The decay of the media and the rise of the silent majority

 

 

Journalism has in recent years become more and more barefaced in their attempts to push a leftist political agenda. Not satisfied being Pravda, the media intends to police the Overton window by compulsion where it cannot persuade, using tactics not unfamiliar to the Stasi or the Maoist Cultural Revolutionary Guards – shaming, doxing, bullying, and getting people fired.

 

Take the grey lady the New York Times. Just in July this year, it has seen the forced resignation of a senior editor James Bennet for publishing a commentary by Republican senator Tom Cotton. Cotton argued for the use of state troops to end the increasingly violent and lawless lootings and riots in multiple cities after the death of George Floyd.

 

Buildings damaged or destroyed in Minneapolis and Saint Paul - data from the Star Tribune

Whether you agree with Cotton’s view or not, an opinion piece by a prominent legislator seems reasonable for a publication that has the unselfconscious claim of ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print’.

 

What’s more, an Ipsos/ABC News poll and a Morning Consult poll conducted in early June showed that the majority (52% and 58% respectively) agreed with the use of troops to quell violent riots. So the NYT fired its own editor for simply airing the opinion of an elected Republican senator that also happens to reflect the majority view.

 

Days later, centrist journalist Bari Weiss resigned, citing “bullying by colleagues” at the NYT. In her resignation letter, Weiss wrote of the NYT that: “[ ] Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.”

 

A MSNBC producer, Ariana Pekary, quit on the 24^th of July, citing a TV veteran who told her “We are the cancer and there is no cure.” She went on to say that “the model blocks diversity of thought and content because the networks have incentive to amplify fringe voices and events, at the expense of others…all because it pumps up the ratings.” For these reasons, Pekary said that “I don’t know what I’m going to do next exactly but I simply couldn’t stay there anymore.”

 

The same can be said of the publically funded BBC in the UK. Between the years 2005-2015, when discussing the Brexit vote, the BBC invited overwhelmingly more anti-Brexit than pro-Brexit guests (4,275 vs 132), on the Today program alone, according to the Institute of Economic Affairs.

 

The BBC also saw fit to lambast Dominic Cummings, the pro-Brexit Tory advisor, for taking a car trip to be nearer his parents during the coronavirus shutdown, a trip that the police concluded did not breach the shutdown laws. But you’ll have a hard time finding one piece critical of the hundreds of BLM protests in the UK who clearly breached shutdown laws.

 

Journalists breaking quarantine rules while accusing Cummings of breaking quarantine rules

This metastasising bias is why the ABC News ran the gloriously Panglossian Tweet: “Protestors in California set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station and assaulted officers after a peaceful demonstration intensified.”

 

This is also why, after more than 50 days of nightly riots, the Portland Mayor was invited on to CNN to say that rather than his consistently weak policies, it is the Department of Homeland Security troops, which the federal government sent in specifically to protect federal buildings from being set alight, who are causing the violence, contrary to all facts.

 

The current state puts in mind an observation of W.H. Auden, who noted propaganda to be “a monologue that is not looking for an answer, but an echo.”

 

The leftward shift of the mass media has been evident for many years. In the US, a survey saw the proportion of Republicans within journalism shrink from 25.7% in 1971 to 7.1% in 2014. In the UK, a Pew report found 60% of BBC audience identified as Liberal, with only 13% identifying as Conservative.

 

What is concerning is that this radicalisation of the media might be the tail that is wagging the dog. A Pew report showed that while the median Conservative in the US has largely maintained their ideological positions, the median Democrat has veered sharply to the extreme left over the last 20 odd years.

 

In turn, the ideology of House candidates who won their primaries similarly has shifted substantially left among Democrats compared to the static Republicans over a similar period.

 

This radicalisation should be alarming. A 2019 King’s College London study found that adherence to extreme left wing ideology is linked to sympathies for violent extremism. Indeed, Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke knew this during the French Revolution. Orwell realised this in the 1930’s. And anyone who had studied the Stalinist Purge, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s killing fields, or the repressions in Cuba and Venezuela today should know that extremism of the left can be every bit as deadly as extremism on the right.

 

Yet the general culture of the West is such that while wearing a T-shirt with a swastika will lead to unanimous repudiation and possible hate-crime charges, one can wear a T-shirt with the hammer and sickle with no reprisal. Given this, the leftward biased reporting and tolerance from politicians of violence in the recent US riots, particularly in Democrat run cities, is not surprising. Follow Andy Ngo for some street-level reporting of the vile things the 'peaceful protesters' are up to nightly.

 

The attempt of the mainstream media to create a consensus a thousand miles wide and a millimetre deep shows the complacency, mean spiritedness and arrogance to the public, in the face of their own perceived power. 

 

But in today’s technological age, the media no longer has the monopoly on news and interpretations. Signs increasingly suggest that the public has begun to see through the spin.

 

A 2018 Gallup Poll found that trust in the newspaper and television press is among the lowest of all institutions surveyed. A Knight Foundation and Gallup Poll also found that the majority (69%) of adults has lost confidence in News Media over the past 10 years. This ranged from 95% of Conservatives to 46% Liberals. A 2018 Rasmussen Report of likely voters found that 45% think that reporters are favouring the Democratic candidate when reporting on congressional races, whereas only 11% think that they’re trying to help Republicans. 

 

A recent Cato Institute poll found that amazingly 62% of Americans have political views they are afraid to share. The only group where a majority feel able to freely express their political views are ‘strong Liberals’ at 58%. A silent majority is likely to be more than a catchphrase but a statistical fact.

 

This pent up resentment has led to costs to these dishonest publications and broadcasters. In 2019, almost 8,000 people, largely from very leftist institutions like Huffington Post, NBC, Washington Post and VICE, had lost their jobs. BBC News viewership has dropped by 7 million over the past 7 years.

 

They are also paying in many other ways for their unchecked and often hubristic biases. Nick Sandmann, the teenager caught up in a horrendous media smear storm, based on prejudice and lies, has successfully settled with Washington Post for a $250M defamation lawsuit in July. This is in addition to settling with CNN in January. Sandmann is also suing ABC, NBC, The Guardian, The Huffington Post and Slate among others.

 

The modern Leftist media has lost all that made the Left noble while inheriting and magnifying all its flaws. It has become reactionary, parochial, unkind, strangely conformist and dogmatic in its insistence on groupthink while being stubbornly incapable of admitting guilt. It has become more and more totalitarian. But unlike Winston Smith in 1984, it seems that the average person will not likely comply with their dictatorial wishes. So much for the better.