To the Editor:

After all the arguing over which crowd-participations were hugest in last week's Friday and Saturday Presidential Inauguration-induced events in Washington and around the world, what are we left with to call reality?

There is a thread of "reality" that runs through what we see and what we hope for, but depending upon political parties, culture and geography the press can barely discern truth anymore.

The Constitution's First Amendment made journalism the only American business endeavor actually protected by federal law, but lately it is just not enough to secure what the Constitution's Framers hoped it would as our "informed" electorate's most independent source of truth.

Journalism in 2017 so far is simply flummoxed. To be fair, in 2016 the Donald J. Trump foundation was effectively held responsible and shuttered as the result of good reporting by a Washington Post columnist who later described wearily stumbling onto the story with his editors.

New York's Attorney General is pursuing the case effectively also, perhaps as a direct result, but this is just one successfully truthful story among thousands of examples of alarming non-stories and stories that were manipulatively disappeared.

2018 will bring a new election cycle in the North Country, in Albany and in Washington. Jobs, immigration, health care, schools, criminal containment/rehabilitation, and climate change will still be crying out for attention. And all along, the international civil and criminal communities will be watching America to see how the last superpower sets new standards for handling human affairs.

After the World Wars, modern philosophy struggled with fascism and other escapes from freedom. Jean-Paul Sartre concluded that human reality is raw subjectivity. Now we definitely find ourselves thinking whatever we want to think in this rawest-ever subjectivity.

When I notice myself thinking what I want to think about alt-rightism and fake news, the iterations of truth are like a carnival fun-house mirror or that effect in bathrooms when full-length mirrors reflect infinitely with sink mirrors. Get me out of here.

Objectivity is almost impossible to prove in modern media. The President of the United States can say two or three different things about an aspect of "reality" and right before my eyes reality disappears in a cloud of sulfuric smoke. Anti-education is really becoming a malignant problem, for young folks and job numbers, etc. but also for example the risks involved in merely proclaiming oneself "pro-science." Is Armageddon a self-fulfilling prophecy? I hope not.

Not to be "overly dramatic" (a la Spokesperson Conway) -- I do so much hope that Armageddon is a deeply spiritual story that figuratively depicts the cautions we will need in order to keep Earth inhabitable for our grandkids and their grandchildren to come. Times do change. Before The New Testament, "Old Testament" as a word had no meaning. It was not yet real.

Let's watch closely what will happen to journalism in 2017 and then decide what peoples' "real" needs will be.

Scott Blankenship

Canton