Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.-Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY)
You can click on the above "Tom Tomorrow" cartoon to enlarge it for easier reading. It goes a long way in explaining how we even got to the state of lunacy we've been in, not just in this most recent election cycle, but for quite some time.The media isn't solely to blame for the sick status of current political discourse, of course. That would take a book to explain, and I don't mean the kinds of school textbooks that are overseen by rightwing Christian loons and other crackpot republican subsets. But the media's insistence that all sides and all opinions are equally valid and that "Alternative Facts" should be treated with respect and not be seriously challenged has amounted to way, way too many news programs being, at best, half fact and half Tokyo Rose, with goon platoons of wingnuts that tell the gullible, all too willing to believe anything public that the Earth is 6000 years old and that a "caravan" of small pox-bearing brown people is headed our way; never mind the fact that small pox was eradicated decades ago and, at most, only exists in germ warfare labs, not in the bloodstreams of Central Americans. FOX "News," in particular might as well just move their whole operation back in time to 1942 Japan, but that doesn't let the other news outlets off the bloody hook. The others, also run by fascist-favoring corporations who are addicted to the advertising dollars of Big Pharma, Big Oil, and car companies, eagerly broadcast Herr Trump's perverse "fireside chats" into America's homes every night of the 2016 campaign, slyly giving Trump $2 Billion in free advertising and promotion. It will only get worse as propaganda outlets such as Sinclair, Smart News (aka Bot News) continue to expand.