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Politics has always been nasty — this is worse

“A press badge or even a notebook is coming to be a liability in the increasingly polarized atmosphere of these civil conflicts. Neutrality is obsolete. The question now, even for a journalist, is, ‘Which side are you on?’ In Chicago I was clubbed by police; In Washington I was menaced by demonstrators.”

— Hunter S. Thompson, “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan”

I have always loved working election night.

The bleary-eyed, dumb-tired feeling from late nights, eyes strained from checking and double-checking number after number as you type results. Stomach acid-grumbling from too much pizza and coffee. Beer-thirsty, hoping the results come in early enough to put the paper to bed before last call at the Cricket Club or the Griffin.

Nastiness has always preceded those fun-exhausted nights.

I remember a supporter of the longtime Calhoun County clerk letting slip that the clerk’s opponent had once worked in the Clerk’s Office but had been fired for incompetence. I remember the coy way the clerk “reluctantly” released the records from her opponent’s county personnel file.

I remember the state rep candidate who gave me the silent treatment for months after I reported that he showed up to a township board meeting “fresh off his loss in the state House race.”

A city council candidate, a prominent Battle Creek restaurateur, angry because we reported how far behind (years!) he was on his property taxes. He lost the election and later lost his restaurant.

Oh, how nasty it all seemed then.

Oh, how quaint it all seems now.

As a journalist, you position yourself on the sidelines. Not in the middle, because that is a side all its own. You try to be a fly on the wall, or at least a fly in the ointment, hoping to watch from some neutral high ground while you scribble your notes.

Instead, you end up in the crossfire, hit from all sides, bleeding and trying to fend off another volley long enough to make sense of something.

It’s always been that way. But this year, even more so than in 2016, things are amplified, the volume turned up to 11 on everything, the very air buzzing with tension and anxiety.

A journalist’s perspective is an interesting one from which to watch politics unfold.

When you’re in one candidate’s camp or another, you tend to think your arguments are entirely reasonable, that it’s the other side grasping at straws or failing to see the big picture, the other side that’s turned democracy sour.

But, from the outside looking in, you can see both sides ignoring uncomfortable truths that don’t align with their positions, all camps digging trenches and preparing for battle instead of debate.

You see it, for example, in the complaints about political cartoons.

Here at The News, we alternate daily between conservative and liberal cartoons on the top of our Commentary page — an anti-Trump illustration one day and anti-Biden the next, for example, because Commentary pages are meant to share with readers the broad perspective of ideas that exist in their country and community. When there’s room on the page for a second, smaller cartoon, it always is sketched from the opposite perspective of the larger cartoon at top.

Yet, for weeks now, I have heard angry denunciations from both sides that our cartoons are ridiculously unfair and only prove our bias against their man, both sides seeming to ignore that, just the day before, we carried a cartoon from the other angle.

Both sides seem unwilling or unable to imagine that the other side is calling to complain, too, both sides unwilling to budge, even when shown that all you have to do is count the conservative and liberal cartoons to see the balance.

Being accused of bias is nothing new to a journalist, but there’s something different in the tenor and frequency of the phone calls and emails that tells me things are dangerously different out there.

Where, before, readers might accuse us of being for one candidate over another, we are now more often accused of being against their candidate, part of some overarching anti-their-guy cabal, readers seeming to think our cartoons attack the very humanity of their man, and, therefore, attack their very humanity, too.

And, while I have always been called names for the things I wrote, I am more often now attacked for the things others wrote (or drew), and the attacks are more personal, trying to cut deeper.

There seems to be a disbelief out there that anyone could sit on the sidelines this time, that, if you’re not for my guy, you must be against him.

And that is a worrisome place for any democracy to be.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-358-5686 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com.

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