Many years ago, when I first graduated from college, I moved to Chicago to find a job. I ended up leaving after several months because the winter weather was unbearable and I’d met my future husband (and found a newsroom job) in southwest Ohio. But one experience in the Windy City has stayed with me all these years, as vivid as the day it happened.
I wasn’t feeling well, so I had left work early and was riding the El home to my apartment on a weekday afternoon. As the train thumped along the tracks, two men were walking around, trying to engage the other passengers in a game. If you gave them some amount of money - $1.00? $5.00? I can’t remember now – they would place a pea beneath one of three walnut shells then move the nuts around. The shell game. If the passenger who paid correctly guessed where the pea was at the end, he or she got to keep their money (and probably won more). If the passenger guessed wrong, he or she lost their money.
Even at age 23-ish, I knew those guys were hustlers. Unfortunately, not everyone else did. I have no idea how many people they conned before they walked from the car behind into ours, but when a man sitting across the aisle from me fell for the trick and lost the game, he got angry and tried to grab his money back. A fight ensued but the hustlers were prepared. In a split second, one of them pulled the emergency stop wire that ran along the ceiling while the other one sprayed everyone in the car with pepper spray or mace.
The train lurched to a stop on a bridge, the men ran up into another car or off the train and the rest of us were left choking in a cloud of pepper spray for close to 20 minutes while the CTA people tried to figure out what happened.
This whole memory came back to mind today as I tried to mentally align what’s happening in our nation right now with what’s being covered on the news. Today’s big stories were that Russia has invaded the Ukraine (rightly so, the media is paying a lot of attention to that right now, as it has major repercussions for the balance of world power moving forward) and - late breaking - that President Biden has made his pick for the Supreme Court.
But as I see it, neither of those is really the “pea” beneath the nutshell. I’m not saying that a Russia / Ukraine war and the Supreme Court aren’t incredibly important; the former, in fact, terrifies me. But unless you’re affiliated with the military, neither of those things will affect our nation and your day-to-day life quite as immediately and as drastically in the near term as other things that are already happening right here, right now in the U.S.
It’s tough to tell sometimes what and where the “pea” is – there are so many important stories in play at all times right now and corporate media seems to be doing its best to ignore or downplay many: Rising gas and energy prices (which will likely only get worse because of the war); rising food prices and food shortages; floods of migrants crossing our border daily and being quietly relocated by the US government to cities and suburbs across the nation; Covid cases and hospitalizations rising amongst the vaccinated and boosted (here’s the raw CDC data for that last one if you can’t get behind the paywall)… the list goes on.
Hopefully, after 1.5 years of reading this blog, you’ve started to understand that media chaos and confusion is by design. Like the characters in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the more we are inundated with information, the more we tune out and the less we truly know. Again, that’s by design.
But there is one thing in particular happening right now in our nation that’s probably worth keeping an eye on.
Inspired by the Canadian truckers, a group of U.S. truckers began a convoy in California Wednesday morning that’s scheduled to arrive near Washington D.C. some time next week. Today, a second convoy began from New England and will arrive in D.C. around the same time. Both are occurring as a means of peacefully protesting any remaining Covid restrictions on Americans.
At one point, the larger of these groups was projecting that thousands of people would join their procession; to date, a few hundred have started the journey.
(Don’t know about these convoys? You can read more here, here and here)
Why is this story potentially more urgent than all the other things happening in the national news cycle right now? For starters, because 700 national guard troops have been deployed to the U.S. Capitol in anticipation of the trucks’ arrival. And because the truckers have already raised more than $554,000 as of Thursday at 6 pm. But also because, if it happens - if thousands of truckers do indeed stop working and instead start driving across the nation to protest our government’s Covid-related rules and regulations, and if more join up with them along the way – the U.S. supply chain could be affected, and things in your life – and the lives of millions of other Americans – could most definitely change. Very soon.
You may agree with the truckers and/or their tactics, you may not. Either way, what they’re doing right now is pretty newsworthy stuff.
I don’t usually make predictions in this blog, but I’m going to go out on a limb here. My hunch – and for the record, I would like nothing more than to be wrong about this – is that the vast majority of U.S. news outlets will cover the story in one or more of the following ways:
They will largely ignore it / pretend it’s not happening, or downplay it.
They will essentially brand it as “Insurrection 2.0” (or create another catchy and legally derogatory new name which they will all repeat ad nauseam).
They will label groups of people participating in the event as “Nazis” and/or “racists” and/or “conspiracy theorists” and/or “right-wing” (and/or any other derogatory names du jour)… but they won’t provide much, if any, proof that these things are true.
They will make mass generalizations about the whole group of thousands of people.
They will parrot government talking points about the event.
The good news is, there are ways to cut through these narratives and see what’s really going on. For starters, instead of reading or watching news stories about the convoy, why not follow the biggest convoy’s website – The People’s Convoy? You can also make a point to follow both left- and right- leaning news outlets that cover the story, so you get a complete picture of what’s happening. Better yet – if you can make time in your schedule, why not figure out when the convoy will be near you and go watch it in person so you can make your own conclusions about what you see? (Again, check The People’s Convoy website for daily updates and information)
However you choose to follow the event, ask yourself the following questions:
What kind of vibe is there around the caravans?
How many people actually showed up?
How are the supporters acting? Are there many of them?
How are the opponents acting? Are there many of them?
If a fight of some sort breaks out, how does the crowd handle it? Who steps in (if anyone) to break it up?
If someone shows up with a Nazi arm band or a confederate flag, how does the rest of the crowd react? Are there lots of people with the same symbolism, or is that person a lone wolf?
Any news outlet that can’t – and won’t – honestly answer all of these questions is not really a news outlet after all. Because – again - whether you agree with the truckers or not, if anything near thousands of vehicles ends up caravanning across the entire nation and meet up with 700 national guard troops, it will be an historic moment that should be covered in the news. Anyone who’s truly a journalist would be eager to see and cover this kind of gathering, because events like these are newsmedia pay dirt - rare opportunities to cover a massive national story with a local eye.
I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know how many truckers will actually show up for this caravan, or how many will make it all the way to D.C. I don’t know if undercover FBI agents will be accused of infiltrating and misguiding the truckers the way they’ve been accused of doing with the Gretchen Whitmer kidnap plot, or the January 6 event. I don’t know if the whole thing will be a bust. I don’t know if any of the truckers will lose their cool and resort to violence to get their points across. Anything, at this point, can happen.
But one thing I do know is that the media shell game is already well underway. And I’m keeping my eye on the trucks.