by E.M. Cadwaladr
Journalism schools do not teach journalism anymore. They teach the Machiavellian black art of propaganda.
Isn't it amazing that the left-wing media continue to compare Donald Trump to Hitler, fling accusations of racism at half the country, and beat the dead horse of the Russian collusion conspiracy well beyond the hope of any serious public traction? It is amazing only if you assume that the liberal media possesses, lost in some forgotten corner of its deranged psyche, some shred of respect for the American public. If you give up the hopeful notion that they respect us, leftists' behavior becomes far more understandable.
For the sake of our own mental clarity, we have to delete the phrase "liberal bias" from our vocabulary. A "bias" is a tendency, sometimes even an unconscious tendency, to favor one thing over another. A "biased journalist" is a person who has some deeply held beliefs that tend to color his assessment of the world. Such people may lean in one direction, but they still imagine that they are looking for and reporting the truth. The idyllic days of biased journalism are over. This isn't the 1980s. This, my friends, is a brave new world. To say CNN is still trying to report the truth but leans a little to the left is like saying the serial killer John Wayne Gacy cared a lot about young people but just got a little overly enthusiastic at times. The liberal media are not engaged in journalism, except on those rare occasions when they cannot find some angle of a natural disaster on which to grind their political axes. They want to destroy both Trump and his supporters – period. They will incite, inflame, obfuscate, and outright lie in the pursuit of that goal.
Journalism schools do not teach journalism anymore. They teach persuasive storytelling. They teach the Machiavellian black art of propaganda. Like most black arts, left-wing "journalism" relies heavily on its own peculiar dogma of magical rites and incantations. To shut down Herman Cain in 2012, our leftist adversaries invented (or at least exaggerated) the ever popular sex scandal – the trusted and true kill shot they have used to assassinate troublesome public figures for decades. Republicans nailed by a weeping and well paid accuser have typically curled into the fetal position and faded away. There have been subtle variations to this gambit, but the tune is always recognizably the same. All bow before the dirge of the disgraced. Then the left tried it on Trump – and failed! He staggered briefly with the airing of the Billy Bush tape and a bevy of newly found women wronged, but he was soon on sure footing again. The Christian voters who were supposed to abandon him in droves had been played for suckers one time too many. They'd had enough.
The Russia scandal, I think, was just another attempt to divide and conquer. The hope was that the legions of retired cold warriors who voted for Trump would balk in Pavlovian fashion at the mere mention of the word "Russia." Again, the media wing of the political class showed quite plainly that they hold the minds of ordinary mortals in contempt. It never occurred to them that the aged portions of the Republican base were more than bright enough to have noticed that today's communists are much closer to home. The Legionnaires and their brethren didn't buy it. Not for a hot second. "Trump is Hitler"? Again, the average voter knows the difference between refusing to invite the entire Third World in for breakfast on the taxpayer's dime on the one hand and herding local doctors and jewelers into gas chambers on the other. We are not so lobotomized that we believe that swimming the Rio Grande at midnight is an "act of love" or that Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is a number-one bestseller in the Muslim world. Let's be honest – it isn't even number two.
The playbook of the leftist media isn't a particularly thick volume, but it's all they know. In the absence of any success, except among the bitter brainwashed progeny of what passes for universities, they have little choice but to carry out the instruction on their playbook's last page: when all else fails – repeat, repeat, repeat! While it is true that repetition has a certain power to convince, it does have limits. You can sway a few weak minds by publicizing and politicizing every single cop-shoots-black-man incident in the country, but the Trump-is-Putin's-puppet narrative gets a little old when the best you can come up with are campaign people speaking to miscellaneous Russians about nothing much. Sooner or later, "unnamed sources" need to be named. At this stage, substituting "unnamed government officials" doesn't really help. They might as well say "unnamed Hillary Clinton supporters." Or, just as likely "the reporter sitting next to me." Sooner or later, even inattentive people notice the sickening smell of the elitist media's contempt for anyone not of their class, for the franchise, and for the truth.
In their ongoing comedy of chaotic outrage, the left has even managed to wreck its own storyline by adding a growing litany of distracting or incompatible side plots. If Trump were mentally unstable to the point of blowing up the world, as CNN and others have claimed, why would the Russians promote him as their stooge? Stormy Daniels, too, is a far less believable creature than Anita Hill – and returning to the sex scandal ploy at this point is just going from beating one dead horse to beating two. "Trump demanded an extra scoop of ice cream for himself!" "Trump is responsible for making an innocent Hispanic child cry!" The random flailing is more like a grand mal seizure than an exercise in journalism. It is almost as if some leftist billionaire (God only knows which one) had offered a gigantic prize to any "journalist" who can bring the president and the populist movement down. With now monotonous predictability, they are all shambling creepily toward that goal like something out of Night of the Living Dead. "Come out, Donald. We know you're in there, Donald. We're going to kill you, Donald..." If you watch the faces of the reporters at the White House press conferences, you will notice their zombie-like thousand-mile stares and the weird, barely suppressed compulsion they appear to have to feast on the brains of the living – as though such a meal might provide them with some actual ideas.
Yes, I exaggerate – but only just. It seems not to have occurred to these mouthpieces of the political class that we have excellent reasons not to listen to them anymore. Hillary called us deplorables. Jonathan Gruber called us stupid on numerous occasions. Peter Strzok, the Deep State hero, summarized us concisely as pieces of excrement. And these examples name but a few. The left-wing media have defended or obfuscated for every one of our detractors. They've insulted us directly. Apparently, they think we've been too insensible to notice. We have not. A series of landslide elections and a rough-edged real estate developer in the Oval Office later, and these pampered propagandists still believe they are the entitled shapers of public opinion. They are not. We've heard enough. We've been on the butt end of their manipulation for much too long. Let them howl. It's worth listening only for the sheer delicious satisfaction.
For the sake of our own mental clarity, we have to delete the phrase "liberal bias" from our vocabulary. A "bias" is a tendency, sometimes even an unconscious tendency, to favor one thing over another. A "biased journalist" is a person who has some deeply held beliefs that tend to color his assessment of the world. Such people may lean in one direction, but they still imagine that they are looking for and reporting the truth. The idyllic days of biased journalism are over. This isn't the 1980s. This, my friends, is a brave new world. To say CNN is still trying to report the truth but leans a little to the left is like saying the serial killer John Wayne Gacy cared a lot about young people but just got a little overly enthusiastic at times. The liberal media are not engaged in journalism, except on those rare occasions when they cannot find some angle of a natural disaster on which to grind their political axes. They want to destroy both Trump and his supporters – period. They will incite, inflame, obfuscate, and outright lie in the pursuit of that goal.
Journalism schools do not teach journalism anymore. They teach persuasive storytelling. They teach the Machiavellian black art of propaganda. Like most black arts, left-wing "journalism" relies heavily on its own peculiar dogma of magical rites and incantations. To shut down Herman Cain in 2012, our leftist adversaries invented (or at least exaggerated) the ever popular sex scandal – the trusted and true kill shot they have used to assassinate troublesome public figures for decades. Republicans nailed by a weeping and well paid accuser have typically curled into the fetal position and faded away. There have been subtle variations to this gambit, but the tune is always recognizably the same. All bow before the dirge of the disgraced. Then the left tried it on Trump – and failed! He staggered briefly with the airing of the Billy Bush tape and a bevy of newly found women wronged, but he was soon on sure footing again. The Christian voters who were supposed to abandon him in droves had been played for suckers one time too many. They'd had enough.The Russia scandal, I think, was just another attempt to divide and conquer. The hope was that the legions of retired cold warriors who voted for Trump would balk in Pavlovian fashion at the mere mention of the word "Russia." Again, the media wing of the political class showed quite plainly that they hold the minds of ordinary mortals in contempt. It never occurred to them that the aged portions of the Republican base were more than bright enough to have noticed that today's communists are much closer to home. The Legionnaires and their brethren didn't buy it. Not for a hot second. "Trump is Hitler"? Again, the average voter knows the difference between refusing to invite the entire Third World in for breakfast on the taxpayer's dime on the one hand and herding local doctors and jewelers into gas chambers on the other. We are not so lobotomized that we believe that swimming the Rio Grande at midnight is an "act of love" or that Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is a number-one bestseller in the Muslim world. Let's be honest – it isn't even number two.
The playbook of the leftist media isn't a particularly thick volume, but it's all they know. In the absence of any success, except among the bitter brainwashed progeny of what passes for universities, they have little choice but to carry out the instruction on their playbook's last page: when all else fails – repeat, repeat, repeat! While it is true that repetition has a certain power to convince, it does have limits. You can sway a few weak minds by publicizing and politicizing every single cop-shoots-black-man incident in the country, but the Trump-is-Putin's-puppet narrative gets a little old when the best you can come up with are campaign people speaking to miscellaneous Russians about nothing much. Sooner or later, "unnamed sources" need to be named. At this stage, substituting "unnamed government officials" doesn't really help. They might as well say "unnamed Hillary Clinton supporters." Or, just as likely "the reporter sitting next to me." Sooner or later, even inattentive people notice the sickening smell of the elitist media's contempt for anyone not of their class, for the franchise, and for the truth.
In their ongoing comedy of chaotic outrage, the left has even managed to wreck its own storyline by adding a growing litany of distracting or incompatible side plots. If Trump were mentally unstable to the point of blowing up the world, as CNN and others have claimed, why would the Russians promote him as their stooge? Stormy Daniels, too, is a far less believable creature than Anita Hill – and returning to the sex scandal ploy at this point is just going from beating one dead horse to beating two. "Trump demanded an extra scoop of ice cream for himself!" "Trump is responsible for making an innocent Hispanic child cry!" The random flailing is more like a grand mal seizure than an exercise in journalism. It is almost as if some leftist billionaire (God only knows which one) had offered a gigantic prize to any "journalist" who can bring the president and the populist movement down. With now monotonous predictability, they are all shambling creepily toward that goal like something out of Night of the Living Dead. "Come out, Donald. We know you're in there, Donald. We're going to kill you, Donald..." If you watch the faces of the reporters at the White House press conferences, you will notice their zombie-like thousand-mile stares and the weird, barely suppressed compulsion they appear to have to feast on the brains of the living – as though such a meal might provide them with some actual ideas.
Yes, I exaggerate – but only just. It seems not to have occurred to these mouthpieces of the political class that we have excellent reasons not to listen to them anymore. Hillary called us deplorables. Jonathan Gruber called us stupid on numerous occasions. Peter Strzok, the Deep State hero, summarized us concisely as pieces of excrement. And these examples name but a few. The left-wing media have defended or obfuscated for every one of our detractors. They've insulted us directly. Apparently, they think we've been too insensible to notice. We have not. A series of landslide elections and a rough-edged real estate developer in the Oval Office later, and these pampered propagandists still believe they are the entitled shapers of public opinion. They are not. We've heard enough. We've been on the butt end of their manipulation for much too long. Let them howl. It's worth listening only for the sheer delicious satisfaction.
E.M. Cadwaladr
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/the_zombie_media.html
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