Grassroots journalism is filling the 'trust void'

Americans have not only become so hyper-partisan that they distrust the concept of "government" on the whole, they also distrust "the news," or "the media." Except for the "media" or "news" choices they make, of course.

Since media consolidation and profit margins have weighed in so heavily on decisions made in news rooms with dwindling numbers of personnel, that "trust void" has left us wanting - and yet we're seeing dandelions popping up out of the concrete as entities like the Atlanta Community Press Collective (ACPC), The Atlanta Objective and Pro Publica press on.

In Atlanta, for example, the ACPC pushed and pushed, pursuing FOIA (freedom of information) requests until the Atlant Police Foundation had to cough up nearly 300 pages of records detailing their lobbying efforts to push the Atlanta Public Training Facility (aka "Cop City") through city hall despite intense public scrutiny and opposition.

Pro Publica, for its part, researched to learn more about the men who'd been deported to el Salvador by the Trump administration: 230 Venezuelan immigrants, 197 of them having "not been convicted of crimes in the U.S. — and that only six had been convicted of violent offenses." They also "identified fewer than a dozen additional convictions, both for crimes committed in the U.S. and abroad, that were not reflected in the government data."

There's more: "Nearly half of the men, or 118, were whisked out of the country while in the middle of their immigration cases, which should have protected them from deportation. Some were only days away from a final hearing." You know, going about it "the right way" MAGA's implore to us that that's all they want from immigrants. Okay.

They dove into the use of tattoes as predetermining factors and the flaws in that rationale, which we've done here, too.

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To wrap the show last week, I couldn't help but enjoy the deliciousness of Donald Trump whipping out his "gotcha" data in front of a press pool spary while touring the Fed renovations with Fed Chair Jerome Powell, only to have Powell dutifully correct him in front of same pool spray. Trump (and Senator Tim Scott touring with him) thought he had ambushed Powell, and it went like one of those Wile E. Coyote cartoons. "Boom."