Open Letter to Ben Doody
Nebraska is Complex
Mr. Doody, I am excited to see what you will do as editor of the Omaha World Herald (https://x.com/bendoody), particularly with your understanding of the digital information age.
I hope you will bring back civil discussion such as the Public Pulse but if not that, a Zoom meeting of subscribers or at least a meeting with writers such as myself. This would create a public forum where people can actually converse as to what is going on.
You will be challenged with the urban/rural divide as this is common nationally. But in Nebraska, you may be shocked by the nuance and the rejection of strident passions. In the end, Nebraskans are realists while having some idealistic ideas.
The national news services, such as the Associated Press and virtually every other national news outlet, regularly engage in fearmongering, sensationalism, and unrelenting partisanship instead of the basic facts as to what is going on. Many have tuned out or at least tried. The fear over COVID was horrendously exaggerated and resulted in preposterous proposals. While the corporate news media fed the fear, few recognized such news was sponsored by the likes of Pfizer, which pushed vaccines. Fauci supported the fearmongering even in the absence of evidence.
Many of my readers have sought relief by seeking alternatives by going to sources such as Glenn Beck and the Blaze Network, to Ben Shapiro and the DailyWire. Tim Pool, Tucker Carlson, Stephen Crowder, and even Alex Jones, have presented ideas worthy of discussion instead of vilification. In fact, Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe were pioneers of this change. So was The Epoch Times, but perhaps you will dismiss them as “right wing”. But realistically the far left has fear mongered about “right wing extremism” for a long time as they live in a fish bowl and hope you remain in the fish bowl, isolated from other viewpoints. My advice is you should avoid the fish bowl.
Many left-of center people are upset about Trump and cannot understand how their own actions caused others to vote for him, as I did. This includes Jeremy Aspen who is listed on your opinion pages as “Community Representative” and switched from Republican to Democrat while running a company in Mexico.
The corporate media lied about reality and the more outrageous false allegations against Trump became, people, like me, looked to other sources such as Right Side Broadcasting Network (https://www.rsbnetwork.com/), merely to hear Trump’s speeches in their entirety instead of the 10 second clip done by all televisions stations.
Most of the corporate news media readily engaged in blatant falsehoods which are too often very prevalent. A site called The American Debunked has tried to reveal the extent of the falsehoods (https://americandebunk.com/hoaxology/). Yet, the defamation and falsehoods continue.
Perhaps you can set a new and more inspiring course for journalism by merely documenting all of the who, what, when, where and how, of just what is going on, challenging career indeed.