The American Mind

Power corrupts

William Hillman

(3/2019) The manufactured outrage du-jour in last month’s article centered around the young Covington High School boy in a MAGA hat smiling at an American Aboriginal man. The media had a wonderful time jumping to conclusions and publicly shaming the young boy. As history would predict, the narrative that the news media presented proved to be contrived and full of lies.

This is just one in a growing list of manufactured stories formed to advance the political agenda of the writers and editors. If there was any honesty left in press outlets like CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, there would have been deep soul searching, a review of editorial procedures, and front-page apologies. Instead, The Washington Post elected to spend Five Million Dollars on a Super Bowl propaganda ad to convince us that the mainstream news media is the defender of good honest government. Something any honest critic knows is simply no longer true.

Right on que, we have Jussie Smollett. Smollett, (apparently, an actor on some TV show that I’ve never heard of), was the latest victim of those evil Trump supporters. He told police he was attacked at 2 a.m. on Jan 29 in Chicago by two people who yelled racial and homophobic slurs, tied a rope around his neck, and poured a chemical on him. His assailants then yelled, "This is MAGA country."

The News put on its outrage blinders once again. The press ignored the fact that it was minus 16 degrees out at the time of the attack, Chicago is hardly MAGA country, and when Smollett called the police hours later he was still "wearing the rope." Through the entire "attack" Smollett incredibly never dropped his sandwich. Small little hints to the unbiased observer that maybe something was amiss with his story and it might be best to avoid a rush to judgement, but all lost to the "outrage blind" news media.

The Washington Post’s Eugene Scott, "To many, the Smollett incident — and the political nature of the assault — is yet another reminder for many black gay Americans that this president’s vision of a ‘great America’ does not appear to include them."

The New York Post’s Zachary Kussin, "Empire Star Jussie Smollett Beaten in Homophobic Attack By MAGA Supporters, this is unbelievably disturbing. I also hate when cops investigate this kind of blatant shit as a ‘possible hate crime.’ This is obviously a hate crime."

There is an important connection between these two events. Both were linked to "Make America Great Again". To the news media, MAGA is the new dog whistle. All someone has to do is accuse their opponent of being MAGA and the media ignores all impartiality, common sense and goes into attack mode. Why does the news media accept these obviously incredible stories without question? Ben Shapiro writing for the Nation Review put it best, "Because it perfectly fit narratives that the Left loves: the narrative of America as racist, homophobic hellhole; the narrative of Trump supporters as violent bigots; the narrative of Trump himself as an inspirational figure for such violent bigots. The story was too good to be true. So, no one cared whether it was or not."

It seems with each broadcast and story printed, the news media destroys their own claims of impartiality and honest reporting and feeds the argument of "Fake News". This is not good for a free nation.

In 1787, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to a friend, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

The above quote was lifted from an editorial that appeared in the New York Times in August of last year titled, "A FREE PRESS NEEDS YOU". The editorial rightly argues that a free press is vital to a free people. Yes, the Press should be a check on the power of the government. But, it is elitist and insulting to suggest that the Press should be excused from such checks on its own power.

The framers of our constitution understood the need for checks on all forms of power. The news media is not invulnerable to corruptions and needs its own check in the form of public criticism and alternative forms of news distribution.

For example. The media demands "diversity" in government, private business, and organization. But among its own ranks, claims immunity. There is practically no diversity of political ideology, as represented in the American public, in the news media. If you are anything but a card-carrying democrat-socialist-progressive, you better keep your mouth shut.

Democracy and progress only happen when people are free to discuss and present alternative positions and ideas. How is honest debate possible when the moderator (the news media) has chosen to defend one side and portrays any oppositions as not just wrong but "Evil".

I have an old friend who is a writer for a prominent newspaper who also happens to be very conservative and politicly Republican (though registered independent for obvious reasons). He’s expressed to me in order to hold his position he must hide his political beliefs. On the rare occasions when a writer is "outed" as having conservative leanings, you can start the clock on the end of their career.

Former CBS’s foreign affairs correspondent, Lara Logan, in a recent interview described the news media as a mostly left-wing and partisan Democrat news landscape in the U.S. and abroad.

From her interview:

"Visually, anyone who’s ever been to Israel and been to the Wailing Wall has seen that the women have this tiny little spot in front of the wall to pray, and the rest of the wall is for the men. To me, that’s a great representation of the American media, is that in this tiny little corner where the women pray you’ve got Breitbart and Fox News and a few others, and from there on, you have CBS, ABC, NBC, Huffington Post, Politico, whatever, right? All of them. And that’s a problem for me, because even if it was reversed, if it was vastly mostly on the right, that would also be a problem for me.

"My experience has been that the more opinions you have, the more ways that you look at everything in life — everything in life is complicated, everything is gray, right? Nothing is black and white.

"One ideological perspective on everything never leads to an open free diverse tolerant society. The more opinions and views … of everything that you have, the better off we all are. So, creating one ideological position on everything throughout your universities, throughout academia, in school and college, in media, and everywhere else, that’s what concerns me. I don’t have to agree with everybody.

"Although the media has historically always been left-leaning, we’ve abandoned our pretense — or at least the effort — to be objective, today. … We’ve become political activists, and some could argue propagandists, and there’s some merit to that."

Lagan later added, "Any journalists who are not beating the same drum and giving the same talking points," she insisted "pay the price" for not going along with the liberal crowd."