by Daniel Greenfield
When you're in a competition and you're losing, one of the first thing to do is to study what your opponent is doing and copy him. In this case
1. Get Good Media Coverage By Excluding Bad Media Coverage
Say that two movies will be coming out next week. One of those movies has studio which bans all critics who have spoken unfavorably about it from seeing it. The other movie welcomes all reviewers. When the final numbers are tallied, which movie do you think will have the best reviews? The one that didn't screen the movie for any critics who were not favorably disposed toward it. Sure the other movie might claim that its favorable reviews were honest. And that and a dime will buy you a cup of coffee.
Now say that these two studios keep doing this for 10 years, and that they're the only game in town. Eventually just to be able to do their jobs, critics will almost always positively review movies from the studio that bars critics, and almost always negatively review the movies from the other studio to stay on the good side of the first studio. That is because selecting for optimal results will produce them.
Free societies "screen" for all critics. Totalitarian ones only play to supportive audiences. That is why they get the better publicity than free societies. Journalistic integrity is supposed to make up the difference by telling the truth to the public. When it doesn't, then the journalists are functioning willingly as tools of totalitarian regimes. And maybe it's time to give them the boot.
If
The mainstream media will be outraged, you say. There will be even more negative coverage. As if there isn't heaps of it now. And what will the negative media coverage be of? Reporters forced to stay home. Foreign correspondents who have to cover an election in Hungary, instead of eating caviar in a Jerusalem hotel and writing vicious articles about Jewish Middle Eastern refugees living in East Jerusalem. Haaretz reporters will have to move to
Should
2. Get Good Coverage by Killing People All the Time
Terrorist groups are always killing people, which the media is fine with.
In other words, someone who steals all the time is viewed more favorably than a seemingly solid citizen who gets caught shoplifting. Don't believe me? Count how many ballads have been written about highwaymen, bank robbers and terrorists. The answer is a whole lot.
This defect does not judge the morality of behavior, but its consistency. Someone who is consistently bad is seen as good, because he sticks to his principles. Which are bad. Clearly proving that he's good. Because if he weren't good, why would he be bad all the time? It must be because he believes that his behavior is really good. So all we have to do is understand his point of view to see why he acts this way.
On the other hand someone who is inconsistent is clearly a hypocrite. Otherwise why is his behavior inconsistent? Clearly he knows he's doing wrong and occasionally tries to restrain himself, but still keeps engaging in wrongdoing. Which means he has no principles, and his behavior is therefore unjustifiable.
Applied to the Israeli-Muslim Terrorist conflict, this means that
This seems like madness only because you aren't a cultural relativist. Which is to say that you believe some things are right and other things are wrong irregardless of who believes them or does them. But if you were a moral idiot, or a cultural relativist (but I repeat myself), you would understand that subjective labels such as right or wrong don't matter. What matters is that people behave in a way consistent with their cultural imperatives and global context. Which generally means killing people or feeling bad because their ancestors killed all those people, depending on their level of industrial development, infrastructure and average family income.
Back when
Not only does consistently doing something result in a better global image, but it also deadens any scandal by turning it into static. Assassinate one terrorist in
3. Victims of Our Own Competence
The real problem with
What do I mean by that?
When a reporter goes to Tel Aviv or
But when he goes to Ramallah or
The solution is to make
Photographers will be invited to take pictures of senior citizens struggling to manually translate Henning Mankell and Iain Banks novels by hand, due to their boycott of
Of course none of this makes any sense. But it doesn't have to make any sense. The facts don't matter. The Muslim terrorists proved that already. The point is to create a lot of sympathetic dramatically staged photos and blame someone for them. It might as well be
In the anti-capitalist dogma, competence is criminality. A more advanced society is always more wrong than a less advanced one. Clearly the only way to win their sympathy is a race to the bottom. If the lights go out in
At some point where Israeli schoolchildren achieve a lower literacy rate than their counterparts in the
Only successful states take the blame, because only they are judged as being responsible. Failed states on the other hand are always someone else's victim. If paradoxically the only way to be a successful state, is to be a failed state-- it's time to start failing upward.
Anyone who supports the Muslim terrorist side, and disapproves of the article should ask him or herself, why?
If censorship, homicidal mania and deliberate dysfunction are effective media relations tools for the poor "Palestinian Arabs" who can hardly walk four steps without claiming citizenship in the great state of victimhood, maybe it's time their victims got a piece of the action. If the left doesn't like working countries that don't throw critics off buildings or constantly try to kill people-- then they're writing a scenario in which those countries will transform themselves into the image of the sort of countries that the left does like.
This is only a satirical piece, but all satire has more than a grain of truth to it. If the media left calls democracy, tyranny and tyranny, democracy. Then perhaps the only way for them to recognize a country as a democracy is for it to become a tyranny. If they praise countries that violate civil rights, for their freedom, and damn countries with freedom for violating civil rights-- clearly then the only way to the leftist heart is by violating civil rights. By calling good, evil, and evil, good-- the left has written this narrative itself with the inkstains of its own moral hypocrisy. It cannot complain about its consequences.
Daniel Greenfield
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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