The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

So I’m sipping the second cup of coffee Tuesday morning, watching the sun come up over the Smokies, scouring the web looking for an expert to quote, when it finally dawns on me like an epiphany: I must be the nation’s top expert on the press and public opinion.

If not, then why is there literally no one else saying anything close to what I’m saying? No one else even asking the questions I’m asking?

This is undeniably a massive institutional failure on the part of American universities, the academic culture, social scientific peer review, and the Constitutional First Amendment guarantee of a free press itself in the United States.

Our problem can literally be boiled down to a Facebook meme quoting the film “Cool Hand Luke.” Why doesn’t this go viral with millions of hits? Maybe if I just use the quote in the headline?

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate,” says The Captain, played by Strother Martin, to Paul Newman as Lucas “Cool Hand Luke” Jackson. “Some men you just can’t reach.”

No matter how hard everyone tries to report the objective facts, there are some people you just can’t reach.

Of course Luke was the hero in that film, the prisoner who just kept escaping, not The Captain. Maybe that’s the problem. We glorify the criminal.

After writing a three part series on the problems of the press in America, couched in an introduction modeled on the writing of Hunter S. Thompson and the search for the American Dream and the failure of the American Empire, we published a straight public opinion story on the eve of former president Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate.

It is already being reported that he will not be found guilty or banned from running for office again, even though 58 percent of Americans do not want him to ever hold public office again and 54 percent say he should be found guilty of inciting a violent insurrection.

A Majority of American Voters Say Trump Should Never Hold Public Office Again

But it dawned on me that if only 54 percent of Americans favor Trump’s conviction, something is horribly wrong with this story and picture.

This is not just a problem of a partisan divide and a split in opinions in our country. This is a complete failure on the part of the press and media to effectively communicate that it’s wrong for an American president and commander-in-chief to incite a violent insurrection against our democracy and government itself by trying to overturn an election that all the experts say was one of the most honest and thorough elections we’ve ever pulled off.

I went looking for experts at Harvard, the Pew Research Center and other places, including the University of Tennessee, but concluded that my own Master’s thesis still holds up as one of the few pieces of published academic literature showing how the press influences public opinion. Most of this research downplays the impact so the corporate media can avoid responsibility and liability.

Public Attitudes and Press Coverage of the Environment, 1968-1996

Part of the research one would need to figure out why we have this communications problem is to study and report on where American voters get their information. But to interpret this data, you need someone with the requisite education and experience to explain it.

For our purposes here, we will use this report, which lays it out simply enough for the average American to understand.

Studies show that 89% of Americans get news online. That leaves only 11 percent just reading newspapers in print or exclusively watching television news.

Now before you jump to the wrong conclusion that the problem is online news, let me lay it out for you.

Yes, it’s true that since 2019 an overwhelming majority of Americans (89%) say they get at least some of their news online, according to the Pew Research Center, where research has shown this as a growing trend for years since the advent of the internet and web in the 1990s.

When it comes to favorite modes of news consumption for those who prefer READING news, 63 percent go online to get their news while only 17 percent still say they read newspapers and or magazines in print.

Other research shows that people inherently learn more from reading news than from watching it or listening to it on the radio.

Surveys seem inconclusive in nailing down how many people get their news from radio, and it doesn’t seem to be broken down by more factual public radio as opposed to conservative talk radio. This is a flaw in the research.

Pathways to news

But we know this. Among those who prefer to WATCH news, about 44 percent say they get their news from television (network and/or cable), compared to 34 percent who prefer to watch news on online platforms such as YouTube or a news app, which could also be a network news or cable news app.

The gap is narrowing, according to the research, as online news consumption increases, while television’s popularity as a news source declines.

Around 20 percent of news WATCHERS in 2019 said they preferred to view news online compared to 12 percent in 2016, so this is obviously a growing trend away from broadcast news or even cable, which is more and more perceived as a bad deal by consumers as more people turn to Netflix and other services for entertainment programming.

When it comes to local news, preference for online channels (37%) is close to equalling those who still watch some television news (41%). The report does not break down those who watch cable compared to those who still have a broadcast antenna, another flaw in the research.

Younger Audiences Prefer Social Media

Nearly one-in-five adults say they often get news through social media — where Facebook is the dominant source — with 43 percent of Americans saying they use FB to get news — even though it’s not very efficient at delivering news and was not in fact created for that purpose.

In general, adults under 50 prefer online sources regardless of their desired format (audio, video or online from a print news company).

“There are no reasons to believe that a generation that has grown up with and enjoys digital, on-demand, social, and mobile video viewing across a range of connected devices will come to prefer live, linear, scheduled programming tied to a single device just because they grow older,” says Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute.

Those over 50 are also warming up to the web.

In 2016, 32 percent of the news readers in the 50+ age group expressed a preference for web news sites. This has increased to 43 percent in the latest surveys (2019).

“Moreover, nearly all Americans get some news through digital means,” researchers say.

Digital news consumers also place a high value on an easy-to-use website, they report, with 82 percent saying they get local news online, and an easy-to-use website is the most important feature. (Presumably this means websites without pay walls and popup ads, although apparently the researchers didn’t think to ask).

This is way ahead of other features like schedules of local events (59%), regularly updated social media accounts (51%), customizable news (45%), videos (43%) and comment sections (31%).

Additionally, 51 percent of Americans who get their local news online do so through a mobile device like a smart phone or tablet rather than a desktop or laptop computer. But that still leaves nearly half of all consumers using computers.

While there is a growing preference for online news channels, 57 percent of those who access news on social media are also concerned about the quality and authenticity of the information and worry about “fake news.”

And well they should be, although the technology itself is not to blame.

The technology can be an amazing tool to find out just about anything you want to know.

The problem is that the search engines are now polluted with commercialized crap and fake content, and the mission of most news outlets, including online news outlets, is treating news as a capitalist commodity and reporting lies as equal to facts in a world where objectivity came to be defined as “fair and balanced” news covering “both sides” of every story, even if there are more than two sides or only one credible side.

What if one side is factual, and the other is not? Where is the scientific objectivity in that?

As far as I can tell, there is not an academic expert in Communications, Political Science, Public Opinion or Journalism who is even asking these questions, much less trying to answer them.

Again, it seems fairly simple to me now.

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. Some (people) you just can’t reach.”

But that can’t be nearly half the people in the country.

Maybe it’s a third of the people, and mainly those who watch fake news on Fox News, NewsMax, Breitbart, Parler and other right-wing conservative news sources that are biased towards Republican politicians and capitalism? Those numbers don’t add up, but you have to take into account that half of these people don’t pay much attention to news at all. What they know they get from word of mouth or on Facebook from friends and family.

No matter. It’s still a failure to communicate.

On the face of it, prima facie, Donald Trump is the most ineffective, corrupt president in modern American history.

He’s responsible for millions of deaths due to his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, which nearly collapsed the economy.

And rather than accept the fact that he lost the election, he launched an all out propaganda war on the truth to fool people into believing the election was stolen with fraud, and incited a violent insurrection that threatened to tear this country and its institutions apart behind repair.

And the press and media in this country let him get away with it, and are letting him get away with it still.

If he’s not stopped, now, we will be faced with continuing to fight this war for another four years as he will no doubt keep running for election again in 2024, raising money, putting out fake news, and keep us divided for the foreseeable future.

Russia and China, Iran and North Korea, and our other adversaries abroad will be able to keep exploiting this divide to undermine our economy and national security until we are pounded into dust, like a revolutionary war fort on the new frontier being pounded into submission by the bigger guns of the other side.

Sorry for that parallel. I just rewatched “The Last of the Mohicans” again on Amazon Prime Video last night.

The French pounded the British fort until the English commander had no choice but to surrender.

If we are not careful, we will be surrendering soon to Russia or more likely China. While we are distracted by Trump, who is manning the fort and the supply lines?

Will the Biden administration be able to take back control of the federal agencies from Trump appointees in time to prevent another insurrection, one that may work next time?

Is a military coup still possible in this country?

Will someone be able to get all the racist right-wingers out of all our military institutions and police agencies in time?

I hope so. But unless the entire press corps and mainstream, corporate media in this country gets onboard with telling this story straight, and stops spreading the lies, our future is not guaranteed.

Even the expert pundits are already saying the Biden administration must accomplish big, bold steps in a hurry and only has two years to turn public opinion around, or the tea party Trump Republicans will be back in two years and in a position to retake control of the Senate, the House, continue to dominate the courts, and retake the White House in four years.

Is that what you all want to happen?

It seems to me that “the people” on the political right are not the only ones looking for a savior.

“The People” have a huge roll to play in the the future direction of this country. Are you going to help spread the objective truth by sharing the links? Or just sit there cowardly hoping someone else will save the day for you?

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