Crediting newsrooms for “operation brainwash” would be giving them too much credit

Every time I hear someone bellow, “I blame the media,” I laugh especially in regards to the media having some gianormous, multi-tentacle strategy to change the hearts and minds of the American people as one cohesive unit.

I have worked in almost every version of news gathering (TV, print, radio) and trust me there’s no united plan of anything.

Yes, there’s Fox News and MSNBC and some papers are more conservative than others and some writers and/or TV hosts/commentators do have opinions that they get paid to share. But for the rest of the working journalists out there, too much is on their plate to make time for “operation brainwash.”

Let me describe for you a TV newsroom.

Imagine if you have a family of 20 kids and everyone overslept and now it’s mass pandemonium as children throw on clothes and scream, “Where’s my backpack!” as they all are furiously rushing so they don’t miss their bus. Now add in a mother cursing at her kids as she shoves them out the door .

Welcome to just about any newsroom in the country.

When I worked in television news, the reporters would joke that they had ADD because stories were pinging back and forth so rapidly it was hard for a mere mortal’s brains to process the ever-changing information landscape.

You start out the day working on, say, a feature story, thirty minutes into that you’re pulled off by the assignment editor because of breaking news. After you do a live shot, then it’s back to the feature story and just as you start to do an interview you get a call that there’s a news conference downtown so it’s off to cover that.

By the end of your day you feel like taffy at the state fair yanked on by a mob of people with anger management and tactile control issues and your brain has a lot in common with a double deep fried Twinkie. Believe it when I say there is no room in that schedule for any sort of media manipulation.

If you don’t buy that news you can use, let me also share that reporters agree on almost nothing. I’m talking zero, nada, zilch and good luck ordering in a pizza everyone wants to eat. Thus the media can’t be in cahoots because it would take Edward R Murrow rising from the grave and the ghost of Peter Jennings to get a group of reporters to all share the same opinion.

The primary reason that you’ll never get a group consensus from a newsroom is because there’s an ego thing going on and everyone thinks they’re smarter than anyone else.

Never mind, that most reporters were average students who have always liked the sound of their own voice.

Okay, wait that could just be me.

But this C student can prove, by using one word, that there is no grand media objective simply because the media isn’t smart enough to pull anything like that off. And that word would be — surrogate.

Just a great big WTH on surrogate? Have you noticed that during this campaign season surrogate is the favorite word of journalists everywhere? You can’t say campaign staffer, friend of the candidate or campaign insider. I guess that’s so 20th century. In 2016 it’s got to be surrogate.

Who thought up that? Probably a D student because as a C student I would have gone with campaign squad mate or even candidate bestie. The fact that the use of surrogate to define a campaign ally is the one thing that journalist everywhere seem to be okay with agreeing on is all the proof you need that we’re not smart enough, as a collective force, to pull off any sort of master plan of propaganda.

So relax and go share this bit of breaking news with your surrogate.

This story was originally published November 1, 2016 at 5:10 PM with the headline "Crediting newsrooms for “operation brainwash” would be giving them too much credit."