Imagine a scenario where an American was removed from society for 20 years. We’ll say it was voluntary, for the purposes of this essay. No internet, no cable television; his main source of information, the ABC World News at 6:30pm EST every night along with the political roundtable shows on Sunday mornings. Kinda like a social experiment in a controlled environment that examines the prolonged effect of the legacy media on the human brain. What would this person’s political opinions and beliefs look like based on his daily diet of news consumption? How might his worldview be shaped after a couple of decades of David Muir, Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos?

Dystopian as it may sound, you actually do know someone like this. You are currently reading his words.

When it became fashionable to distrust the media and “fake news” became a national catchphrase, I didn’t get it. Why would anyone not trust Cecilia Vega? Why would respected journalists like Jonathan Karl and Martha Raddatz tell bald-faced lies to the American people? I still don’t believe they would. But a couple things happened over the last few years that at least caused me to reevaluate my blind trust in network news. The most alarming and egregious of which happened during the January Sixth riot . . .

Amid the live ABC News footage of gallows being erected, chants of “hang Mike Pence!”, police being beaten with Trump 2020 flags, windows being busted, and members of Congress stacking tables and chairs as barricades, another ominous clip was woven into the feed―the image of Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr’s fiancée at the time, laughing and dancing at what appeared to be a party in the West Wing. I think she might have even had a champagne flute in her hand.

This was a tipping point for me. The moment when my disgust and outrage boiled over. The fact that this family of billionaires from Queens, New York, had convinced rural America that they were somehow their champions was bad enough, but now they were celebrating as democracy collapsed? Unreal.

So I did what every other writer does in times of distress and despair―I grabbed my pen and wrote about it. The result was a scathing indictment of this modern-day Nero fiddling in the Oval Office while the Capitol burned. I titled the essay Final Act of Cowardice, slapped it in an envelope, and mailed it out to be posted on the Malcolm Ivey website.

A year later, I was watching ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” when a guest mentioned in passing how the footage of Guilfoyle dancing was actually from a previous White House function and did not occur on Jan 6. Wait, what? This seems like something that should have been vociferously condemned, investigated, and corrected in the interest of capital T, Truth. Instead, barely a footnote.

Shortly after this revelation, I watched a former White House staffer testify before the House January Sixth Committee that the president had to be restrained by Secret Service in order to be kept from joining the rioters/insurrectionists/sightseers that day. Restrained. An allegation that Trump vehemently denies, but that’s not the point. I accused him of cowering in the safety of his office while his supporters and Capitol Police paid the consequences for his reckless words and his inability to admit defeat. I even included it in the title of the essay. While it is inarguable that all those people―and America as a whole―did pay a hefty price for his reckless words and inability to accept defeat (he still doesn’t), I doubt that even his most vocal critics would classify him as a coward. Donald Trump is many things, but a coward is not one of them. The world learned this in real time on July 13, 2024, when his kneejerk reaction to an assassination attempt was to pop back up, raise his fist, and yell, “Fight! Fight!”

Sidenote: The intent of this essay is not to capitulate. I’m not a tech oligarch seeking to expand my empire, or a Democratic senator in a red district, or an Ivy League dean in fear of losing federal funding. I’m just a prisoner. A guy who’s changed his life while serving his time and hopes to reenter a society not teetering on the brink of civil war, economic collapse, crumbling infrastructure, and totalitarian government. But I’m also a writer. And a writer’s job is to tell the truth.

Back to last year’s MAGA rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One of the interesting things about this day in relation to the media was how the crowd quickly turned on the press correspondents who were covering the event. “You did this!” they shouted in the eerie aftermath of the shooting. Of course, the journalists they were referring to were pretty much everyone except Fox News.

Ever since I arrived at my first federal prison last year, I’ve been fascinated by the cable news experience and how the reporting varies on a given topic depending on which channel you’re on. It’s like two different countries almost. In a federal joint, this difference is further underscored by the fact that televisions are segregated like Jim Crow Era water fountains in the Deep South. The “white TV” is mostly Fox News interspersed with a little History Channel here and there when the 24-hour news cycle gets redundant. The “black TV” is mostly BET with either MSNBC or CNN for news. Each station is transmitted through headphones. Flipping back and forth between the two has been a revelation for me.

For instance, when CNN was reporting on the market’s recent nosedive due to tariff fears and consumer uncertainty, Fox was hammering transgender athletes competing in female sports . . . When Fox is highlighting how we are 39 trillion in debt with a 1.9 trillion deficit and how it’s fiscally irresponsible to borrow money just to give it to other nations via USAID, CNN was talking about a looming “constitutional crisis” and how the current administration might defy judges’ orders . . . When the editor of the progressive Atlantic magazine was accidentally invited to a Signal group chat full of Trump’s highest ranking Cabinet members who were discussing the planned bombing of Houthi rebels two hours before it happened and sending each other muscle emojis as the targets were struck, Fox News quickly pivoted to a high-ranking MS-13 gang member who was nabbed just outside of D.C.

Similar to our current political climate, one side is clearly rooting for the other to fail. But contrary to popular belief, I don’t think that the media brass “hates” Donald Trump. I think he is the only hope of prolonging their inevitable demise, even if ratings are currently down. Just today, I’ve been listening to coverage of him floating the idea of a third term. And another story about him going after the nation’s largest law firms. This is headline gold for news organizations. And every day, it’s something new and disruptive. No other president is giving the media that.

And then there is radio . . .

My friends on the right will disagree with this, but one exception to all this partisan media animosity is NPR. Yes, certain shows, hosts and guests obviously have their own views. But there is nothing remotely polemic or political about Science Friday or A Way with Words or Hidden Brain or Marketplace. I owe so much to National Public Radio. Far from home, in solitary confinement cells, through hurricanes and wildfires and cancel culture and presidential elections and war and pandemics . . . NPR has been an amazing source of fact-based education. They are part of the reason an autodidact prisoner like the author of this essay even knows what “autodidact” means 🙂 Unfortunately, NPR and PBS are now in Trump’s crosshairs. I hope the opposition can find a way to resist him on this. Time will tell.

That’s it for this week. See y’all next Tuesday. Stay safe out there.

—March 31, 2025

[This essay is the second part in the Continental Rift series first posted on March 24, 2025. See Continental Rift III…]