The Fourth Estate is Bankrupt

Are you for or against us
we are trying to get somewhere
--Join the Boys,
Joan Armatrading

Change is avalanching upon our heads
and most people are grotesquely unprepared
to cope with it
--Future Shock,
Alvin Toffler  

Nobody will have to leave home
 to go to work or school, 
or even stop watching television. 
Everybody will sit around all day 
punching the keys of computer terminals 
connected to everything there is, 
and sip orange drink through straws 
like the astronauts. 
--Ladies and Gentlemen of 2088,
Kurt Vonnegut
 _________________________

When did we go crazy?

The New York Times asked last week if the press should cover a duly elected presidential candidate in a disinterested way, sans commentary or prefatory disclaimers and disdain with no apparent irony in absurd non-sequitur, “Trump is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism,” (when it is THEY who are demolishing the norms.)

I am a stranger in a strange land reading this.

The press should be an institution tasked with collecting and disseminating the news in a thorough and disinterested way; only the editorial side of the house is permitted to make commentary. 

When did this outrageous fascistic press arise which arrogates to itself the power to decide what we see and how we see it? Why have we allowed this and -- moreover -- why do we fed greedily at their trough?

August 8 2016 saw the first NYT coverage of Mr. Trump as a candidate with a platform, and not simply a caricature to be derided.

Three days prior, Robert Parry and Andrew Bacevich considered in separate pieces that Trump is actually a candidate, and that the the liberal media entity has failed both us and themselves in its project to discredit the candidate. In fact, the media has succeeded only in dropping the democratic standards of a free and disinterested press by several rungs.

The shame is entirely upon the press which has fomented the hatred in the public square and erased any serious debate between the candidate’s positions. The talking heads and pens and their creative efforts to curry reader's outrage became the story the year.

Their collective egos trumped the actual story, which is beyond their hatred or disdain.

Surely our abdication of rationality and impartiality to our egoistic social media feeds are partly to blame for our isolation in our respective echo chambers. But there is something else, something more atavistic, which is being awakened in the public.

The decency imposed by exposure to a marketplace of ideas has been erased as a new Left arises which brooks no censure of itself. To be Left qua Left today implies having a lock on the progressive impulse.

Any thought they deem conservative is labeled as hopelessly reactionary and foolish. By extension, the people who hold conflicting ideas are voted off the island of sophisticates. 

But it is the Left in the United States which is missing the bus in their snarky boy-in-the-bubble deshabille. This smug dismissal is ignorance of the highest order.

Opposed to the media story is a mass of people who are chagrined by dynamic world events, and they are not reacting obediently to the Left’s unrelenting insistence upon change-as-progress (lest one be labeled a Neanderthal.)

The Left is wallowing in the madness of the riotous mob (theirs), born of fear and hatred of the unfamiliar, of that which challenges its tidy status quo. They have become bullies. They are they (and therefore, enlightened), and we are we (who are by default, not.)

The reformist and progressivist impulse is gone. I have no sympathy for them and their project to silence their opponents.

By rendering the other side of the aisle as some vague menacing enemy, they give lie to the reality of our political process which for all its variations in opinion, seeks to safeguard and enhance our republic via mediation and amalgamation of a marketplace of ideas.

What I have seen from the erstwhile legitimate liberal press resembles nothing so much as World War II agitprop, which depicted the Japs and Huns as various vermin with exaggerated and grotesque features. Such is the image rendered repeatedly, ad nauseum, of Republican candidate Trump.

Lobbing verbal mortars is so much easier than actually listening and allowing a space for understanding.  One may understand this crude impulse from the average person who lacks access to the details of a precise news feed. But one may not excuse this behavior from the press.

This derogation of the "Other Candidate" is what the liberal media has being practicing for the last year, and they have done so with our imprimatur. Slaves to our shibboleths, the press -- like liberal media wonk Nate Silver at his site FiveThirtyEight who failed so dismally in calling the Republican primary – has NO idea what time it is in our nation.

We are not a very serious people. We play Angry Birds and we are Angry Birds. We prefer to flame-out online versus to engage in rational dialog, and have bifurcated into two dismally remote factions, glowering at each other from our respective caves.

But the more shameful ire and bigotry has arisen from the Left, the corner which should be a shining beacon for liberal thought. The Left has lost any prior claim to excellence and understanding. It has become mean and shrunken.

Snarkiness and much worse rules the day. It is an ugly elitist bastard copy of liberalism with which we are bombarded. Do you present another point of view? “Lalala”, they say, “I don’t hear it”. Moreover, “You are not one of the cognoscenti, because you are with us or agin us.” And with a fillip, the possibility of  an emergent unity from difference is disallowed.

Back to The Cave.

The obituary of liberal and progressive media will say it went down a rabbit hole of begrudging anger and verbal violence born of befuddlement of their fellows, the “Other 50%”. They got lost pursuing cleverly violent bilge to stoke and corral anger against the Other Candidate and his electorate in their easy and predictable derision.

In their refusal to countenance Mr. Trump’s message, the Left shows itself biased, arrogant and dismissive fools. I am not a part of that club. My interest is for the whole of my society, and to understand the impulses behind people’s contentions, and the solutions which are forwarded.

I can’t see all of this from within Plato’s Cave, which is where my liberal fellows currently reside.

August 15 was the first time Trump was mentioned by name as-candidate on the ABC Nightly News. Unfortunately, it was simply to deride some campaign-trail rhetoric (regarding the genesis of ISIS), juxtaposed with an audio-visual of Mrs. Clinton saying something derisive in response.

Because it is her voice alone which was featured, the implication is that she is the Serious Candidate, and therefore alone is sound-byte worthy.

Later the same day, BBC America also mentioned candidate Trump in service of its agenda. Program emcee Kitty Kay asked Former former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen about Mr. Trump’s position vis-à-vis NATO.

Rasmussen predictably said, “[NATO] has worked very well since it’s inception in the Cold War.” (An era which has been, of course, OBE.)

Undeterred by the superannuated bias of her guest, Kay asks Rasmussen asks in her very American form of editorial reportage, “So do you fear for the safety and security of the West if Mr. Trump is elected President?" in what used to be called a "leading question", suggesting candidate Trump would put the entire world in mortal danger from the "bad guys" (Rasmussen's term).

“Indeed,” replied the agreeable-to-being-led Rasmussen (a sina qua non of being Secretary General.)

This abdication of pure reportage -- more pointedly, its devolution into cartoonish verbal partisan violence – is shocking and sad.

We the People do not need to receive this hate and nearsightedness. What fools we are to accept this bludgeoning to our psyches on a daily basis.

We need excellent, careful, disinterested reportage, and we are not getting it.

[cross-posted @ milpub.]

Zimmerman Lynch Mob

--this cartoon shows the 
 typical facile liberal perception

Ahm seventeen. Almost a man.
He strode, feeling his long loose-jointed limbs 
--Almos' A Man, Richard Wright

I am looking for a human 
--Diogenes of Sinope

How could they see anything but the shadows
if they were never allowed to move their heads? 
--Allegory of the Cave, Plato
_________________

I opened my news on a muggy North Florida Sunday to read the verdict of the Zimmerman trial: "Not guilty". I have faith in the jury system, and believe jurors -- my peers -- largely get it right, when provided the relevant data.

The form in which the news came to me was via a liberal news service which ran the Yahoo news article by Liz Goodwin. The lede begins,

"Zimmerman, 29, was charged with second-degree murder in the death of Martin, a 17 year old black boy ..."

"Black boy" -- evocative, no? My passing acquaintance with UPI and AP press manuals would suggest, "young man / adolescent / juvenile / or teenager" as fair descriptors, but "boy"?  BOY? Not for a 17-year-old young man, and especially not a young black man. It seems so uncouth as to be risible. It is derogatory, emasculating and humiliating.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit decided in a judgement last year that the use of the term "boy" towards a black man showed evidence of racial discrimination (Ash vs. Tyson Foods).  A retired judge commenting on the case was quoted in the New York Times as saying “It’s the same as calling him a nigger.”

Were Ms. Goodwin to describe a young black man thusly in our neck o' the woods, she would be liable to be jumped. Especially you, Liz-miss-white-person. No sir. Snoop Lion may say "boy" or "niggaz" ("fo shizzle my nizzle"), but certainly not you. Using a non-evocative, non-pejorative adjective is Journo 101, and it is sad when a national news service cannot get that right.

Our press is riddled through with bias at every slice. This should be the story of a trial and its findings, not an effort whip up some after-the-fact angst.

In addition to the offensive coverage, the comments from my fellow liberals following the story were atrocious, hideous, beginning with the suggestion that a black person now kill Z. The following is the comment I left:

"Why does the writer use the phrase, "17 year old black boy"? "Black boy" is the phraseology of the Jim Crow South; at 17, Martin was a teen. 

Oh, I get it, the liberals are just as disingenuous as the conservatives, and use anything in their arsenal, without regard to bias; in fact, intentionally with the intent of biasing. Disgusting, really. 

Some of the readers here call for the murder of Zimmerman by a black man ... most of you people here are nuts. Any hopes I had that this might be a truly liberal community are gone -- if this is liberalism in 2013 America, you can have it."

Ah, but a "boy" was killed, and we are gulled into believing that it was precisely because he was a "boy" (=young black man.) Don't give me that hokum. As Ranger says, when a 17-year-old young man earns the Medal of Honor dying in battle for his country, we do not call him a "boy". Trayvon falls short of that mark, but his age is commensurate; "young man", not "boy".

What passes for "news" and reportage today bores me. That people accept it is scary and disgusting.

She Fights for Her Corner

Only the important bits, please
(from NYT fashion section, 3/1/08)

She drives me crazy
Like no one else
She drives me crazy
And I cant help myself
--She Drives Me Crazy, Fine Young Cannibals

Thank you, oh Lord,
for not having made me a woman
--Orthodox Jewish morning prayer

"Mr. Editor, I fight for my corner.
Mr. Editor, I leave when the pub closes."

--Winston Churchill, to London Times editorial
suggesting he "retire gracefully"
______________

There were a few sayings dear to my mother which eluded me. One of them was, "She can't win for losing." How does this make sense? Today I found out.

A dear, yet deeply conservative, friend -- a devotee of Drudge and Hannity -- told me the latest dish from his sources on Hillary:

[a] She wants Obama to win, so that people will see what a horrid president he will be, and they will then be ready for her come four years from now. Alternately of course, [b] she wants Obama to win the nomination so that McCain can beat him. He smiled, as he had two plausible reasons for Hillary's continued presence.

None of this recognizes the fact that she might be running in order to actually win the nomination. No -- she is a spoiler and a harpy, and has been since the outset. When she wins, as she did by 40% of the vote in West Virginia, she loses, as the press gives her short shrift. And besides, the West Virginians are rednecks. No one wants to consort with them; best they stay in the mines and haul coal for the rest of us.

This is really ruining the coronation. Please just go before you win anything else and steal more votes away from our presumptive candidate. The papers have been writing her obits for months, and their tone is alternately angry, wheedling and disinterested. The chutzpah is enormous: "Hillary is irrelevant; let's just begin our discussion of Obama vs. McCain." For candidates separated by a couple of percentage points in the popular vote, 100+ electoral votes -- this is democracy?

It reminds me of an 85-year chemistry professor at FSU recalling her days as an undergraduate, remembering when a professor chided her in front of the class: "Why are you taking up a seat that a man might have?" The WaPo ran an essay today, "Misongyny I Won't Miss" explaining how it goes down 65 years later.

The press had ordained the winner back when Obama was emerging as the golden boy among people who knew what to order (not "coffee") in a Starbucks ("Look, our barristas are white.") Hillary is for Dunkin' Donuts people. She is dowdy and frumpy and passe. It is not for the likes of her people have transitioned from Walmart to Target.

Poor Hill. She can't win for losing.