by Lev Stesin
Much of the mainstream US media, cowed by the Left, reflexively capitulates to its demands to “cancel” individuals who express opinions that go against Leftist orthodoxy.
President Donald J. Trump, Official White House
Photo by D. Myles Cullen
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,675, August 4, 2020
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The American Left is
intensely frustrated by President Donald Trump’s ability to penetrate
their monopoly on the news cycle. When the Left is frustrated, it acts
out, up to and past the point of violence. A powerful weapon at its
disposal is its ability to silence its perceived enemies. Much of the
mainstream US media, cowed by the Left, reflexively capitulates to its
demands to “cancel” individuals who express opinions that go against
Leftist orthodoxy.
In the wake of the riots and destruction that coursed across the US after the killing of George Floyd, New York Times
editorial page editor James Bennet was left with no choice but to
resign after allowing the paper to publish an op-ed by US Senator Tom
Cotton (R-Arkansas). Cotton argued in his piece that the military should
be mobilized to restore order, and the airing of such a view is now
verboten in the pages of the Times. Similarly, Stan Wischnowski, long-time editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, was pushed out of his job for daring to print a piece with the headline “Buildings Matter, Too.”
Both were victims not of careful reviews conducted
by their papers but of the demands of the mob, which is now in control
of the American newsroom. Along the same lines of this trend, Twitter
made the executive decision to begin “curating” President Trump’s
tweets.
To an extent, these events are simply eruptions
coming from a large group of individuals who have not been educated in
the norms of liberal democracy, but there is more to it than that. The
demand to shame and ultimately silence perceived political opponents
reflects the Left’s deep frustration that it has lost its monopoly on
the news and is unable to beat Trump at its own game.
The American Left has controlled the news
narrative for at least half a century. With a few notable exceptions,
such as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, the mainstream
media have kept Republican presidents under perpetual assault and served
as a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party. This pattern was as
consistent as it was effective: the Times would publish an
article, the sitting Republican president and his administration would
be forced to spend days or weeks reacting to it, and when the public
finally got tired of it, the paper would fire off a new salvo. The
barrage was relentless and there was no return of fire.
President Trump changed that completely. In the
months preceding the 2016 election, his use of Twitter indicated that
the next presidency, should he win it, would be made visible to the
public in an entirely new way. In Trump’s hands, Twitter was as
effective a weapon against his numerically superior enemy as was the
artillery deployed by Napoleon Bonaparte.
Sure enough, after Trump was elected, his crude
but precise fire proceeded to decimate one column of well-trained
professional writers after another. He essentially flipped the game
upside down. His modus operandi is to wake up in the morning, shoot out
an extemporaneous, unfiltered, at times wholly ridiculous tweet in all
caps to his millions of followers, and then watch The New York Times
and all the other media outlets throw all their resources at reacting
to it. Suddenly it was the Republican president setting the agenda, not
the media.
At the dawn of the internet, and indeed for
decades thereafter, most politicians resigned themselves to the idea
that the internet was an unstoppable and uncontrollable force. They did
not understand it, viewing it as an untamable force of nature that had
to be accommodated. An America leader cannot, after all, behave like Kim
Jong-un, Xi Jinping, or Vladimir Putin, all of whom strictly control
(and, in Kim’s case, entirely block) internet use. Yet President Trump,
whose position as a political outsider has allowed him to take steps
that previous presidents would never have considered, managed to coopt
the internet for his own purposes.
Trump’s ability to harness the media was deeply
galling to the Left. Almost immediately after his victory, voices began
to rise up demanding that the president and his supporters be silenced.
The value of free speech, a pillar of liberal democracy, was slowly but
persistently eroded by an increasingly vocal progressive mob, which
comprises not only a good chunk of the national media’s readership but
populates its newsrooms as well.
The dam was breached the week of the George Floyd
riots. For Jake Dorsey of Twitter, his decision to “curate” the
president does not seem to have entailed any internal struggle with
democratic principles. That is not entirely surprising, as Silicon
Valley has almost no understanding of the world around it. Many of its
leaders have only just discovered Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics. It
will take at least another few decades of changes to cultural fashion
before they get to ideas like liberal democracy.
As self-defeating and dangerous as it may be, the
Left’s fervor to “cancel” the president and his supporters by erasing
them from the internet and the printing press is only growing. Its
ultimate goal of countrywide censorship meted out according to its own
dictates cannot be achieved in a functioning democracy. It remains to be
seen whether the Left’s attempts to achieve that goal will succeed or
will incense the president’s supporters and grow his base.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/us-media-purge/
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