What Democracy?

The first time I was contacted for an interview by a major newspaper was in 2010. There was an issue at my alma mater, and they wanted my perspective as somebody with specific knowledge of the situation. Since then, I’ve been contacted at different times and on a variety of issues by Newsweek, Chicago Post Tribune, St Louis Post Dispatch, and others. I’ve also been contacted by individual journalists working on freelance projects. I ended up rejecting every single request except for an interview with Rod Dreher.

The reason why I always end up rejecting interviews is because the way it works for an in-depth piece is that you receive the questions before the actual interview. Alternatively, there’s a pre-interview where parameters are set and the conversation is prepared. Every single time (except with Rod Dreher who behaved with the utmost professionalism), the journalist would come to the interview with what I can only qualify as egregious bias. No space was left within the interview for me to talk about what actually happened. We are not talking about opinion pieces, mind you. These were supposed to be articles on specific events at the institutions where I worked.

The questions were of the following variety:

“Please describe instances of racism at your college. How did it make you feel to witness them?”

“Please describe the trauma that Professor X caused you with his repeated sexual harassment. What are some of the professional costs of this trauma?”

These questions were based on absolutely no claims of mine. I never witnessed any racism on any campus. Professor X never caused me a second of unpleasantness. I’ve never in my life been sexually harassed in any academic environment. But the journalists were treating these fantasies as fact. I knew that no matter what I said at the interview, my words would be perverted to mean whatever lie the journalist wanted to advance.

One of my instructors agreed to a TV news appearance and was horrified at how her comments were edited to transmit the opposite message from what she actually said. Again, this wasn’t about opinions. The instructor was trying to describe an event in which she took part. The journalist turned her into a whiny, pathetic bastard when the message the colleague was trying to send was that of cheerful positivity. This wasn’t an issue of world politics or elections. Still, the journalist found it necessary to inject lies into the story. Events exist so that journalists can turn them into lies. The lie is the ultimate goal.

This is not only personally aggravating but scary. The information we receive about the world is vitiated. Yarvin and Zizek point to a very real problem that makes our entire pretense at democracy look pathetic.

Yesterday Trump said to a dumb, unprofessional journalist who kept interrupting in a voice of an excited toddler who urgently needs the bathroom, “Are you with Bloomberg? You are horrible. Horrible. I don’t know why they even have you.” That felt good. It felt like he was saying it to every single one of these bastards who tried to put words into my mouth and use me for dishonest purposes. We can get upset with Trump or with Zizek but the question remains. How can any of what we call democracy mean anything if everything we call the news is lies, including about pretty trivial issues?