Conservative Media Outlets Are Damaging the Country

“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of work, right?” — Hillary Clinton, March 13, 2016

How many times have you heard Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, or a conservative pundit bring that quote up? It makes Clinton look like a heartless liberal out to destroy good ole’ blue-collar folks’ livelihoods. Complete with evil grin, if you get your “news” from sites like this, or this, or this, or, of course, this. There’s only one problem: all of those articles are completely full of shit.

To illustrate, let’s take a look at the rest of Hillary’s statement at the time:

Look, we have serious economic problems in many parts of our country. And Roland is absolutely right. Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let’s reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities.

So for example, I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?

And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.

Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.

So whether it’s coal country or Indian country or poor urban areas, there is a lot of poverty in America. We have gone backwards. We were moving in the right direction. In the ’90s, more people were lifted out of poverty than any time in recent history.

Because of the terrible economic policies of the Bush administration, President Obama was left with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and people fell back into poverty because they lost jobs, they lost homes, they lost opportunities, and hope.

So I am passionate about this, which is why I have put forward specific plans about how we incentivize more jobs, more investment in poor communities, and put people to work.

Basically, completely the opposite of what conservative media outlets would like us to believe. She’s not being heartless at all. In fact, she clearly recognizes the plight those workers are finding themselves in, and demonstrates that she will actually try to help them. That would run counter to the GOP’s decades-long smear campaign against her, however, so those agencies devoid of journalistic integrity are more than willing to take a single sentence out of context and distort its message into unrecognizability. All in a day’s work for the conservative info-tainment industry, I guess.

And that’s just a single demonstrable incidence of right-wing “news” making America dumber. I could also mention their embracing of birtherism, deliberate distortion of climate change science during “news” broadcasts, and making up out of thin air that Obama is a socialist. One could even make the argument that pandering to the gullible and/or ignorant is actually damaging our economy. After all, something like 2/3 of our economy consists of consumer spending. When consumers feel good and/or confident they spend their dollars and stimulate the economy. When they are angry and scared, they hold onto their cash…economy suffers. Well, what is the bread and butter of Fox News and their ilk? Stoking fear and anger, of course. Seems like basic psychology, though I am no expert. I’ll have to do some more research on that aspect of the argument.

At any rate, my point is that ingesting this kind of stuff is literally making us dumber. Donald Trump as a presidential candidate is the result. Please, for the sake of your brain: STOP.