Citizen Journalism
Why we need it now
Like a lot of you, I was shocked to wake up to the news on November 9, 2016, that Donald Trump won the presidential election, beating Hilary Clinton. When I’d gone to bed the night before, Clinton was predicted to win pretty handily. So “What happened?” was my first thought after reading the headlines. What happened indeed.
Of course, in the coming weeks and months we would eventually find out that Clinton won the popular vote by approximately 2 million votes, but lost on electoral votes. We would also find out that some Trump voters lied to pollsters and/or the pollsters just got it wrong, that the Democratic Party establishment derailed a Bernie Sanders nomination and that somehow Russian spies hacked into voting machines and voting rolls in 12 states.
It’s been nine months since the election and we still don’t have a clear answer on why or how Donald Trump was elected. Obviously, in the literal sense, more votes were recorded for him. But the question of how the mainstream media got it wrong and whether they deliberately got it wrong and pushed a pro-Clinton agenda still lingers in the air, as does Trump’s connection with Russia.
One of my immediate reactions to the 2016 election was the desire to start an online political publication specializing in telling the truth, i.e. concentrating on facts. I wanted it to be independent, ad-free and fact-checking website for both right and left wing news articles, since fake news seemed, at least in weeks right after the election, to have played such a huge role in Trump’s election. I don’t believe everything is relative and I do believe there is such a thing as truth and I intended to use Sojourner News to pursue that truth, and help the Americans who were fooled by fake news to see reality. How earnest.
Of course, things have gotten much slipperier since then, after those first few post-election weeks. Establishment Democrats blamed the Bernie Sanders supporters for Clinton’s loss while some claimed Trump’s win was driven by Southern white evangelicals who were brought by the bus loads to polling stations. Even now, we still don’t know the whole story of the November 2016 election and what the hell happened. Did Trump win legitimately? Did Russian hacking make Trump win? Is the mainstream media out of touch or did they deliberately mislead the American public about the election? Did pollsters lie? Who are we as a country? Was Trump white America’s reaction to eight years of a black president?
Obviously, all these threads of tales and truths are still being pulled upon and unraveled and it may be years before we find out what caused what. In the interim, as a murky picture has emerged of how the US government and media operated during the election and in general, I’ve lost faith big time in both. And I didn’t have a favorable view of either prior to the election! That is what is sad. And I know I’m not alone.
But now, I feel a responsibility to use my voice. You should, too. We need to become journalists, all of us, to tell the story of America and who we are as a country today. Not who we wish we were or what we were in the 1940s or 1950s. And not through the blurry lens of a right or left wing media that demonizes the liberals or the conservatives. But who we are in our everyday lives as we struggle to pay our bills and survive and make something good.
We can’t let those who stand to gain money and power manipulate us into hating each other, which in my opinion is what is happened right now. We’re seeing both left and right wing media and politicians urge Americans to hate each other based on supposed politics and it’s leading to real-world violence.
Because of this, I’m no longer interested in using this publication for fact-checking. Instead, I want this to be a place to use the personal narrative to tackle current events. At least with a personal narrative, we already know up front what the bias is: it’s the writer’s. And at the end of the day, I do believe that by taking all of these bits of personal narratives and weaving them together, we do get a broader view of a somewhat objective truth. And that’s what I’m after.
