the discussion of issues which we seem to have lost in this fast-paced information cycle bred by social media.
If you really care about this country and this election, you’ll do the right thing and research before you react. Take some time and use Google for what it’s designed for, searching for the facts. Don’t stop on the first article you read and when you do read, read from both ideological spectrums. If you don’t have the time, then don’t engage. Just sit that particular issue out because doing so without research just feeds the beast.