One of my personal social contracts relates to truth and facts, or more specifically news.

When I was a kid, back in the 70’s and 80’s, the news was the news. It was truthful, factual, and accurate. There were three stations: ABC, CBS, and NBC. The nightly news had real actual fucking reporters like Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw. If twenty people sat down at the local bar at the evening news, they’d have all gotten the same thing. They might have had different opinions about what they saw, different ideas about how we as a species should respond, but they all had the same facts and were able to have (hopefully) intelligent conversations because they were working off the same baseline.

These days it’s not like that. While traditional, mainstream news sources have tended to stay on target, Fox News, which came into being in the early 1990’s (in part destroying my favorite Oregon TV station KPTV 12), created an environment where bias (and eventually bald faces lies) in news reporting was not only acceptable, but accepted. Forget for a second that everything we do as human beings is biased. One of the news sources I watch every day, Democracy Now, is extremely biased in their reporting—but they don’t tend to report bullshit or make up lies (they just bias their reporting to some 60’s hippy anti-war, anti-capitalism at all costs bent). Bias and even lying has become the norm. Anyone born after 2000 exists in a world where “truth” is just a fancy idea, where they wouldn’t know what it was like to tune the TV into someone who could be trusted, where it’s all about finding (consciously or otherwise) a “news” source that conforms to one’s own beliefs and opinions—even subscribing to “news” sources that have no interest in expounding on or sharing actual factual things—going so far as to make up shit.

In my world that’s called propaganda.

Ignorance.

And people who subscribe to it: willingly ignorant.

For me that’s a social contract that got broken. It started happening (at least in my lifetime) when Fox News became a thing and people like Rush Limbaugh took over the airwaves; it became acceptable as we saw Bush Jr. lie regularly on TV supported by a network that was all too gleeful to get behind those lies. Next comes Palin (a poor choice McCain regretted to his last breath) and then Trump and before you know it, the truth, the facts, don’t matter anymore (at least to a substantial portion of the population).

So yeah. News sources and reporters tossing away the truth to make money, to suit some world view over verifiable facts and (fucking) reality, that has me miffed. It’s a breach of the social contract that news sources promised me while I was growing up. And now I have to question everything I learn regardless of the source.

Thank God for PBS nightly news.