Several days ago a 14-foot-long, 1,600-pound great white shark was spotted off the coast of North Carolina. Here’s the bad news: It was headed north. And last month an even bigger 20-foot shark swept through a pond off Block Island – which is off the coast of Rhode Island.
Now, I mention this not to terrify any of you who plan to hit Atlantic beaches this summer. No, I raise the specter of shark attacks just to remind you that the old saying, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” is most assuredly balderdash. If a great white is circling while you’re happily splashing in the water on a sunny day, you could be mistaken for chum, chum. So heed the lesson: Keep track of what’s going on around you.
Which is what we all should be shouting just now in response to the polls revealing that so many millions of Americans don’t have any opinion about the huge tax-and-spending bill that’s churning through Congress. This “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” – yes, that is its legal title -- incorporates a lot of President Trump’s agenda, and its impact on our lives would be huge. So not knowing what’s in it is the civic equivalent of being oblivious to the shark that’s circling your dangling appendages. Once something’s nibbling on your toes, you know, your time’s probably up.
Which is about where the American people are with this Big Ugly Bill. I’m not going to use this short segment to tell you all of the bad stuff that’s in this bill because that’s not the point I’m making here. What concerns me just now is what the ignorance about this important legislation says about us – and what we ought to do about it.
Well, I have to tell you just a bit about the bill. First, the House-passed version of the bill would raise the deficit by a net of $2.8 trillion over the coming decade. That’s mainly because it would lock in Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which disproportionately benefited rich folks. My generation’s great-great grandkids will be paying for those tax cuts. It would pay for part of the cuts by slashing Medicaid – which provides healthcare for one-fifth of the nation’s population, 72 million people – and SNAP benefits, which provides food aid for 41 million Americans. It would roll back a lot of green energy tax credits aimed at fighting global warming and instead more or less subsidize oil companies and even coal companies.
Here's the thing: These ideas are unpopular with American people if they know about them. The latest Washington Post poll shows Americans oppose the bill by an almost 2-to-1 margin: 42 percent to 23 percent. But check that number: It leaves out one-third of Americans – those who told the pollsters that they have no opinion. That is, they don’t know enough to have an opinion.
I’ve became a journalist a half-century ago, and I’ve got to say, if something this big is a mystery to a third of American voters, we journalists need to be doing a better job. No, it’s not our fault if people are ill-informed, but it is our failing if we haven’t made it easy for people to know what’s going on. (3:00)
Part of the blame, to be sure, rests with Rupert Murdoch, a one-man immigrant crime wave, in my view, since I consider it a crime to lie while purporting to be doing journalism. Murdoch legitimized intentionally biased media coverage when he set up Fox News – and these days, Fox isn’t letting its deluded viewers know about what’s really in that Big Bad Bill.
But I’d also say that journalists aren’t doing a good enough job of reaching Americans where they are – including people I’d call reluctant news consumers. We’re never going back to the days when Americans reached understanding of big issues by tuning in to one of three evening network newscasts. But we journalists can and must get better at delivering news beyond our usual platforms, in short bursts and with compelling storytelling – yes, on platforms including Tik Tok and You Tube and Instagram. I’ve been paying attention to some of the people who are dropping newsy videos on Tik Tok, and I have to say that they could teach those of us in the broader news media establishment a thing or two about connecting with an audience.
That commitment to better journalistic storytelling – to reaching the reluctant news consumer -- is an essential step if we want a nation of informed citizens. Look: That Post poll showed that two-thirds of Americans oppose cutting food aid for poor households, as the Big Bad Bill would; 61 percent say no, don’t spend $45 billion to construct migrant detention centers; more than half say we should not end tax breaks for wind, solar and geothermal energy, nor spend $50 billion to finish the Mexico border wall.
Those are the views of informed citizens – the people who see the sharks circling in the water. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough of them to keep this from being a dangerous season for us all.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.