Real news, fake news, & the ever-growing information Mason-Dixon Line

25 years ago, when I was just a year or so into my career as a TV news producer, the news director at the local station in Decatur, Illinois where I was working called me into his office. He wanted to show me an article he had written about what he thought the effects of the nascent Internet would be on American news viewers.

In short, the argument in his article was that the web would eventually splinter the nation into several million subsets of people with entirely different understandings of what the "news" was on any particular day, month, or year. He warned this would threaten the nation's cohesive structure and lead to all kinds of untold chaos.

Of course as a 24-year-old producer with a whole year of professional experience under my belt, I pushed back on my boss. Convinced that he was just shilling for the outdated and equally dangerous control of the news process by a small number of powerful corporations, I made a two-pronged counterargument. First, I insisted that the flood of new sources of information from the Internet wouldn't cause too much upheaval. Second, I posited that even if it did create some news consumer splintering, that wouldn't be such a bad thing.

A quarter of a century later, it appears we were both partly right and partly wrong.

My old boss was wrong and I was right about Internet news sources and even the unforeseen emergence of social media creating dozens or even millions of subsets of news stories. But he was right and I was wrong about the splintering of the country into two much more rigid groups with often very differing sets of daily information. We may have thought America was deeply divided along left/right lines in 1995, but the divisions today are much stronger, angrier and more violent. But it's hardly just the Internet' fault.

In just the last year or so, the difference is growing in the kinds of stories the two opposing groups in America receive. The difference is so extensive, that it would take weeks just to catalog it properly. But just to make the point clear in as brief a way possible, let's look at five major stories from just the last few weeks that have been reported widely by certain news sources and ignored completely by others.

WARNING: Be prepared to hear about some important "news" your trusted information source never provided you.

1) Iran is blowing up

Since the beginning of the summer, Iran has been beset by a long series of explosions, fires, and other mishaps at many of its military and supposedly civilian infrastructure sites. Almost none of the explosions, which included a major event at Iran's nuclear program headquarters in Natanz, have made the headlines in the mainstream news media in America. Neither has there been much reporting on the fact that almost no experts believe this is a coincidence, (one exception is my exclusive report on the likely catalysts for these attacks).

That changed somewhat this week after the huge explosion in Beirut of what by all reliable accounts was in a building where the Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah was storing a massive amount of ammonium nitrate/fertilizer-based explosives.

But even though the basic facts of the story and the stunning video finally broke into the headlines, the connection to the all the other explosions and fires at Iranian or Iranian-backed weapons sites was not mentioned.

Since the story first developed, the string of man-made disasters in Iran was something many right wingers on Twitter and some other social media platforms have been learning and talking about. Meanwhile, mainstream news media outlets remain uninterested in anything that can't be directly connected to President Trump. Even the usual cable news guests who shill for Iran or against American and Israeli foreign policy aren't getting any air time on this story.

This comes not long after most of the news media ignored the bloody crackdown on massive anti-government protests in Iran last fall. Considering Iran's regime has continued to vow to destroy America, the mullahs in Tehran must be wondering what they have to do or say to get America's news media to pay attention to them!

2) The George Floyd arrest body camera video is out

Remember George Floyd?

Yeah, that George Floyd. The one whose killing at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in May set off weeks of protests and riots and a national mea culpa to the Black Lives Matter organization?

Well, an extensive amount of the police body cam footage showing extensive footage of a long portion of the entire arrest process was leaked to the public this week. Not everyone who has seen the video believes the footage exonerates the cops in the case or condemns them further, but wouldn't you have thought that a considerable new piece of evidence in this killing that captured the nation's attention and rage would have dominated the mainstream news media airwaves as soon as it was leaked?

And yet, it didn't happen and the nation's overall information quotient has suffered yet again. It's also another story where conservative/right wing news consumers are focusing on it while most moderate and liberal news consumers are likely to be totally unaware of it.

3) Bill Clinton was implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein case

It's been days since documents made public thanks to independent journalist and attorney Mike Cernovich, showed that a witness has said she saw former President Bill Clinton on Epstein's island with "two young girls" from New York.

Almost a week later, barely any mainstream media outlets have reported this, even though Epstein's suicide last year in a New York City federal prison made major headlines at the time.

Now, it's certainly fair to cast doubt on the accusation and even the accuser in this case. But it's beyond bizarre for most of the media to ignore the story of a living former president with a history of sexual misconduct being accused of visiting a notorious pedophilia hot spot.

Once again, conservative and right wing news outlets and websites have been covering the story heavily, but mainstream news followers have been left in the dark.

4) Nightly rioting in Portland wasn't covered until the Feds moved in

When the Trump administration decided to bring a small number of DHS agents into riot-torn Portland last month to detain and question some suspected violent ringleaders, the outrage from the left and even many moderates was stunning.

That is, it was stunning to the right wing/conservatives news consumers who had been aware of the seven weeks' worth of almost nightly destruction and mayhem in Portland that preceded the move by the Feds. Almost everyone expressing anger over the Trump administration move was totally oblivious to all that had transpired for weeks beforehand in Portland. Even House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler responded to questions about the Portland rioting by calling it a myth.

One cannot see the response to the lack of coverage in Portland without eventually wondering if our nation's angry political divide isn't mostly the result of selective news feeds.

5) Eric Adams and the firecracker killers

The final story may seem like just a local New York issue, but with violent crime and the role of the police becoming more of a national issue it should have made major headlines all over.

At the beginning of the summer, several New York City neighborhoods were being disturbed well into the late night and early morning hours by roving groups setting off fireworks. Lost sleep, frightened pets, and worse were the result for a city still mostly locked down at the time because of COVID-19.

Brooklyn was one of the worst-hit areas, but Brooklyn Borough President and former NYPD captain Eric Adams made a big public announcement urging residents not to call the police to complain about the disturbances. Instead, Adams advised Brooklynites to simply go outside and ask those setting off the fireworks to kindly cut it out.

But on the night of July 7, a 33-year-old Brooklyn woman did just that and it cost her life. Shatavia Wells was shot eight times after witnesses said she nicely asked a group of friends setting off firecrackers to move away from some young kids in the area for their safety. Naturally, Adams hasn't apologized or acknowledged the story at aleven as he is expected to officially join the race for mayor of New York City in 2021. Other than some criticism Adams has received over the incident from some of his presumptive 2021 opponents, reaction to the story has been muted even in the usually sensational New York news media industry.

Contrast that silence to the national outcry that occurred in response to the infamous Kitty Genovese murder case in 1964. Genovese's murder in the city's borough of Queens was seen nationally as a full indictment of the city's police and civilian surrender to crime because she was killed in full view of dozens of her neighbors who never physically intervened even after she screamed repeatedly for help.

With loud national calls to de-fund or at least severely redirect police resources in the wake of the George Floyd killing, one would think that this firecracker murder incident might be a piece of evidence millions of American lawmakers and voters should consider, right?

No dice.

Instead, what we're seeing now in America and in much of the rest of the world is something much more akin to what we saw occurring during World War I. In the lead up to the U.S. involvement in that war, the American people were bombarded with a competing set of two propaganda streams. One "reported" regularly on alleged German atrocities being committed on civilians and war prisoners, the other did pretty much the same thing but blamed atrocities on the British and the French.

By all indications, those dueling propaganda news streams succeeded in keeping Americans split on entering the war and relatively divided in any support for or against either side in the conflict until we finally entered the war in 1917.

This time, the dueling news or propaganda streams are focused squarely on domestic politics and advancing and/or diminishing domestic political groups. The result of that dichotomy is Americans are more divided than we've ever been since the Vietnam war era.

But it could get worse.

If this dual narrative/semi-news blackout situation continues, we could see divisions and intramural violence in America that reaches levels not seen since the years leading up to the Civil War.

We're not there yet, and we could start to see things getting better once the news media's general obsession with President Trump ends in six months or four years, (depending on what happens on November 3).

Of course, just avoiding a new civil war isn't something to be proud of on its own. Until then, the major news media companies have a responsibility both ethically and financially to increase their story counts, decrease their opinion-fueled programming, and at least strive to give their audiences a fuller picture of what's happening around the world.

Until they do that, watching the news on TV or reading it online will continue to more closely resemble a revival meeting than a quick check on the headlines.