Trump’s ‘S. Succotash’ moment goes south

who has just been laid off should be interviewed nationwide?”

You bet. The journalist’s job is to cover news, not make us comfortable.

But Reagan, as some of us news consumers recall, responded to such media disclosures with jolly kindness compared to today’s president. Reagan didn’t have Twitter to get his message out, but he didn’t need any such gadgets either.

After Trump’s speech, in which he laced into prominent Democrats, the nonpartisan VFW issued something else that differentiated him from Reagan: an apology. “We were disappointed to hear some of our members boo the press,” VFW spokeswoman Randi Law said in a statement. “We rely on the media to help spread the VFW’s message, and CNN, NBC, ABC, FOX, CBS, and others on site today, were our invited guests. We were happy to have them there.”

Thank you, fellow veterans. As a Vietnam-era Army draftee, I, too, was disappointed to hear the VFW crowd’s booing. Some things should stay above partisan politics.

“Have those veterans who booed and taunted the media in response to Trump’s cue forgotten that some members of the press corps are combat veterans?” wrote Martha Raddatz, chief global affairs correspondent at ABC News in a Washington Post op-ed.

“We shared foxholes,” read the headline in print editions of the piece. “Now they boo us.”

She described her decades of working alongside American soldiers in the Middle East. She cited journalists who have given their lives while reporting from war zones, and others whose reporting of the treatment of wounded veterans resulted in improvements by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Unfortunately that public service side of journalism is not what people always see.

News media and news consumers alike need to be aware of the polarizing impact that competing versions of reality can have on our democracy. Otherwise we risk devolving into the divided society that our real enemies want us to be.