Yesterday I did something new, something I haven’t done in at least several months. I read a news article about a topic other than President Trump. It wasn’t about his vicious, base and idiotic tweets, it wasn’t about the ongoing House impeachment inquiry, and it wasn’t about his latest efforts to use executive orders to take America back to the Stone Age socially and politically.
No, this article was about the continuing pro-democracy uprising in Hong Kong against mainland China, the territory’s administrative ruler.
And you know what?
It was fascinating.
For months now, Hong Kong residents from all age, economic and social strata have been turning out in the streets to battle police in an attempt to gain greater social and economic freedom from China. Scores have been injured, and yesterday for the first time a protestor was shot with live ammunition.
The article was very long, very informative, and very moving. It appeared in The New York Times, and I happened to see it as I was scrolling down the NYT app. If I hadn’t have been suffering from such extreme Trump fatigue I probably would have missed it.
But there it was, screaming out at me. “Read me, please read me. There are other things going on in the world besides Trump. Just read me. I promise you’ll learn something.”
And you know what? I did. I learned a lot.
That’s exactly my point. The US media has so saturated the broadcast airwaves, radio, podcasts, multimedia outlets, and print outlets with Trump coverage, that it’s literally drowned out any and everything else going on in the world.
Which is tragic. Because there’s a lot going on in the world, there really is, from climate change and impending environmental collapse, to military tension between Russia and the West, to the rise of the far-right in Western nations.
See? There is a lot happening, if we could only free ourselves from the tyranny of nonstop Trump coverage.
Now I’m not say Trump shouldn’t be covered at all. Because obviously an impeachment inquiry of a sitting US President is a serious matter.
But do we have to cover every tweet, every brain fart, every utterance that comes out of the mouth, or from the thumbs, of this odious man?
I say no, no we don’t.
The mainstream media is complicit in this sordid affair. They know that Trump coverage = ratings. And that’s all they care about, ratings and advertising dollars.
So my message to the US media is, be better. Just be better. Cover other stories too. Go to undiscovered places. Bring us the arts and culture again. Sports. Music. Anything, really, just anything other than this evil man.
That gets me to the title of this essay. Why do I say the US media’s coverage equates to political oppression?
I’m a writer, and a couple of years ago I took a fiction writing class in New York City that was taught by a Romanian refugee woman whose family had fled the rule of notorious Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in the early 1980’s.
She was a brilliant woman, and a great writer, and she was wise in a way that only those who have suffered under all-encompassing totalitarian systems can be.
I asked her what she thought of Trump. Obviously, as an immigrant, she hated him.
Then I asked her what she thought of the American media’s coverage of Trump.
“It’s political oppression, pure and simple,” she replied.
I was a little taken aback, and I asked her to elaborate.
“When I was a little girl in Romania, the only news we were allowed to hear was about the ‘Great Ruler’ President Ceausescu and his wonderful achievements. He was on TV nonstop. He was on the radio. And he was in the newspapers.”
“That,” she said, “is political oppression.” She explained that forcing a nation’s citizens to consume the same [false] news about the country’s leader and his political party to the exclusion of all other news was a form of political oppression.
I thought about this, and I realized I completely agreed with her. She was a fellow writer, intellectual, and a seeker of truth, and her words carried great weight with me.
Now of course you might say that Ceausescu was a brutal dictator, and the media was lying about him, whereas while Trump is vile and evil, he hasn’t [that we know of] conducted mass assassinations of political opponents like Ceausescu did.
But you know what? It doesn’t matter. The mere fact that we hear about this man 24/7/365 has been enough to cause a collective national psychosis, which is what I believe most Americans are suffering from.
And yes, much of the media is now anti-Trump, as opposed to how they fawned over Ceausescu. But it’s still cloyingly, achingly, painfully brutal to open The New York Times app on my phone and see 19 of the top 20 stories are all about Trump. 19 out of 20.
You know what my Romanian exile writing teacher would call that?
Political oppression.
And I agree.
*********
