You know the old clichés about causation, don’t you, Gentle Reader? The one about the cart pulling the horse, and the one about chickens coming home to roost, are the ones on my mind this fine morning. It seems certain persons in the media have forgotten them, to their own detriment.
There is no better example of the shamelessness of the media than how “Wuhan coronavirus” or “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese coronavirus” have all been declared to be racist because used by Trump or Trump supporters.Yet the same media-types themselves used the terms....
"Stop calling it Wuhan virus. It's racist."
"Here's you guys calling it Wuhan Virus for weeks."
"This is what you're worried about?" https://t.co/1yR76dIC7i— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) March 12, 2020
There also is a media push to weaponize the crisis to defeat Trump. The same people who screamed that the restrictions on travel from China imposed over a month ago were racist and xenophobic all but ignore that the restriction is credited with substantially slowing down the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus to the United States, buying important time.
New York Times reporter and CNN analyst Elaina Plott tweeted:
Have been talking to lots of Trump supporters across the country these last couple of days, and the disdain for and distrust of the media right now is worse than I've seen at any point throughout this presidency.
— Elaina Plott (@elainaplott) March 12, 2020
That a Times reporter should remark thus endangers the stops on my irony meter. The media, with the Times leading the charge, have actively denigrated and defamed the Trump Administration, the Trump agenda, and Trump’s supporters for four years. While they’ve occasionally resorted to undisguised condemnation, their preferred techniques have been disproportion and distortion: broadly speaking, the under-reporting (or outright concealment) of the improvements and the exaggeration of the costs to the national economy, security, and society that have arisen from Trump’s policies. And by implication, we who support President Trump and his policies must be (ahem) stupid.
It hasn’t been President Trump condemning “fake news” that’s produced our disdain for the media. It’s been the media’s shameful behavior toward Trump and his Administration: its fabrication and promotion of fake news. But that was merely the fulfillment of the media’s sub rosa commitment to supporting the Democrat Party at every turn.
You can’t get away with that kind of behavior for long...indeed, in these days of the Internet, not for long at all. If the Times is unhappy about its diminished reputation among American news consumers, it should look first to its own conduct for the reason.
Now for a bit of prognostication. I feel this will be a safe call, as it will follow a pattern that has gone unbroken since 1956:
It won’t matter whether the Democrats nominate a man demonstrably in the grip of ingressive senile dementia, an unabashed socialist who hates everything this country stands for, or a sick, drunken, bitter old hag all of whose enemies have “suicided.” The editors of the Times will endorse the Democrat nominee as the candidate to prefer...because shut up, you ignorant chauvinist Neanderthal rube, you.
They endorsed outright racist Lyndon Johnson.
They endorsed inept, melodramatic Hubert Humphrey.
They endorsed mush-brained George McGovern.
They endorsed muddled peanut farmer Jimmy Carter.
They endorsed nonentities Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.
They endorsed lying philanderer Bill Clinton and his vicious, unprincipled “wife” Hillary.
And of course, they endorsed lying, vacuous, anti-American Barack Hussein Obama.
But we who support President Trump, celebrate his achievements, and seek a second term for him are the stupid ones. They can’t imagine why we distrust their “reporting.” Remember that you read it here first.
3 comments:
It's a good thing you are both an irrepressible writer and a man self-governed by principled restraint. Were it otherwise the hired pens would be in anxiety of what unique punishment you'd be devising for each one of them -- the most visible first. Someone driven by pursuit of originality and possessing unrestrained ruthlessness would be formidable to such mediocrities.
Perhaps consider a character so described for your next novel? May the muse so grant.
The Klavan video is from April 1, 2009. "Shut Up" on Youtube is oddly prescient, given what happened to conservative posts on Youtube and other social media platforms in the years following.
And the fact that not only does the same silencing happen in the mainstream media and academia, but that the left either doesn't see it happening or maliciously promotes it, is proof enough why we need to understand we're pretty much in a fight to the death.
I found it interesting that my local McClatchy rag (The State) which always follows the NY Times' lead on endorsements actually went so far as to snub Joe Biden in favor of Pete Buttigieg. This must have also been a blow to Biden and Jim Clyburn, as the newspaper previously endorsed Barack Obama in '08 and '16 and has always backed Clyburn who said earlier this year that Buttigieg wouldn't receive much support from the black community due to his lifestyle choice. BTW, McClatchy has filed for bankruptcy protection IIRC.
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