The View From Here: Fake News?

The View From Here: Fake News?
By Ken DeLaat

Let’s take the vacant building that once housed Plumb’s.

Oh, there have been rumors and perhaps substantiated rumors because many people who would be likely to know such things agree on the prospective and perhaps inevitable new tenant.

But, of course it has been kept fairly quiet as things get negotiated because they’re sensitive, meaning final details have yet to be ironed out or no one wants their whole hand played too soon or any other combination of things that go on in the wheeling’s and dealings of businesses.  During this process they generally require legal help to maneuver the all too complicated seas created by, well, people who sell legal help I guess.

So the general public doesn’t get access to this in any official capacity until everything is set and those involved are ready.

​I get it.

So given that, should the politicians... 

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,... from the folks on your city or township council and boards to the county commish to the lawmakers in Lansing to the D.C. denizens be given the same leeway? Should the decisions made that tend to somehow find their ways into your lives be allowed to be created and enacted with minimal public inspection or coverage?

That depends. Do you trust people who are elected to represent you to be honest all the time? To serve the general public beyond their own interests? To possess that rare level of integrity that allows one to be above reproach in all matters?

If so, the media is of little help to you.

Because there is nothing to shine a light on.

However, if you find yourself from years of experience and an awareness of how life goes sometimes and how people, even good people, can stumble sometimes, you may want to rethink joining the growing movement to disparage the media.

Granted, no organization can claim to be unbiased if it is run by human beings. There are some obvious outlets of ultra-subjective slants that pander to the conspiracy theorists in all of us and can be believed if one is inclined to lean that way. Accuracy in these outlets can be pretty marginal and agenda driven.

But these are not journalists.

The so-called Mainstream Media is just what its name implies. Down the middle of the current with as little leaning to either direction as can be attained. These are the outlets whose history of reporting the news that absolutely required coverage is undeniable.

And they are under attack.

Without “Mainstream Media” you are left to trust implicitly those who are placed in the precarious peak of power from the White House to your city or township offices.
It’s up to you, but you cannot marginalize the mainstream media and have irrefutable facts go under attack and hope to ever get any grasp of the truth other than what those who are sitting in the seats of power want you to hear.

Julie Irwin wrote a piece in the Harvard Business Review in 2014 titled “Loyalty to a Leader is Overrated, Even Dangerous”.  In it she states:

 “Leaders don’t have all the answers, and followers have more responsibilities than just blindly submitting to whoever is at the top of the food chain.”

And from your civic leaders to the top of the political heap I cannot agree more.

Loyalty isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Blind loyalty is.

“It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.”- Joseph Goebbels