They Have Made Themselves the Enemy of the People
Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.
So much of the ridiculousness in our society today can be laid at the feet of an ignorant, incurious, and biased press. If you think most of our “free press” are either highly paid preening peacocks of progressivism or nubile young “investigative reporters” with a journalism degree and a brain filled with mush who could not form a rational line of thought if you gave them a million dollars, you would not be far from wrong.
That is why absurdist theorists, like Ibram X. Kendi (aka Ibram Henry Rogers) and Anthony Fauci, can go on TV and never get challenged for statements they make with confidence but that are clearly and demonstrably known to be wrong.
Often the consumers of the news, the public at large, are assumed to be the problem, lacking the capacity of thinking critically – and while that may have some credence, humans have some degree of logic built into our DNA, sort of an epigenetic capacity the same as the way baby animals born in nature possess survival skills from the moment of birth. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said: “Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked”, I believe the same goes for humans – most of humanity has a bullshit detector encoded at the genetic level – functioning at varying degrees, of course, but independent of formal education and always active.
It is not so much that the bullshit detector of the people is not working, it often gets overridden. Many, especially if they watch local news or the Alphabet Networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS), never hear both sides of any story and therefore never have enough information to form alternate hypothesis for themselves.
There are so few reporters and editors belonging to any “news” outlet that have the will or capacity to examine situations in a critical way, form probing consequential questions and challenge the “newsmaker” on their premises, positions, and pronouncements. When examining people or events fitting their perspectives and biases, they play softball, when grilling that and whom with which they disagree, their questions are equally as absurd, better fitting the “gotcha” category or taking the form of a statement rather than a question.
Even comedians fit this description. There once was a time when comedians would skewer politicians and others in the public eye for their idiocy, using sarcasm and parody to get at the truth. No more. Now it is one-way, politically motivated smugness, snark, and anger, 99% of which is directed at the Republican side of any issue.
Back when there were only three major news outlets (the over the air broadcast networks), the public was exposed to public intellectuals like William F. Buckley and comedians like Johnny Carson, both who could cut through the miasma of bullshit and distill the facts. Running from 1966 to 1999, Buckley’s Firing Line program was legendary for its probing debates – the current iteration, resurrected in 2018 and moderated by Margaret Hoover is an embarrassment, a PBS’s cookie cutter version of any talk show on CNN.
Similarly, Carson’s “Tonight Show” brought forward the issues of the day through comedy and taught us how to bring down the high and mighty with mirth that cut to the heart of every matter. The late night “comedy” shows of today occupying the old “Tonight Show” time slot – Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon – are all in-kind contributions to the Democrat Party.
PBS has always catered to the left leaning, tote bag carrying, socks with Birkenstocks crowd but even they were once capable of producing fair, thought-provoking programs that promoted critical thought. In 1980, PBS produced what is perhaps one of the most important and consequential series in television history. “Free to Choose” starring 1976 Nobel Prize winning Milton Friedman and his wife Rose Friedman, an equally gifted economist, presented the case for the Austrian School style of free market economics, that ran directly counter to the prevailing Keynesian economic “wisdom” of the times.
41 years on, those programs are still available on YouTube and for purchase and are some of the most succinct and powerful cases for free market economics ever produced. It is unlikely we will ever see the likes of such programming from PBS or any broadcast network again and for that reason, those ten hours of programming should be required viewing for every high schooler in America.
Add to the presentation of only one side of any position, an equal danger is how the mainstream media simply ignores any story not helpful to their allies or supportive of their narratives. Hunter Biden’s Laptop, the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, spying on the Trump campaign by Obama’s DOJ, exculpatory evidence in the Mueller “investigations”, the examples are legion – and since only right leaning outlets on cable and on the Internet even consider such things, the mainstream brands anything opposing their biases as “conspiracy theories”.
But the media has long seen itself as the gatekeeper for what people should be allowed to hear. I recall the late, great Tony Blankley writing in 2004 about how the mainstream media simply ignored the John Kerry “Swift Boat” story:
“According to Editor and Publisher, the respected voice of official big-time journalism: ‘Chicago Tribune managing editor James O’Shea tells Joe Strupp the Swift Boat controversy may be an instance of a growing problem for newspapers in the expanding media world — being forced to follow a questionable story because non-print outlets have made it an issue. “There are too many places for people to get information,” says O’Shea. “I don’t think newspapers can be gatekeepers anymore — to say this is wrong, and we will ignore it. Now we have to say this is wrong, and here is why.”
Now, there are two revealing statements there. First, it is odd to see Mr. O’Shea, an official, credentialed seeker of truth, complaining about “too many places for people to get information.” He sounds like a resentful old apparatchik glaring at a Xerox machine in the dying days of the Soviet Union.
The second noteworthy statement is the hilarious complaint that they can no longer merely think a story is wrong and ignore it: “Now we have to say this is wrong, and here is why.” It apparently escaped his thought process that if he hadn’t yet investigated the story, it might not be “wrong.” A seeker of truth in a competitive environment might have phrased the sentence: “Now we will have to report it to determine if it is right or wrong.”
In the shadows of Obama and Hillary’s Benghazi scandal, Pat Cadell, long time pollster for the Democrats, was far harsher:
“First of all, we’ve had 9 days of lies…If a president of either party…had had a terrorist incident and gotten on an airplane [after remarks] and flown off to a fundraiser in Las Vegas, they would have been crucified…it should have been, should have been, the equivalent, for Barack Obama, of George Bush’s ‘flying over Katrina’ moment. But nothing was said at all. Nothing will be said. […] It is [unacceptable] to specifically decide that you will not tell the American people information they have a right to know. [The MSM] has made themselves the enemy of the American people. It is a threat to the very future of the country; we’ve crossed a new and frightening line on the slippery slope, and it needs to be talked about.”
The founders created the First Amendment guaranteeing a free press -and it was first for a reason, it was due to the recognition that the public needed an oversight role. The people should know the facts and be free to choose (no pun intended), it was known that a captive and biased press would do little more than run interference and provide cover for elected officials – and they were right.
Pat Caddell hit the nail on the head when he said that the mainstream media has made themselves the enemy of the people.