With layoffs left and left across America’s newsrooms, there’s lots of hand-wringing over the state of newspapers and “journalism” these days. Notably absent from these laments are any mention of leftism, wokeness, or the naked contempt today’s MSM journalists display again and again for ordinary Americans. Indeed, it’s such a long running theme on this blog that I had to wade through years of Media Watch-tagged posts to find one of the many specific takedowns of that contempt, but it was this one.
Our ruling elites seem unable to come to grips not only with President Trump pantsing them at every turn, but that their own smug sense of superiority and entitlement is what led to his rise in the first place. They don’t do “humble.”
Their smug sense of superiority shines through in every imperious announcement and self-satisfied Facebook post. That smug is the reason ordinary Americans love watching President Trump humiliate the media.
Snip.
The same people love to conflate contempt for their biased selves into contempt for the freedom of the press and the First Amendment. This is patently false. Ordinary Americans love the First Amendment. It’s the current smug, biased, dishonest incarnation of the MSM that we hate.
Look in the mirror. We don’t hate the free press. We hate you. Personally. And our loathing for you smug pricks dates back to long before Donald Trump ever threw his hat into the ring…
Ace of Spades offers up similar thoughts, including this reaction to ideas for media subsidies: “Fuck you. I will literally join a guerilla warfare unit before I allow you to take my money to propagandize against me.”
We’re not the only one celebrating the demise of the woke, left-leaning, Democrat-boosting MSM. After drinking the rich, zesty tears of Taylor Lorenz kvetching about How Horrible This Happened To Our Beloved Media, Matt Walsh offers similar thoughts.
It’s not limited to America. The BBC has the same woke narrative problem.
Finally, Larry Correia with a succinct distillation of the problem:
We’re happy when journalists get laid off because we hate them.
We hate them because they lie to us. https://t.co/7rTWYL4wui— Larry Correia (@monsterhunter45) February 10, 2024
Indeed.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Tags: Ace of Spades, Democrats, Larry Correia, Matt Walsh, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Taylor Lorenz
“Death to the media. Infidel defilers. May they all drown in lakes of ink.”
– Thulsa Doom
In his final broadcast, CBS commentator Eric Sevareid who many rank just below the “Father of Broadcast Journalism” Edward R Murrow, stated of his profession:
“We are not the worst people in the land, we who work as journalists. Our product in print or over the air is a lot better, more educated, more responsible than it was when I began some forty-five years ago as a cub reporter. This has been the best generation of all in which to have lived as a journalist in this country. We are no longer starvelings and WE SIT ABOVE THE SALT. We have affected our times.”
When you are an elite war correspondent, your social and political views are able to shape the war’s outcome. You can successfully oppose the Generals, bring down a sitting President, lionize a second-rate American actress or third-rate Swift boat Lieutenant.
You can readily fabricate the outcome of the Tet Offensive. You can airbrush a Viet Cong death squad leader’s crimes and recast him as an innocent civilian, ruthlessly executed by a brutal autocratic Major General.
You do not sit above the salt as a meek and mild press reporter like Clark Kent; you revel in your unbridled power as Superman.
I was a reporter and editor for more than 40 years and could see this coming since the early eighties. I remember when Time magazine ran an essay that called for “interpretive journalism” because reporters were there, readers weren’t. So consumers were expected to believe everything said or read. Now mix that with the Long March and you get Taylor Lorenz. I guess accuracy is truly dead.
This is an expression of what I’ve always said about the mistake that the Gramscian left made: By capturing the institution, they rendered that institution essentially powerless through their misuse of it. Same thing is going on in education and government… They’re in control of the institution, but because they’re ideologically locked, they’re destroying those institutions and making them pointless. It will end by “journalism” being dead, replaced by something else, “education” being dead, replaced by something else, and so too with governance…
The real problem here is that the left is composed of the mentally ill. They think that the world is created with their ravings, that whatever they imagine inside their diseased minds is real, and that they create reality with their words and intent.
This is not a truth of the universe. The real world can be influenced by their imaginings, their words, but it cannot be fundamentally changed. Renaming an illegal alien an “undocumented person” does not change the nature of that illiterate barbarian from a primitive society; they will continue to behave as what they are, not the “natural aristocrat” that the leftists imagines them as.
So, too, with everything else in the left’s realm of the imagination. They capture these institutions, and then destroy their meaning and function by what they do with them, because they are wrong about the nature of the universe. It does not conform to their imaginings.
Rush Limbaugh was prescient when he decried the “chickification of the media”.
Kirk, I’ve long had a list of three rackets that have hollowed out respected institutions – and which will collapse when everyone figures out what happened.
Two (as per your comment) are education and government.
The third is “health care.” That’s the next racket that is going to be figured out…
The inherent error in the Gramscian worldview is that they think that power resides in the institution itself.
They have mistaken the form for the substance; the institutions that they’ve captured lose all value and utility once enough people recognize the fact of capture, and the ensuing loss of legitimacy.
You have to actually perform. They cannot, because to be able to fulfill the functional requirements of all these institutions, they’d have to be able to recognize and respond to reality; because they’re ideologically locked, they cannot. This is an inherent characteristic, one they cannot overcome. Why? Because if they did, then they’d have to admit that their ideology doesn’t work, and since they’ve made ideology such an intrinsic part of their identity…? They’d quite literally prefer death to an admission of error or an acknowledgment that their worldview simply doesn’t work…
“They have mistaken the form for the substance.”
When I was just a child, the record player would play a song:
When you go through life
Make this your goal
Watch the donut
Not the hole
It is surprising how many seemingly educated people reject this simple creed.
“The third is “health care.” That’s the next racket that is going to be figured out…”
Soon enough, no one will be able to afford it:
From the January 2024 Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index Report, out today:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf
Overall medical care services prices were up 0.7% from December 2023 to January 2024 on a seasonally adjusted basis. This is an 8.731% annualized rate of price inflation.
Physician services prices were up 0.6% from December 2023 to January 2024 on a seasonally adjusted basis. This is a 7.4424% annualized rate of price inflation.
Hospital services prices were up 1.6% from December 2023 to January 2024 on a seasonally adjusted basis. This is a 20.983% annualized rate of price inflation!
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