Call Them What They Are Cont’d

     Institutions, like individuals, have priorities. At this time the overriding priority of the legacy media is to defame the Trump Administration:

     The New York Times recently ended up being shamed into adding a correction to their story about a State Department expenditure for curtains that was clearly intended to give readers the impression that the purchase decision made by Nikki Haley and the Trump administration instead of the Obama administration.

     On Fox News Thursday evening, Haley said the Times had all the facts but decided to put an anti-Trump admin spin on it anyway, which ended up just adding another item to the mountain of “fake news” examples...

     This would not have been believed sixty years ago. The Gray Lady of the Fourth Estate knowingly propagated a falsehood? Unthinkable! Yet numerous similar cases can be produced by anyone who still tests his patience by reading the legacy media. But if it’s so swiftly and easily found out, why do they do it?

     The only conceivable answer lies in the priorities of the institution. One desideratum overrides all others: degrade the public’s perception of the Trump Administration. But how did the New York Times, once regarded as the world’s most reliable news source, acquire that as its top priority?

     The answer is easily arrived at, albeit massively unpleasant. The paper, like most of the rest of the “journalism” industry, was infiltrated and corrupted by Leftists – and to a Leftist, there is nothing more important than his political agenda. It’s entirely consistent with the fabled Gramscian “long march through the institutions,” which has corrupted education and entertainment with equal success.

     I’ve written about this dynamic many times. Here’s a fairly recent example. What baffles many is how individuals’ priorities become institutional priorities, when the substitution is nearly always unfavorable to the institution’s financial health and its original agenda.

     But an institution is nothing more than the people who populate it: its workers, supervisors, and higher management. If persons who promote politics over profitability can be brought in to replace workers who depart, the institution can be infiltrated and colonized. If those persons then relentlessly advocate the hiring of more like them and work to ensure that “undesirables” are marginalized, the institution can be conquered in its entirety. It’s why Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics functions so reliably.

     Of course, a Left-conquered institution will no longer function acceptably in the eyes of those who originally patronized it. It will usually require a sugar daddy, or governmental protection, or both, for market forces are inexorable. The New York Times has a sugar daddy: Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. Owing to the First Amendment, it’s harder to see how the Times could acquire legal privileges, but the way things are trending for freedom of expression, it would be unwise to imagine that that state of affairs will never change.

     For the above reasons, the entirety of the legacy media is operating in failure mode. All its major organs (and many of its lesser ones) have been targeted, infiltrated, colonized, and conquered by left-wing ideologues with no real interest in reporting the facts. Those organs disseminate falsehoods and propaganda labeled “news.” Every one of them has lost the greater part of its credibility. Every one of them is losing “eyeballs.” Yet every one of them is vehement about its dignity, its “journalistic ethics,” and its reliability as a trustworthy source of information.

     What was that saying about protesting too much?