Does the Media Exhibit Symptoms of Oppositional Defiant Disorder?

After work today, I was sitting around trying to think, what, if anything was there to put pixel to screen about today.  It’s Day 3 of the Trump Administration.  It’s 2017.  News moves way too fast to get all that upset about.  Kellyanne Conway’s memorable “alternative facts” line has already been viral and will soon be forgotten.  The media’s orgiastic celebration of the various Women’s Marches has now devolved into questions of “what next?” for that “movement”.  This morning I had a bit of a snit about the New York Times’s headline “News Analysis:  Rocky First Weekend for Trump Troubles Even His Top Aides”, but as asinine as that premise is, it is so clearly premature, exaggerated and flat wrong, that it demeans analysis.  What to do, what to do?

The thought then occurred to me, “oppositional defiance”.  In front of the CIA, President Trump acknowledged that he has a “war” against the “dishonest media”.  Each morning in my Apple News feed I am bombarded by headlines like the New York Times one above, or, from whatever “Mic” is, this beauty “Can Donald Trump be impeached? Here’s what experts have to say.”  The majority of the political headlines I see are gloomy, dark, and defiant.  It dawned on me, then, this is the behavior of a teenager! 

I first want to say that I acknowledge that Oppositional Defiant Disorder is a recognized mental condition.  I have sympathy for the children and parents or guardians that struggle with it. 

A few years ago I recall often seeing a late-night infomercial discussing Oppositional Defiant Disorder and offering a free video to help parents reform the behavior of their child.  Having remembered those commercials, and feeling the way I do about the state of many of today’s political headlines, I decided to check out Wikipedia for the definition of Occupational Defiant Disorder.  Could it be that most of the media that I’m seeing exhibits the symptoms from the infomercial that I remembered? 

According to Wikipedia,  “Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is defined by the DSM-5 [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition] as ‘a pattern of angry/irritable mood, argumentative/defiant behavior, or vindictiveness lasting at least six months.’” 

It seems to me there is a pattern of behavior.  Since Trump announced his candidacy for President there has been ill-informed, loud opposition to him from the mainstream media.  Focusing on past deeds and campaign missteps rather than his call for change and ideas for bringing back jobs to an America wrongly deemed post-industrial by a lazy, snobbish Ivy League class of leaders and journalists, the media became more and more angry/irritable as the now President Trump out-classed and winnowed the field of 16 Republican candidates for the Presidency. 

Argumentative/defiant behavior became more apparent as President Trump continued his call for economic change against one of the most formidable establishment-emblematic candidates ever nominated by a major party, Mrs. Hillary Clinton, a former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State who would ensure that the policies of ever-increasing globalization would continue unfettered, regardless of its effect on the lives and jobs of ordinary Americans. 

Mr. Trump having won the Presidency despite their best efforts, it seems the media has now, really as it has all along, exhibited vindictiveness.  Rather than credit candidate Trump for having spoken to the economic needs of everyday Americans, the media embraced first an absurd dialogue that “white nationalists” were behind his victory.  That failing they decided that Russian hacking must be to blame.  Never mind that the wrong the media complained about, the hacking of emails at the Democratic National Committee and the substance of those emails, would not have gained widespread notoriety unless the media itself was complicit in publishing the emails posted on Wikileaks.  Now, the media seeks to delegitimize President Trump by playing to his vanity and teasing him about the size of his Inauguration Day crowd, knowing full-well that he would respond to its taunts and look petty.  All of this seems pretty vindictive to me.

The good news for the media’s case of oppositional defiant disorder is that there is hope with treatment.  As President Trump’s economic agenda advances, the reality of decent paying manufacturing jobs returning to America may have a positive effect.  Otherwise, my advice to the media, get therapy. 

What is “News”? Can there be “alternative” facts?

Day 2 of the Trump administration and there is clearly an open, established and acknowledged war between the administration and the media. 

Earlier this morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, presidential counselor KellyAnne Conway had a remarkable interaction with moderator Chuck Todd about the distracting media troll job about the size of President Trump’s Inauguration audience.  In defending White House spokesperson Sean Spicer against claims of lying at the President’s direction, a fairly remarkable assertion on the second day of an administration, Ms. Conway declared that the White House had merely presented an “alternative set of facts” for consideration by the public. 

It really was quite an interview, one that almost certainly Mr. Todd’s predecessor, Tim Russert, would have had the good sense to avoid, and it brought up a lot of issues for me.  What is the news?  As a consumer of media, is it proper to call it “news” media?  Is it something else?  I’ll try to flesh those out based on my sense of things.

Funk and Wagnall’s defines “news” as “[r]ecent intelligence; something new; always used as a singular.”  Not particularly helpful without knowing what’s meant by intelligence, which it defines as “[m]ental power; understanding”.  Not a lot to unpack there. 

How do estimable Messrs Funk and Wagnall handle the definition of “facts”?  It is a word that has been presented by the entrenched media as an Excalibur, a razor-sharp foil used to eradicate any opposing viewpoint President Trump or his defenders might proffer.  In FW’s definition, a “fact” is “[a]nything that is, is done, or happens, an act; deed; truth; reality”.  

Only one more, I promise.  What, just to round things out, is “opinion”?  Again going to my terse definers at FW, “opinion” is “[a] confident belief without full certainty.” 

Now we’ve got a start, then.  “News” is recent intelligence/understanding.  By definition, however, a proper definition of news does not by necessity include fact.  A fact is something concrete, it “is”, has been “done” or “happens”.  Opinion on the other hand lives where there is less than full certainty.

To me, this helps give an understanding of the fight between the media and administration of President Trump.  For over two years there has been a nearly complete lack of “fact” reporting by the “news” media.  By necessity, except for the reporting about specific things that happened or words printed or uttered in deed, there have been no facts to report about the Trump administration; it hasn’t done anything yet.  Media outlets are free to report and speculate about the meaning of specific facts, but upon wading into those waters they leave the realm of “fact” news and enter the sea of opinion, by definition. 

Given the definition of fact, Ms. Conway erred in declaring that Mr. Spicer and the Trump administration had presented an “alternative set of facts” as related to the size of President Trump’s Inauguration Day crowd.  There was one crowd size, but without a recognized official attendance count, that number cannot be known with certainty.  The tweet used by media outlets, and retweeted by the National Park Service, certainly indicated that there were fewer spectators for this Inauguration than there were in 2009, but without indications of what time a photo was taken, that clear conclusion can be somewhat reasonably disputed.  Given what is acknowledged as fact both the media and President Trump can have alternative opinions.

In my opinion, the slim definition of fact is the cause of the war between the Trump administration and the media.  The definition of “news” does not require fact.  The definition of news does not differentiate between fact and opinion.  In my view the news media has determined that it is an arbiter of fact.  In today’s media environment however, consumers of media have the same ability to see objective images and hear objective words.  There is no barrier between the public at large and the concrete substance that the media reports upon.  Having presented the concrete images to the public, however, the media then determines that it is free to opine upon the meaning of the substance it has presented.  While opinion on the substance can be helpful for understanding to an audience it is not necessary, humans are able to see facts for themselves and form their own opinions about those facts.  To me it is kind of funny, precisely by providing more access to campaign rallies and speeches, the media in essence eviscerates one of what it appears to see as its core functions, to frame facts.  To an empowered audience, facts don’t need framing.

I think this has been interesting.  Funk and Wagnall’s have provided narrow, and in my opinion, natural, definitions to our understanding of language.  Because there is such a narrow definition of fact, concrete occurrences which have existed or currently exist, there naturally is a broad range for opinion.  By providing wide ranging access to facts, which allow consumers to form their own opinions, the news media has obviated its role to frame those facts to consumers.  The news media is fully within its role and true to its function by providing opinion based on the facts as it sees them, but that doesn’t mean its audience must agree with that assessment.