Can We All Just Get Along?

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 2023

Twenty years ago this fall, the wildly successful author/producer Michael Crichton spoke at the famed Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. As a topic, he was asked to address the most important challenge facing mankind. The challenge he selected took the club members by surprise, namely “distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.”

Without the ability or the will to make these distinctions, Crichton argued, solving more tangible problems
was futile. It is just as well that Crichton did not live to see the advent of social media. “Distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda” has become all that much harder.

The problem has become particularly acute at the local level. For more than a century, The Kansas City Star played the role of local arbiter. The newspaper helped its readers distinguish success from failure, reality from fancy, good from evil. Although far from perfect, The Star kept its reader reasonably well-informed, and most everyone read it. Local debates proceeded from a shared base of information. 

Some time around the turn of this century, The Star lost its way. So subtle was the shift at first that even its reporters did not sense it. I recall a student forum about 15 or so years ago in which reporter Dave Helling was asked how the paper treated the issue of abortion.

“We play it right down the middle,” said Helling. I remember his statement well since he made a motion with his hand as though he were slicing a pizza in half. “Dave,” I said, “The Star just won the ‘Maggie,’ Planned Parenthood’s top journalistic honor, for your commitment to reproductive rights.”

True, I used air quotes around the phrase “reproductive rights,” but I never pretended to be non-partisan. The Star did. The issue on the table was not how one felt about abortion, but how objective was local reporting. As I explained to the students, they could no longer depend on the local newspaper to discern truth from propaganda.

Today, few people read The Star, and fewer still depend on it. Offsetting its demise is the explosion of alternate news sources, all of them partisan, some more conspicuously so than others. 

The challenge for the individual is to create a personal informational matrix that is relevant and reliable, and that can help that reader distinguish truth from reality. The challenge for that individual in a communal setting is to recognize that others are pulling their news from an entirely different matrix.

As Americans, we continue to share the same values. What we do not share are the same information streams. Some events, however, show us how much we all have in common. The great majority of Americans, for instance, reacted with horror at the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel much as they did at the Sept. 11 attacks on America. Few among us would endorse the slaughter of innocent civilians, and fewer still would do so publicly.

Few events, however, have that kind of galvanizing power. Going forward as a community, we have to devise a strategy for negotiating our differences in a civil manner. This begins with the acknowledgment that the other guy may know something you don’t and deserves the right to be heard.

One current case that will test our ability to sort out our differences involves Eric DeValkenaere, the former Kansas City police officer convicted in 2021 of shooting and killing 26-year-old Cameron Lamb. The headline of a recent Star op-ed both summarizes the dispute and disqualifies the paper as a reliable source, “‘I know every fact’ of KC cop who shot Black man, says Baker. It’s Parson who does not.”

The use of the word “Black” in the headline by the race-obsessed Star renders its opinion suspect. The shooting had nothing to do with race. The fact that DeValkenaere is “the first Kansas City police officer ever found guilty of killing a Black man” shines no light on whether the 20-year police vet and family man deserved his conviction. 

If anything, the injection of race into the issue suggests that the media environment in which prosecutor Jean Peters Baker tried this case—months after the Derek Chauvin trial in Minneapolis—may have affected her judgment.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, who is weighing a pardon, certainly thinks so. Parson recently told local radio host Pete Mundo that “you don’t ever want anybody convicted because of the political side of things.” Baker, he said, “set a poor example of setting the stage and making this more of a political issue when she should be doing what’s right by the law.”

Without a reliable media arbiter, the citizen must work harder to understand why Parson would even contemplate such a risky political move. The information is out there. Those who want to know would do well to read the Respondent’s Brief prepared by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey. Reading it, I had to wonder why anyone would ever want to become a cop in Kansas City.

Too few people, however, will read it. The people protesting in the streets are the least likely. Contrary information will only dim their passion. “If DeValkenaere is pardoned, if he is let off the hook by any other means, the people of Kansas City will not stand idly by. We are not going to let this injustice stand,” said one of the many protestors putting heat on Parson.

To keep matters civil in a city with an unreliable media, it falls on civic leaders, Baker and Mayor Quinton Lucas most notably, to resist the urge to inflame the public, to urge calm, ideally by explaining the state’s case to their followers. 

If so moved, they might wish to quote the cautionary words of a man who saw what can happen to a city when civic order breaks down: “I just want to say—you know—can we, can we all get along? Can we, can we get along?”