Alfonse D'Amato

The perils of ‘make news’

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Lots of attention these days is devoted to whether the news is real or fake. That often depends on the eyes and ears of the beholder. One person’s fake news is another person’s indisputable truth.
What I find more concerning is the current tendency toward what I call “make news.” In our information-addicted culture, we are constantly fed a stream of so-called news, and much of it seems to be more concocted than real. Politicians, the media and pundits alike seem to feel compelled to “make news” to fill the airways and social media.
Take, for example, the recent brouhaha over President Trump’s visits to Houston following Hurricane Harvey. What did some of the media focus on? The length of Melania Trump’s high heels as she boarded the presidential helicopter at the White House. Never mind that she wore sneakers when she actually toured the flood devastation. The unending need for news put her shoes front and center in the Harvey media story.
When shoes are the subject, such news-making is harmless enough, though unfair and unnecessary. But where news is stitched together out of stray threads, the result can be downright damaging. The best recent example is the media-manufactured firestorm over which statues should stay and which should go in our town squares. Are we really, seriously talking about taking down Columbus statues because explorers exploited native peoples? Should the slave-owning faces of Washington and Jefferson be obliterated from Mount Rushmore? Where does this obsession with political correctness end?
Let’s go back a step further. How does such an improbable discussion begin? Now, we all should condemn the hate-mongers who assembled in Charlottesville, Va., a few weeks ago. There’s no place for them in our country. Yet, I don’t know about you, but in my lifetime I have never personally come across a neo-Nazi. Can there be more than a pitiful few of them in the U.S., strutting around in ridiculous uniforms, carrying torches, hungry for attention far out of proportion to their tiny numbers? Still, the media shined such a relentless spotlight on these few nuts in places like Charlottesville that they were made to appear far more numerous than the sick few they really are. That spotlight almost guaranteed that the other tiny fringe, represented by the far-left Antifa, would show up to help stage a rumble for the cameras. Voila, “make news”!

Our country has some very real racial and social problems that we should address. The disparity in educational outcomes and economic progress between blacks and whites is something we must confront. The tidal wave of gang and drug violence is a national crisis. Gun killings in our cities, opioid deaths everywhere — these are the real problems facing America, not which statues should stand and which should come down.
Let’s think about what’s really important, and work to make America better, not worse. Let’s deal with economic disadvantage by growing our economy to create more jobs. Let’s reform the tax code to encourage investment and employment.
Let’s devise a badly needed national infrastructure program to put more people to work. Let’s repair our health care system to make it more affordable and accessible for all. Let’s fix our immigration system and secure our borders. Let’s demand that our education system lead to opportunity and progress for the next generation.
These are the real, living issues America faces today. They may not be flashy “news,” but in fact they pose the most basic questions about what kind of a country we will leave our children and grandchildren. That’s how the best monument to the future can be built: If we’re strong and true to our American heritage rather than consumed by what’s old, or what’s new.
In the past few days, we’ve begun to see that when the president and congressional leaders from both parties sit down and negotiate in good faith, they can get things done. The agreement they reached to extend the national debt limit and include almost $8 billion in badly needed aid for victims of Hurricane Harvey shows what can be done when politics is put aside to deal with the people’s business. This could be a good start on a bipartisan approach to all the other issues, like tax relief and immigration reform. Now that would be real good news!

Al D’Amato, a former U.S. senator from New York, is the founder of Park Strategies LLC, a public policy and business development firm. Comments about this column? ADAmato@liherald.com.