This week the historic first ever criminal trial of a former United States President is taking place. It’s not local news and there’s wall to wall coverage of it, so it falls into the category of things that I, as Editor of this newspaper, think the rest of the media is covering well enough that I should save my column inches for other subjects.
However, the rest of the media is largely fractured, split down the middle, taking sides. And the truth can only be on one side. That’s just common sense: if two people or groups of people are each asserting a “truth” which are opposite of each other, one side is lying, and the other is probably telling the truth.
Which means that you, the readers I am responsible for informing, are getting either truth or lies depending on which side you’re listening to. So there is one thing I need to say about this, in good conscience. There’s only one way to find out if you’re being lied to or not: you have to figure it out for yourself.
Listen, with an open mind, to both arguments. Think of yourself as the judge in the courtroom. Listen to both sides make their arguments, value facts, evidence, and proof over bluster, conjecture, and gaslighting. Compare and contrast their arguments. Analyze them.
Whatever you do, don’t go looking for confirmation of your prejudices – that the side you want to be right is right. That’s the express lane right down a rabbit hole which is the equivalent of an intellectual black hole.
This is only the first CRIMINAL trial of a President
The former President is on trial, in what will likely be the first of several such proceedings, because he allegedly lied in his business records (committed fraud) to cover up a lie he was telling the voters.
This alleged criminal conspiracy to gain the Presidency by lying to the voters, buying the silence of those who could have told the truth, and covering up the financial records of the payoffs with yet more lies… Well, whether it is true or not, it feels familiar, doesn’t it? There’s a good reason for that.
Trump’s argument, summed up, amounts to: I did not pay off that porn star to cover up an affair with her. And that sounds an awful lot like, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” which former President Clinton once said as he was running for re-election.
Clinton didn’t falsify business records in the commission of that statement, which proved to be a lie, to which Clinton ultimately admitted. And that means that his lie didn’t rise to the level of financial fraud the way Trump’s alleged lie may. But he did face serious consequences. Like Trump, he was impeached, and acquitted (because impeachment is a political process that really determines how much support a politician has from other politicians, and is partisan in nature – not a court proceeding meant to result in justice being done). And he was disbarred from arguing cases before the same Supreme Court he had made appointments to. He lost his law license for five years. And he was found guilty of perjury in a civil court, and fined $90,000 dollars (or about $184,000 in today’s value).
So what’s NOT historic or new here is the idea of a President lying about his extra-marital affairs to help them get elected, or re-elected, as well as that of the lying President facing accountability for their actions. And at the time, Clinton and his people said that it was all a political witch-hunt. Which is what Trump is saying now.
But in 1995 the “right wing noise machine” as then First Lady Hillary Clinton had dubbed it was only a seedling of what it has grown into now. The fairness doctrine, had only been ended for eight years, and that cancer hadn’t yet fully metastasized. As defined by the Presidential library of the President whose administration ended it in 1987, Ronald Reagan, the doctrine “mandated broadcast networks devote time to contrasting views on issues of public importance.”
So, in the late 1990’s one could be reasonably sure of getting good information from most reputable sources of news. But today, that cancer which is the lack of the fairness doctrine has spread throughout our body politic. And as a result, what counts as “reputable” depends on your point of view. And most of the national media caters to that.
But in spite of that, true remains true and false remains false, however it gets dressed up by each side.
Which is why, dear readers, I am urging YOU to observe the fairness doctrine for yourself. Listen to arguments from both sides. Home in on evidence, facts, proof, not confirmation bias. Because the TRULY historic “first” of all this isn’t that a President or former President is on trial – it is that this is happening at a time when not just politicians, but certain national news reporters, are liars motivated by politics, and partisanship. And you need to listen to both sides to find out which side the liars are on.
