President Obama has spent his entire presidency blaming others for his problems. He didn’t invent the practice, but the press never calls him on it. President Reagan didn’t have a friendly press. Here’s a video of Sam Donaldson asking President Reagan if he bore some responsibility for the recession during the early ’80s. Reagan’s answer is classic:
President Obama would be too busy feeling sorry for himself to answer a question as good as that. Obama doesn’t have to worry about a hostile press. Sure, he complains about FOX News, but all the other news outlets are so overcome with Obama adoration they’re unable to report anything negative or really question anything he says.
The proverbial elephant in the room in Megan Feldman's ironically-entitled political piece in 5280 Magazine, The Elephants in the Room, was the obvious Progressive bubble bias that, among other things, created a Bizarro Arizona Immigration Law out of the thin freaking air.
Following is a letter to the editor I wrote to 5280 Magazine, Denver’s hip, urban and edgy city magazine geared toward Denver’s upwardly mobile Hipster Dufus crowd. As a little background to my letter, Megan Feldman wrote an article in the November issue of 5280 about the implosion of Scott McInnis’ campaign for governor of Colorado this past election cycle.
Being curious and hoping to glean some interesting and perhaps scintillating information about how and why the campaign went so horribly awry, I was sorely disappointed. It merely regurgitated what I already knew and what had been covered by local media and here at the Daily Plunge.
What did interest me were the little throw-away lines and descriptions sprinkled throughout the text that revealed a certain bias. Bias is obvious and expected in opinion pieces, but this one wasn’t floated to the readership as an opinion piece, but as a hard news expose.
When presented as news, bias is a bit more subtle, but you can pick it up if you have a keen eye. For instance, when a conservative was referenced in Feldman’s article, he was saddled with the additional adjectival baggage of “polarizing right-wing Republican,” but the liberal in the race was simply the “Democratic candidate.” But that’s not all, as you’ll see in my admittedly sarcastic letter to the editor:
I have a difficult time believing anything Megan Feldman wrote in The Elephants in the Room when she trots out the usual Progressive Urban Legends, such as, “…he became one of the first major GOP politicians to praise the Arizona law that requires law enforcement officers to stop people they suspect may be in the country illegally.” Seriously?
I’m not sure if Feldman or the editors of 5280 are familiar with a handy tool called Google. Had they simply Googled the Arizona law, they would have found that the law says no such thing. But I suppose fact-checking is no longer necessary, as long as you simply repeat what you hear in the Progressive bubbles in which you circulate.
If you’re willing to throw out whoppers like that, with nary an editor questioning the veracity of the claim despite the presence of Google and the ability to access it practically anywhere, any time, it makes me wonder about the believability of the magazine as a whole.
How many of the assertions made in 5280’s articles are based on Progressive tribal knowledge? I get the sense through reading the magazine that most of its writers and editors are of the tolerant and open-minded Hipster Dufus set who were taught in college that it’s tolerant and open-minded to close your mind to all things that are not deemed as tolerant and open-minded.
Megan Feldman’s article merely makes my point.
So there! Interestingly, and to my pleasant surprise, the editor wrote me back and said that 5280 would run a correction in the next issue. That’s a positive start to what I hope will be a keener eye toward eliminating “what I want to be true,” ala the 60 Minutes Bush National Guard story, with what really is true. I will continue to crusade against fake-but-accurate coverage in my local news media. I hope someday you’ll join me.
It’s generally a bad time to be part of the media establishment. However, MSNBC has the solution. A brand new tagline! What is the tagline that’s going to restore American’s faith in the media? How about finding some on-air talent that appeals to the political mainstream? Instead, the marketing geniuses at MSNBC have come up with “Lean Foward.” Here’s the promo video for the new campaign.
Hmm… Lean forward? Doesn’t this sound suspiciously like the Great Leap Forward? I’m not the only one who caught this, of course, but is this campaign Chairman Mao Light? By some estimates the Great Leap Forward killed 45 million Chinese. What is MSNBC’s goal with this campaign?
The video above has all the typical progressive Utopian nonsense. “We are the United States of Come as You Are”? “Our differences are what unite us”? The narrator quotes from the Declaration of Independence but leaves out the bit about the Creator. You see, our differences are what unites us, unless of course, you believe in Jesus Christ, like Sarah Palin, or are against homosexual marriage. And please don’t come as you are if you’re to the right of Barbara Boxer.
I just read at Powerline (a conservative blog) that a movie is being made about Margaret Thatcher. Unfortunately, our open-minded, tolerant friends in Hollywood have apparently decided to make Thatcher in their own image, as an imbecile.
Hollywood has a revolting habit of patting themselves on the back for their “bravery” and “speaking truth to power,” but most of what they churn out is nothing of the sort. It’s more akin to Joseph Goebbels’ role in the Nazi regime.
Hyperbolic? Maybe, but like Goebbels, Hollywood and other “mainstream” pop culture media specialize in character assassinations of those who aren’t on board with their stripe of politics; essentially, anyone to the right of Olympia Snowe.
In the topsy-turvy American leftwing media oxymoronic world, a racist, murdering homophobe is a noble and tragic figure, while the duo that brought the Soviet Union to its knees are soulless buffoons. Maybe it has something to do with Marxism and the left’s religious belief that it will bring “social justice” and Utopia to earth, all the while denying they’re Marxist.
Anyone to the left of Lenin, however, is sure to be the subject of some hagiographic memoir that makes you laugh, cry, sing and cheer (Che Guevara, Harvey Milk, Frida Kahlo, and on and on and on). I know the media’s propaganda has been quite effective, particularly over time as reality morphs with each nail the media pounds into the coffin it’s preparing for certain conservative figures year after year.
For instance, I have conservative friends who tell me that Newt Gingrich is not a viable presidential candidate. They say he’s “damaged goods,” but usually have nothing to back this up other than dredging up Gingrich’s affair. I think my friends’ negativity about Gingrich has more to do with the constant barrage of negative press Gingrich received when he was Speaker of the House, and the implication that if he wasn’t simply a lunatic, then he was “extreme”.
Gingrich was targeted by the media, Alinsky style. The media created a hobgoblin image of him that even conservatives bought into following years of unrelenting negative press. The “news” media use innuendo while the pop media bolster the innuendo with lies and distortions. Today’s news cycle is very predictable: CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, The Washington Post, NPR, etc., etc., yada yada, imply through their reporting that the Tea Party is full of racist homophobes, then the bulk of Law & Order‘s episodes are devoted to bringing the white male Christian serial killer to justice, Jon Stewart devotes half his show to smirkily deriding the Tea Party, Janeane Garofalo prattles on and on about how it’s all about “hating a black man” and so on and so forth until the American public is duped into believing it’s all true.
So, while the news media in the ’80s subtly portrayed Thatcher and Reagan, for instance, as heartless demagogues by placing greater emphasis on certain aspects of society that have always been with us (homelessness), the pop media characterize them as doddering old fools who end up regretting their role as monsters.
“Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they’ll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they’ll roar.”
-Gracchus in Gladiator
I absolutely resent the news media’s round-the-clock coverage of Michael Jackson’s death. I was hoping he would continue to fade into obscurity, become less crazy and die of old age at Nevemind Ranch. Why his death matters so much to the media is beyond me, but I also wonder why the media pays attention to what anyone in Hollywood has to say about politics or anything else of importance.
I’ll admit to a certain bias here: I hate Celebrity and the worship of Celebrity in America. Celebrity, not religion, is the opiate of the masses. But I suppose Celebrity is a religion in its own right with its own rites, altars and priesthoods, not to be confused with Jason Priestly, formerly of Beverly Hills 90210 fame.
The rise of Celebrity in America coincides with the willingness of the American people to cede their liberties to the state. Americans believe all kinds of myths because the celebrity culture anesthetizes them to the truth. Celebrity offers easy, pre-packaged answers that require little intellectual effort. Why look into an issue on my own when I’ve got Oprah, George Clooney, Pamela Anderson and Michael J. Fox doing the research for me?
For instance, it has become a truism via the Celebrity culture that embryonic stem cell research, of course funded by the taxpayer, is the only way to cure diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. In reality, the most successful research and actual progress has been made with adult stem cells. But let’s not let facts get in the way when said “facts” have already been cherry-picked for us, and when they happen to coincide with one of Celebrity’s favorite causes, abortion. Yeah for the death of those that are inconvenient to us!
“The science is settled” on any number of topics, according to Celebrity and its minions in Congress. All of the bad weather anywhere in the world is caused by man’s selfish consumption, and must be stopped. Of course, as a Celebrity (or a member of Congress), and because I’m so important, I cannot possibly curb my consumption. “Let them eat cake” has been replaced with, “Let them drive clown cars!”
That is why our spoiled aristocracy – the 21st Century Marie Antoinette – is in favor of the supremacy of the state over the individual. It’s very similar to the feeling a lot of Coloradoans have about their state, best summarized by the bumper sticker fashioned like a Colorado license plate that says, “No Vacancy“. I freely admit to feeling the same way. Now that I’m here, I’d like to fence off the state and not allow another person to darken its borders.
In the same way, celebrities and other hyper-rich, powerful people (such as Avon’s Andrea Jung mentioned in a previous Club Soda post) want to fence off the American Dream and keep the bounty and freedom of America to themselves. It’s a form of arrogance that says they’re individuals while the rest of us are simply numbers in a census (conducted by ACORN, of course).
So, while the media devotes itself to non-stop coverage and posthumous tributes to the King of Pop, Americans are being screwed by another unreadable, voluminous, multi-trillion-dollar bill that will finally defeat climate change and the American economy in one fell swoop.
The media, once again, is asleep at the wheel, celebrating celebrity and accepting at face value the pronouncements of the aristocracy that something “must be done.” Bread and circuses, if you will. When this monstrosity of a bill passes, Denver’s weather better be like San Diego’s year-round, or I’m going to be pissed.
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