Earthjustice and other groups are pushing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to create protected pathways between grizzly habitats that would allow for the bears to move from area to area, as they did for, well, millennia. This would certainly be good for the bears but not surprisingly, the ranchers in the area are not too excited about giant carnivorous animals roaming in the same lands as their cattle and sheep.

Frankly, both sides have good points to make, and the Fish and Wildlife folks have until, ironically, Jan. 20 to issue a policy. I’m guessing most folks on the environmental side of things have their fingers crossed for a quick response, while the ranchers may well just want to wait it out until a certain convicted felon moves into the White House and will almost certainly take the side of the rancher. It’s going to be a tough four years for the grizzlies, let’s hope they can tough it out.

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We also learned in Wyoming, a state I spent five years during my first military tour, has a bill before the state legislature to allow a certain type of concealed carry of weapons in Wyoming schools, without the consent of a school’s campus security folks. Now, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m a military-trained, former military cop, concealed carry permit holding, multiple gun owner, and I can’t really think of a worse idea than adding more guns to a school, especially without the local security folks knowing about it.

The bill’s sponsor, State Sen. Ed Cooper, a Republican from Ten Sleep (a lovely little town in northern Wyoming home to 257 people) had a constituent tell him he wanted to be able to be armed when dropping his kid off at school, and current law bans weapons from school grounds. I’m not sure if dad thinks he’ll be able to pop off a few rounds should troubles arise, or if he wants even more folks carrying guns on campus, but either way, it’s a bad idea.

I learned during my time as a military cop (we call them “Security Forces” or SF in the Air Force) even highly trained law enforcement members, when firing their weapons in actual criminal situations, miss their targets most of the time. A 2019 study found that, using the Dallas police force as an example, professional cops only hit their targets 35% of the time. That means 65% of their rounds fired miss and go on to hit something else. And these are trained professionals with regular firearms practice.

Putting on my old military cop’s hat, the last thing we want on the scene of an actual shooting are random civilians, emboldened by their concealed carry permit, to start shooting at whom they think are the bad guys. Even cops can have a very hard time figuring out who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in such situations. I hope the Wyoming legislature kills that bill, though I worry in deep red states the idea more and more guns make people safer is far too deeply engraved in the minds of too many.

But I’m not going to talk about that.

Instead, I’m going to talk about something that can tick off both my liberal and conservative friends: the mainstream media. There, that should get some peoples’ blood racing.

Frankly, the news about the news media is grizzly (Editor: I see what you did there…)

Over the weekend I was chatting with my beautiful and brilliant wife, about the media we expect in the coming years. She mentioned something I, frankly, hadn’t really considered. As a middle-aged guy (66 is still middle aged!) (Ed: not so much…) I grew up watching Walter Cronkite every night at 6:30 p.m. There was the Ann Arbor News newspaper, to which we subscribed, for local news and lots of radio stations had hourly news summaries.

But today we live in a very different world, at least if you are younger than, say, maybe 66?

My wife pointed out most of the population today are not Baby Boomers reflecting on a simpler time (I still record “Emergency” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show” on the old-timey network). Rather they are consumers of an entirely different type of “news” media. The rise of podcasts, such as Joe Rogan, Substack (heard of that one?), YouTube and other electronic “media” must be fully considered and smart political operatives will figure out who is listening to what these days.

I recall my old and very dear friend Rolland Smith, a now-retired broadcast journalist with a dozen news Emmys to his name, telling me back in the day, Mr. Cronkite and his team acted as the “producers” and decided, out of the hundreds of stories that crossed the news wires every day, which stories merited national attention. Now, Rolland pointed out, everyone can be their own producer, selecting what interests them and disregarding, well, most everything else.

The Trump Republicans knew this lesson far sooner than the Dems, if in fact the Dems have finally learned it. Couple that with a willingness to just lie (e.g., Trump recently claimed the New Orleans bomber was foreign-born and crossed the “open” border, when in fact he was actually born in Texas) and you can see, at least in part, how the GOPers won the last election cycle. While Dems were running ads on MSNBC and other traditional media, the Trumpers were out there where the youth of today hangs out, electronically. The Dems convinced those who were already going to vote Dem to, well, vote Dem. The Republicans sought a new and different audience and convinced a lot of them to switch teams in 2024.

Couple that massive shift with some profound changes in more traditional media, and you have a recipe for misinformed voters. Unless you have a toe in the traditional media waters, you may have missed the recent stunning action by the Washington Post’s editorial board, a group of individuals once applauded for their incorruptibility. Recently one of their Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonists submitted a cartoon for publication, showing Jeff Bezos (who owns the Washington Post and is one of the richest men in the world) and other billionaires bending the knee to Trump on a throne, holding up bags of money. That’s actually accurate, given Bezos was one of several billionaires to give Trump a million bucks each to pay for his inaugural bacchanal.

There was a time the Post would have published the cartoon, without worrying the owner might be upset. Today, though, it appears the Post is a mere shell of what it once was, and I can’t help but wonder what news stories will be killed in the coming years because they might reflect badly on Trump and his team of hacks.

We are entering a brave new world in national media. There are bright spots, of course. On a minor level, I’ll note in seven years of writing nearly 700 columns here at CoPo, never once has my editor refused a column or demanded edits of a column, despite our personal political differences. The Washington Post could take a lesson from my editor, but they won’t, of course. And when you couple a cowed media with a deeply dishonest president, you have an uncertain future.

Democrats must get much smarter very quickly on how to reach today’s voters. The GOPers figured it out, and they have all three branches of government firmly in their hands, albeit with a tiny majority (that they, of course, don’t tell their supporters about). I hope we learn in time, but I worry.

If at least a plurality of the American people is OK with voting for a felon who owes millions to women he harassed, I worry for our future.

Stay tuned.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.