From Watts Up With That?
Essay by Eric Worrall
2016 screenshot of President Obama Listening respectfully while DiCaprio Calls for “Deniers” to be banned from public office.
“… Now people will say … I don’t care about the science … cause they’re just all liberals …”
Obama concerned that Americans ‘almost occupy different realities’
BY LAUREN SFORZA – 05/16/23 2:45 PM ET
Former President Obama said in a new interview that what most worries him is that Americans are occupying “different realities.”
“The thing that I’m most worried about is the degree to which we now have a divided conversation, in part because we have a divided media, a splintered media,” Obama told “CBS Mornings” host Nate Burleson.
“Today what I’m most concerned about is the fact that, because of the splintering of the media we almost occupy different realities, right? If something happens that, you know, in the past everybody could say, ‘All right, we may disagree on how to solve it, but at least we all agree that, yeah, that’s an issue,’” he said.
“Now people will say, ‘Well, that didn’t happen,’ or, ‘I don’t believe that,’ or, ‘I don’t care about the science,’ or, ‘I’m not concerned about these experts, you know, ’cause they’re just all liberals’ or, you know, ‘That’s just conservative propaganda,’” he continued.
The one question Obama doesn’t ask is why the conversation fractured. If Obama wants to understand who caused the problem, perhaps he should try looking in the mirror.
The answer to why is obvious – noble cause corruption. Mainstream media abandoned their original mission of objectively reporting the news, and embraced an alternative mission of trying to re-shape society.
Consider the furore over Trump’s CNN town hall. After Trump’s outstanding CNN performance, critics erupted in anger that CNN had given President Trump a platform.
But millions of people want to hear what Trump has to say.
Why do many mainstream media figures believe CNN should have denied President Trump a platform, when so many of their potential audience wanted to see Trump speak? Were mainstream media objections based on their mission to uphold objective, unbiased reporting? Or were they angry that CNN had deviated from a liberal mission to re-shape society, by silencing voices which dispute the liberal narrative?
When Obama talks about healing the fracture, does he mean giving airtime to other points of view? Or is his idea of healing the fractured national voice an intention to silence those voices he doesn’t like?
Too many people in politics and mainstream media seem to believe it is their mission to protect the public from dangerous ideas and “misinformation”, to be the arbiters of truth, to decide which voices people should hear.
Did people like Obama really expect others would just sit still and take the abuse?
Whether it’s suppressing climate skeptics, refusing to debate skeptics, or deplatforming politicians like Trump, mainstream media and the establishment’s intolerable attempts to shape the conversation through heavy handed censorship are in my opinion the cause of the fracture.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. – CS Lewis
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