Silence = Death; Huffington Post, 5/31/16

Bob Garfield, Huffington Post; Silence = Death:

"The usual false balance. The usual staged cable bickering. The usual dry contextual analysis. The usual intermittent truth-squading to garnish our careless daily servings of uncontested hate speech, incitement and manifest lies. The usual reluctance to “be part of the story” — which, in fact, we are inextricably part of because we in large measure created it by giving oxygen to his every incendiary outrage and being our soundbitten, compulsively enabling selves.

Again.

It is precisely this craven faux objectivity, after all, that fueled the historically ruinous Iraq war. It is just this fetishized impartiality that gave us a decade of stenography as the country’s political center moved to the far fringes of the right. (Alas, this is not my first call to vigilance.) When one side of a story is madness, medieval anti-intellectualism, scapegoating. demagoguery and lies, the neutral broker in the middle has in fact made a choice. The wrong choice.

The only right choice is for truth. And righteous condemnation, not ghettoized on opinion pages but front and center. Every day.

Are we not supposed to be the watchdogs, the speakers of truth to power, the guardians of democracy? It’s time for a gut check. Colleagues, stop gawking. Stop debating. Stop obsessing on the process. Stop being distracted by the daily Trumpruption. Stop analyzing his “policy” positions, his vp choice, his potential Supreme Court nominees, his unreleased tax returns."