Myth of Another America: How Media Coverage, Political Punditry, and Dangerous Manipulation Created A Country Within A Country
Police in Chattanooga, Tennessee responded to a call this past Wednesday that an armed man was standing atop a building with a gun. They found an intoxicated Kevin Leko with a loaded AK-47 and other guns lording over the Black Lives Matter route, upset over the continued protests and visibly distressed. Leko told officers he’d been watching coverage of the protests on television and was “increasingly anxious and in fear.”
Leko joins many similarly worried white Americans around the country who see peaceful protests by black Americans as akin to horror. So far protestors have been poisoned. They’ve been shot at by a man with a bow and arrows. Driven into by a tanker truck. Slashed at by a man wielding giant blades. And, of course, brutalized by law enforcement.
Meanwhile, the President of the United States continues to hide in a bunker, shaking in fear, terrified that his disastrous presidency is coming to a disastrous end. Even while he realizes this, Donald Trump continues to inflame tensions, fundraise off the manufactured threat of Antifa, and live in a reality completely separate from our own.
As discussed, the fascists are running scared. Trump’s turn at installing himself as a holy dictator failed as badly as Senator Tom Cotton’s fascist call for the military to slaughter Americans in the streets. These are both reasons for hope as America stepped up to the brink of oblivion and jumped back in horror. But how did we get here in the first place?
How did people like Kevin Leko get to the point where they would load up their arsenal of guns and consider unfathomable acts against peaceful protestors? Where did that anxiety and fear come from?
It’s easy to lay the blame on propaganda outfits like Fox News. It’s well-documented that they’ve peddled unhinged conspiracy theories for decades now. Their brand since the 1990’s has been the intentional marketing of a conservative alternate reality tinged with racist paranoia. This has been their operating procedure all along, and it has done unthinkable damage to American discourse and the health of our country.
But Fox is an easy target upon which to lay all the blame. Yes, it has brainwashed its viewers. It has introduced poisonous concepts and caused a violent rift in our shared reality. But it would not have happened, none of it would have, if the virus Fox intended to spread had not been embraced and amplified outside of that channel’s reality.
These are times for hard truths. None of this is pleasant or easy or simplistic. In order to get out of this crisis and forge a new and better way forward, we have to look back and understand where we’ve gone wrong and what we’ve done to exacerbate this culture of fear and inequality.
Any discussion has to include a long and critical look at how our media and political figures have failed miserably to meet the moment. We have to scrutinize how dangerous men like Trump and Cotton, with dangerous ideas about lawlessness, racial prejudice, and out and out fascism, were allowed to rise to power and dictate the conversation.
Much responsibility for all of this lays with so-called “mainstream media,” the same institutions Trump and Cotton decry as being biased and liberal. Sure, MSNBC and CNN provide a view of America that seems liberal when compared to Fox News, but they are, for the most part, center-left and center counterbalances to party propaganda. Both have carried their fair share of water for Trump, who is a ratings boon for every channel that profits off political strife, and both have normalized this madness.
The media has failed us. They have prioritized scandals, spectacles, and chosen easy-to-digest telenarratives, full of symbolic gestures and picturesque moments, over hard truths, nuanced discussion, and meaningful debate and discussion. When there is a mass shooting in this country, we don’t get discussions on gun laws, mental health, the dangers of an atomized society, or the risks of extremist rhetoric. We get memorials. Tearful and fearful recitements of the moment. We get a movie-of-the-week coverage.
With Donald Trump, we see a constant chase after a presidency that isn’t there. We see hours of rallies and press conferences where he uses and abuses reporters, spouts complete nonsense, and threatens illegal acts and dictatorial coups. All of it is run through the punditry system to give us “political moves” and tell us he’s “growing into the presidency.”
In the leadup to the 2016 Election, they featured him as their main entertainment, turning the camera to him and rolling and rolling and rolling and just watching as the ratings soared. Before that, however, they brought onto their programs extremists in the form of Tea Party Republicans, who shoveled corporate-tested and manufactured bullshit and told the people it was populism. And, before that, they welcomed George W. Bush and his cadre of liars and chickenhawks to sell an illegal war fought on false premises. In that pursuit, they followed Fox News again and again, both in the narrative of the war and in their coverage.
What needs to be understood, is that Trumpism represents a very small part of our country. Possibly a quarter of Americans live in Trump’s world that Fox News crafted for them. These are the delusional and the dangerous, people who believe they’re fighting an invisible war against conspiracies. People who follow Qanon and other fabricated ideologies. People who climb to the top of buildings out of “anxiety and fear.”
These things happen. People lose the narrative. They get lost in misinformation and propaganda. But we could not have arrived to this moment where it feels like half of America understands at least a semblance of actual reality while the rest our drowning in poison without publications like The New York Times and networks like CNN giving oxygen and representation to the most insane and dangerous aspects of the information war.
In an effort to seem “impartial” and “cover the news,” they have given voice and energy to a minuscule movement, a fascistic, paranoid, doomsday cult that has now found purchase across the country. if we make it out of this crisis without mass loss of life, we’ll be incredibly lucky. The myth of two Americas isn’t just false, it’s a tinderbox that threatens to go up in flames at any moment. We have to keep that conflagration at bay, while also examining who brought the tinder in the first place.
Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.
