Leah McGrath Goodman brings two decades of investigative journalism experience covering politics and money to a new Substack newsletter, Column C, where she explores "cultures of corruption, climate change, crypto, and other calamities."
BRATTLEBORO-It's been a very strange spring under Trump 2.0 and, in hindsight, I think I was right to suggest taking a break from the headlines to avoid burnout. I mean ... what have we really gained from all this?
And while I can't stop watching news cycles, because that's my job, when you consider whether it's best to focus on your own life (read: what you can control) versus these national headlines (read: what you can't control), the answer is obvious. To put it another way, ask yourself, "Would it be better to paint in the desert right now for four years, or write a book, or do that project I've been wanting to finish - or stay glued to my TV/radio/internet?" The answer surely is self-evident.
One of my American friends said to me last month, while getting ready to move back to the U.S. from Australia: "It will be such a rude awakening, going from a country where politics is ancillary to most people's lives, to the U.S., where it's people's whole personality and driving force."
And it's true. What we are willing to suffer through, witness, and tolerate in ways previously unimagined is increasingly based on personal political views and the need to have others justify or validate our reality - even when our shared reality appears to be fracturing from one person to the next.
Sure, there are still different points of view. But if you film two people speaking to each other and play it back, there is such a thing as objective truth. You can see what each person said and did. You can see what did and did not happen. Reality is real.
And yet these days, you can show some people all the data or the facts, and you won't even come close to changing their minds. Somewhere along the way, reality became dogma. And a religion demanding true believers replacing the facts should worry all of us.
* * *
For many years, Americans strained under what was effectively an enforced, shared reality, propped up by tightly edited TV programs, mono-thought news, and the intellectual, political, and academic classes, which rubber-stamped certain modes of thought while rejecting others. Clearly, it did not serve us so well, and we are now learning how many resented it.
But with the internet, the floodgates opened. We now reside in a place where there are so many sources of information and so many versions of a story that it has gummed up the works. And there's no way to hold accountable specific groups or people who are not on very good terms with the truth.
Some care about the facts. Some don't. Many don't even know how to check the facts and are making it up as they go. Or they prefer not to, because it does not meet their ends.
Not long ago, people were "canceled" for various abuses, bad behavior, and breaking the public trust. Now, so many have been canceled, no one can keep track of it, and it's all gone back to neutral. Canceling has been canceled. Accountability has been laughed off as droll, antiquated.
Try to follow the news, and you'll be railroaded around the clock. Steve Bannon's plan to "flood the zone" and beat the public into submission has become virtually meaningless already, because the zone was long ago flooded. You can flood a flood - but who will notice?
* * *
That doesn't mean the flooding effect hasn't had its way, though. It has.
A second friend, a keen headline-watcher, wrote to me recently that anyone proclaiming Trump 2.0 "scandals" is getting zero traction, because "MAGA can write off anything, no matter how horrible. The general public has seen ten thousand scandals now and has trouble sorting them. And the rest of us are no longer capable of isolating any one thing. What would a smoking gun even be in that context?"
Good question.
This is why whatever we are witnessing - whether it is people being wrongly taken from their neighborhoods to be deported, or workers getting fired from government jobs in which they served honorably, or people attacked for lawfully expressing an opinion - has been waning in its terrifying impact.
Americans are getting hammered with wave after wave of outrageous events, many of which threaten to undercut our longstanding, protected freedoms - and yet, even keeping track of it, let alone fixing it, has become a losing game of Whac-a-Mole.
* * *
What to do? Our ability to contend with masses of information, misinformation, and disinformation has literally been pushed to the limits. And don't forget, people are struggling just to differentiate between those types of information. Misinformation is simply getting the facts wrong, while disinformation is an attempt to deliberately mislead.
The signal-to-noise ratio we are experiencing is not on our side here. But what if we did not need to follow it? What if all we needed to do was to keep an eye on the slipstream for key insights? To focus on just the signal and not the noise?
Information has a way of following a pattern. Sometimes it is not always clear - at least initially - who is telling the truth and who is not. But over time, a direction of travel usually develops, and it almost always follows a preponderance of evidence.
While the quantity and intensity of the headlines are not to our advantage, elevating the key items in the slipstream may offer a chance for insight and reflection.
I do not agree with the business-as-usual approach to what we are seeing, and while I may go into high alert now and then over something, I think any writing should be about quality and not quantity.
I suspect quantity is the last thing any of us needs right now.
This Voices column was submitted to The Commons.
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