MEDIA
MYOPIA
First, one wonders why, as Americans, media people fail to reflect the general opinions of the broader population. A rationale comes from no less an old gasbag than Walter Cronkite, recently speaking, for a high fee, from some local Olympus. Hear the Oracle: Journalists start out as cub reporters thus they see the unfairness of life, the suffering of the poor. That’s why they become liberals. Another old bag, Barbara Walters, concurred. Assuming the truth of that “argument”, one can only conclude media people see non-democrats as uncaring of those who suffer from the tragedies of life. Thus, they accrete an agenda to repair perceived inequities. As talkers not producers, they turn to the government and not themselves as their agent of choice for rectification of perceived problems. The media almost never actually does something about anything; they promote it to death. Their chosen party is the party of more government hence they promote and support it, its policies, elected officials and candidates. The demonstrable truth that more government is less for the very people the media purports to champion is irrelevant. The alternative would diminish, if not eliminate, their political sway and authority. That’s one reason why they love Hillarycare even though it is a failure wherever it or a facsimile is in place. Try treatment at your local county general hospital; try Canada. You just think the “Canadian model” is good. Ask a Canadian. Conservatives have long known of this bias against their policies frequently leading to shrill demonizing of individual conservatives. Think of Barry Goldwater and the famous atom bomb commercial; Ronald Reagan who had the temerity to call the Soviet Union “an evil empire” and who promoted the notion of a defense against missile attack which the media denounced as “unworkable” and “Star-Wars”. Never mind that it has turned out to be feasible; the media is never contrite, virtually never says: “Sorry about that; we were wrong.” They are always on to the next item of their agenda. (A recent exception was Chris Matthews who publicly said he was wrong about the Iraqi campaign and other things. Mirabile dictu! Other examples abound. Look at the “looting” stories from or about Baghdad. The emphasis is that the American military failed to “do something”, “failed to plan” for it, thus are culpable. (The military is always culpable just before and shortly after it wins another war. Only during Viet Nam was it culpable during a war. Then, of course, there were Democrats in the White House. It is historically true that winning armies plunder the vanquished. They kill all the males, rape the women and cart off anything of value. Think of the Russians in East Germany and East Europe. They didn’t have too many men to kill but they surely raped all the women and, if you visit the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, you can find many of Old Europe’s stolen treasures. On the other hand, the American military does nothing of the kind. It feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, treats the sick and, after re-building the conquered, it leaves with the defeated country better off in every way than before. And still the media whines about imperfections. My favorite fraudulent media entity, CNN - a fraud by its own recent admission - complained through Wolf Blitzer, that the war was a month old - a whole month! - and we hadn’t found any nuclear facilities yet. Pretty Peter Jennings, the immigrant anchor from socialist Canada, termed the Iraqis pulling down Hussein’s statue a “small crowd”. He would never say that about Martha Burk’s turnout of 40 people for her “mass” protest of the Augusta National Golf Club’s all-male policy. Dan Blather, he who fawningly interviewed Hussein just a few weeks before the war, never revealed that which he could not say or ask of the filthy tyrant. Nope. Blather sat there, respectfully, asking softball questions, a dupe for propaganda. But surely his telecast of the roadway to Baghdad must rank as the dumbest footage shown in decades. One was treated to tape of Blather’s interview drive from the airport to the city, with the roads free and clear. Juxtaposed was his triumphant return drive after the city was secured with, of course, the roads littered with the detritus of war and its ancillary carnage. Then there was the NPR newsbabe reporting that she and other reporters at the Palestine Hotel (in Baghdad) had been required to pay the locals for any access, even to censored stories, and were unable to travel where they wished. Nevertheless, in her next breath, she was getting off on her perception that Baghdad hadn’t been turned into Manhattan within a few hours after the Marines took it over. It goes on and on. The number and kind of such reporting is unknowable but it surely is prevalent. Interestingly, the reporting from those media people who were physically “embedded” with the actual military, moving, eating, living and, in fact, dying with them was totally different from reporting by the coiffed, hair dyed and suave whom we see all too often on our screens. And therein lies the answer to the question of Why? Why does the media have this bent which is out of line with the thinking of other Americans? It is because they are ignorant. Not stupid; ignorant. Most of them have never been in the military; most of them are highly educated, formally and informally; they live within a circle of others such as themselves; they do not go to Yankee Stadium except for the World Series or the All-Star game. They are both insulated from and ignorant of the lives and thoughts of their fellow Americans. They know diversity in the abstract; they live well; they are seldom if ever without work; (a disgrace like Peter Arnett has been hired by The Guardian, Britain’s leading socialist newspaper). The media is essentially ignorant of American life as lived in fly-over country or drive-through neighborhoods. They know they are intelligent but refuse to consider they are ignorant. All of their lives they have been rationalizing as to which is the better way. Rarely have they ever had to manage some theory into a practice. They are book smart but ignorant of how the real world really works. Look too at sets of TV sitcoms, particularly of homes. Unless the show is cops and robbers, the homes are often fully decorated and furnished. They are unlike most modest homes. Fibber McGee at least had a storage problem with his closet. Most automobiles look as if they just left the car wash, even police cruisers. Again, the ignorance of the everyday life of their fellow citizens trickles down to the designers et al who illuminate the script with sets. Yes, it’s show biz but it’s unreal show biz, emblematic of the larger ignorance in the newsrooms. The
result is the carping as to how the performance of others, particularly
those toward whom they have a negative bias, could have and should
have been faster, better, more compassionate; always they demand more,
yesterday. And, of course, the other side of that coin is the reason
why the Big Three networks are losing audience. Why listen to those
disdainful of you, your lifestyle and your country? |