Daly: What Sexual History and Media History Have in Common

Relationship baggage can do a real number on people.

The other morning, I was half asleep and binge-scrolling Instagram reels from the early 1990s (as someone of my age does), when I came across an old teen-abstinence commercial. Actually, it may have been an educational video shown in schools, but regardless, it showed an adult speaking to a room of teenage students. The adult used an old phrase I still think about from time to time: “When you have sex with someone, you are having sex with everyone they have ever had sex with.” (I think I may have actually first heard the saying, as a teen myself, during an episode of the The Jerry Springer Show — possibly during Jerry’s “final thought” send-off).

Anyway, it was one of those cultural phrases that stands out to a lot of people from my generation — sort of the STD version of “This is your brain on drugs.” It may not have packed the wallop of eggs frying in a skillet, but it likely did — despite some flaws in the reasoning — raise the intended awareness (and fear) about the risks associated with premarital sex.

Nostalgia, however, is not why the old mantra still lingers in my mind. I often think about it in the context of today’s political media — specifically in regard to the challenges faced by those in the field who care about their integrity, keep themselves informed, and feel it’s quite important to be honest and fair with their audience.

The challenge isn’t in producing such an offering. In fact, that part’s pretty easy. Just about anyone can have a political voice in this day and age. Case in point, you’re reading this column via a Substack newsletter, written by a guy who records, hosts, and edits three separate podcasts from his home-office.

No, the real hurdle — for those who care more about their credibility than their popularity — is having to contend with every political-media figure their audience has previously had a relationship with (or maybe still has a relationship with).

It too can be like dealing with a transmissible disease or preexisting condition, inflicted by harmful agents spreading conjecture, half-truths, tribal pandering, and outright lies. Prolonged, unprotected exposure to bad media-actors and their shady techniques can debilitate one’s system, and once politically-germicidal treatments like facts, fairness, and intellectual consistency don’t work the way they used to. It all can be a significant impediment to the connection you’re trying to build with that individual.

In fact, such a connection may not even be possible, because you’re not only expected to accept their malady as a healthy baseline condition (shaped by their past or present media-relationships), but also further transmit it.

I brought up one such example with Bernie Goldberg the other day…

Bernie and I are conservatives who’ve long written from an ideologically conservative perspective — one that used to be pretty compatible with the Republican Party. So, no surprise, most of this website’s readers and listeners are longtime Republicans (or at least have been voting Republican for a long time). And in that political space these days, there’s a widely accepted belief that President Trump has ended no fewer than eight wars since returning to office.

To give you an idea of just how accepted that premise is, this website has actually lost a number of subscribers (we know this from the notes they’ve sent us), because Bernie and I have failed to give Trump due credit for this amazing achievement.

Now, the easy explanation for our purported negligence is that the claim simply isn’t true. I’d say that it was clearly a marketing-theme that our president and his administration came up with to bolster Trump’s case for winning a Nobel Peace Prize, but to many political-media consumers (at least of the MAGA persuasion), that isn’t “clear” at all. To them, it’s a straight-up fact that Trump ended eight wars.

Why do they believe that? It’s not just because of what Trump and people in his administration have been saying. The claim has also been treated as fact, and regularly reinforced as such, by much of the right-wing media — from top podcasters to top cable-news hosts (whose audiences number in the millions). And by not accepting that farce as our reality, people like Bernie and I are paying a price for other political-media figures’ dishonesty and sycophancy.

The eight-war stuff is just one example of bogus narratives that unfortunately serve as a litmus test for media credibility on the political right — at least for many. Another one is that Trump’s tariffs have been a huge net-positive for the U.S. economy.

The truth is that there are scores of economic numbers (not just the words of “elite” economists) pointing to the exact opposite conclusion. But those whose political diet consists of daily hours of popular right-wing media broadcasts may not even be aware of that. And those who are, and maybe even feel the pain in their daily lives, largely blame Joe Biden for the misery.

Why? Because that’s the default right-wing-media explanation for all unignorable hardships at a time when Trump is our president, and Republicans hold majorities in both branches of Congress. And if you deviate from that consensus, again — you’re the one with the problem.

I will say that at this point in Trump’s second term, I don’t see many in the right-wing media pretending that the Justice Department isn’t openly waging political retribution against Trump’s opponents. That’s at least a helpful starting point. The problem is with the consensus, again in that sector of the media, that it’s a fine thing for the DOJ to be doing. At minimum, it’s entirely understandable. That’s because they’re not doing anything that wasn’t already done to Trump by Joe Biden and the Democrats. That’s the narrative anyway.

But if you look at that narrative, and see significant flaws in it (like inaccuracies, hypocrisy, and a stunning dismissiveness of executive corruption and abuses of power), you’re the one who’s way off-base — once again, because you’re having to manage relationship-baggage caused by others.

I could get into the 2020 election and January 6, again, but I’ll spare you all this time, and just say that there are perhaps no better examples of relationship-toxicity, on the political right, than these two issues.

Again, some relationships just aren’t possible. And that’s okay. If you offer someone a healthier, more credible alternative than what they’re used to, and it makes them so uncomfortable (and even spiteful) that they reject you, it’s probably best — at least for you — that the relationship was severed. And it’s a lot better choice than letting yourself become infected along with them.