Controlling the narrative

My niece, a Trump supporter, as is all my family in rural Ohio, saw an article I posted on Facebook titled "Why We Grieve Today," and as you might imagine we had a long, heated discussion and ended up not really agreeing on anything. How is it we see the world so differently when we come from the same background and have the same values? I concluded that we each get our information from sources that align with our viewpoints and rarely get information outside our media bubble.

The difference, though, and the point of this letter, is that conservative Americans largely follow Republican-leaning news sources that have controlled the narrative in the United States for 30 years with misinformation, fear and outright lies. This is how Trump became president. Hillary Clinton was the most investigated (and exonerated) politician in history.

The Benghazi investigations dragged on longer than the investigation into the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the assassination of President Kennedy, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the response to Hurricane Katrina.

What was the result of the FBI reviewing 30,000 emails and millions of email fragments? A reprimand. You would have thought she'd killed somebody. (Oh right, she's been accused of that, too!)

The result is this visceral, crazy hatred of Hillary Clinton. We were (and still are) constantly reminded that she lies. She lies. She lies. She lies. The Republican character assassination stuck, but we all bought into it to some extent because when you hear something over and over again you tend to believe it, whether or not it's true.

The most obvious historical example of media spewing hate and misinformation is Nazi Germany, who were masters at controlling the message and turned political propaganda into an artform. But a more recent example is Rwanda in 1994.

Rwanda's hate radio and an extremist newspaper convinced the majority group Hutu to hunt down and kill nearly a million people - men, women and children - in a five-week span. Using lies and fostering an environment of fear, anger and hatred, the Hutu-controlled media justified the extermination of the minority group Tutsi on the grounds they posed a threat to the majority. The media was able to convince ordinary people who had never killed before to turn on their friends, neighbors and even family members, rationalizing that they were defending themselves, protecting their country and restoring what they believed justly belonged to their own ethnic group. Sound familiar?

There have been more than 700 cases of hateful harassment and intimidation in the United States since Election Day, reports the Southern Poverty Law Center. Last Sunday, when asked about the hate crimes committed in his name, the president-elect was "saddened" and told his supporters to stop. On Monday, Trump named a white nationalist as his senior White House advisor.

So much for reining in the hate.