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I’m still getting the odd Instagram comment on a post I made two weeks ago. Words like “communism” and “MAGA” and “liar” populate the 2,500+ comments that the Reel is garnering, and if it sounds like none of those words go together, it’s because they don’t.

But let’s back it up for a minute.

The Reel, which you can view here, starts off, admittedly, with a hook that could safely be characterized as provocative: “This should offend you.” Then, I show a clip of CNN’s anchor explaining why, right before a live Presidential address, is about to kick off, the network has decided not to take it live in its entirety: “We’ll be watching tonight’s presidential address and listening to what the president says tonight. But we’re not going to take it live … That’s because this president, sadly, has a history of misleading and, in some cases, simply false statements on what we’ve been talking about tonight: election security and integrity.”

He goes on to explain that the White House had said that Trump would be showing newly-unclassified documents, and that CNN wanted time to review them, talk to experts, and contextualize what Trump was saying before airing it.

Here’s what you’ll hear if you go back and listen to my words. I unequivocally call for:

• Fact-checking the President (and any person making incendiary claims, generally)
• Challenging politicians’ narratives
• Context

But what made me have such ick at that CNN anchor’s words was the presumption behind them: We need to process this information before you do.

So essentially, it wasn’t the fact-checking that bothered me—it was the order of operations.

The Presidential Address: Just Let Me Hear It First

Here’s my argument: Let us hear what the President says. Then, you can fact-check the hell out of him afterwards. You let it play out live, throw a chyron on the screen while he’s talking if you must, and then bring in a panel of experts afterward to truly parse it. This has been the decades-long standard procedure in TV news, until Orange Man Bad came along.

And I get it. The guy is radioactive. But this isn’t a case of intellectual cross-contamination, where exposure to differing thought makes you turn into a raving ideologue. Ultimately, this is a man, on TV, saying things—things you are entitled to believe, not believe, research then not believe, or any combination thereof.

The fact that CNN decided its audience should be protected from primary source information—even if it was just a delay—combined with the fact that a Presidential address actually came with a black box warning, should bother anyone who says all they want from their media is “objectivity.” This is, quite literally, taking the football from you and running with it.

And why do I care? Why did I have such a visceral reaction when I opened up Instagram that day and saw CNN’s careful “warning?” I care because this protocol will be used one day against a person who happens to be part of your camp. One day, it’s your star player the media will be “protecting” you against.

You have to trust me here; the rules that we set in this era of expanding media will set the tone for how we discourse down the line. And when we disqualify information right off the bat—when restrict access, delay it, or only air it with massive editorialization—we remove the most important step in critical thinking: encountering the information ourselves, before anyone tells us how to think about it.

Everyone Saw a Different Reel

Another shocking realization from my brush with internet shit-stirring? Everyone heard the same words and came to vastly different conclusions on what I was saying.

There was the “in agreement” crowd: They agreed that they wanted no editorial filter from any network before hearing the information for themselves.

There was the “it’s communism” group: This group took my sentiment further than I did, calling the delay in access (in reality, CNN streamed it live online and then showed parts of it later throughout their coverage) censorship, and state propaganda.

And then there was the “Trump lies” crowd: Give us editorialization! they said. Run this shit through ten panels before it hits my ears. This, I understand in principle. Trump isn’t a hypothetical President in a j-school ethics exercise. He is a flesh-and-blood person with a track record of lying. (And not the first President to have dabbled in falsehoods, lest we let this become a D vs. R thing.)

And yet. What I personally don’t want is limited access—not to liars, not to truth tellers, not to anyone in between. I want to figure this stuff out for myself. I want the panels and the experts and the differing opinions and the endless debate before I reach my conclusion.

The Argument Underneath the Argument

That’s when I realized that the discussion my Reel was bringing forward wasn’t necessarily about the substance of what Trump said; it was about the role each person is expecting journalism to play.

Is the job of a journalist these days what I’ve always understood it to be—share information, aggressively investigate and interrogate it, present it with context, and then leave it in your hands?

Or has it morphed into something more—something that our algorithm-infected minds have started to expect and demand from our journalists and creators—gatekeeper, interpreter, and ultimately, opinion maker?

I’m asking this question earnestly: What exactly do you want your journalists to do for you?

We can’t keep on the current trend of assigning political parties to questions. We can’t vilify people who genuinely want to hear what the President says because we assume they’re sycophantic fanboys of his. And alternately, we can’t assume that everyone who wants his speech to be fact-checked is a partisan hack who wants the media to do their thinking for them.

“Is Trump telling the truth?” shouldn’t be just a left-wing question. And, “Should CNN let me hear him?” shouldn’t be a right-wing one.

Considering the Presidential Address: Holding Two Thoughts At Once

Critical thinking requires holding competing thoughts in your mind simultaneously, even when one (or more) is inconvenient to your preferred worldview. And honing that skill, I believe, is the only thing that will get us through the digital media age with our sanity, and our intellect, intact.

So yes. Trump can be a documented liar, and one can still want to hear what he has to say without betraying their intellect, their integrity, and journalistic standards. CNN can make what I consider to be a bad editorial call and I can both understand the impulse, and still want all the information.

None of these ideas cancels the other out. We can hold a plurality of understandings of one discrete event.

As I always say, no one is trying to snatch your belief system from you. I’m just trying to make sure you’re still willing to challenge it.

Thank you for taking the time to read. I hope you’ll join me on Substack for more posts like this one.