The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I don’t have a Twitter account. I don’t stick my hand in electric sockets or lick frozen playground posts with my tongue either. Life is tough enough these days without self-inflicted torture. But I do take notice that there are plenty of folks running around with their hair on fire over Elon Musk buying the company for 50 billion bucks and some spare change, fearing, I guess, that the Tesla Man will be good to his word that the social media platform will be open to any and all whackjobs, right wingers, MAGA nuts and conspiracy theorists. Free speech, he calls it. And to some degree, it is.

But gee, somehow I feel like we passed that Rubicon years ago. Sure, Twitter kicked the President off, tired of his lies finally, but last time I looked, the guy had plenty of outlets for his Big Lie, TV and radio, the entire Republican Party. No problem getting the word out that he was not a Loser, he was a Victim, the election was stolen from him.

I remember back when news programs were required to air both sides of a story. Fair practices, I think it was called. Simpler times, I guess. Fox News arrived on the scene, calling themselves the Fair and Balanced network, implying that CBS, NBC, ABC and PBS were biased. Give the listeners what they wanted to hear, don’t worry too much about the facts. Pretty soon the talking heads were presenting the ‘news’ without much filter between opinion and old school reporting. Walter Cronkite must have rolled over in his grave and turned his head face down.

Hot talk radio rolled in, pretty much the only ‘news’ source in most of the nation beyond the urban centers, Rush Limbaugh and the brothers stirring up grievances, giving vent to the anxieties of a rural decline. Facebook and its imitators followed, not claiming to be a news source but a news source for most of its subcribers anyway, loaded with fake bots, misinformation, a veritable National Enquirer on the virtual newsstand, muddying the water between truth and fiction, alien abductions and political dirty tricks.

Free speech. Sounds good, doesn’t it? The genie is out of the lamp now and if you think you get three wishes, wise up if you think one of them will be to return to the lamp.

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