Time Magazine is stupid. There, I said it. This year’s Person of the Year is The Protester. Huh? Last year the Tea Party movement reshaped the political landscape and Mark Zuckerburg was the the Person of the Year. This year a few thousand hipster dufuses take the street to protest repaying their student loans and suddenly The Protester is the Person of the Year. The best part is that Time was too cowardly to give it to Occupy Wall Street even though that’s obviously what they really wanted to do. Time’s website even has a picture and a quote from the world’s stupidest police captain, Ray Lewis.
The protests in the Middle East started last year, but I guess Mark Zuckerberg was more important than the lowly Iranian protesters. Oh well, what should I expect? The U.S. Navy Seals are the story of the year. If you don’t believe just wait until next year when President Obama boasts about killing Osama Bin Laden.
Tasty at the ballpark, but downright disgusting when packaged as news.
There are various ways to describe the traditional media in America. By traditional, I mean the media that dominated American newsgathering and dissemination for most of its history, first with the metropolitan daily papers, then radio and finally weekly newsmagazines and the big three television networks: ABC, NBC and CBS.
To some degree, the first all-news cable network, CNN, was and is part of this traditional media mix. But it was the forerunner of the New Media, which has successfully fragmented the monopolistic hold traditional media had on reporting news.
The most common term used to describe traditional media is Mainstream. This misses the mark, however, because it is increasingly irrelevant and no longer in the mainstream of American life. Conservatives derisively refer to it as the Lamestream Media, the Dinosaur Media and the Drive-By Media, among others. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to hang onto Mainstream. I suppose it’s comforting to hearken back to a day when news was controlled by the elite few whose opinions were developed in the vacuum of academia, Manhattan, Chicago and Los Angeles.
The most recent issue of Time Magazine asks, “Is America Islamophobic?” I’m sure I could plumb the depths of this issue, but why bother when Mark Steyn fully exposes “Islamophobia” and all the other multi-cultural “phobias” that have emerged during this hyper-tolerant, PC, hate-crime era for what they really are in his classic tome America Alone?
As someone who’s called Islamophobic and homophobic every day of the week, I can’t help marveling at the speed and skill with which Muslim lobby groups have mastered the language of victimhood so adroitly used by the gay lobby. If I were the latter, I’d be a little miffed at these Ahmed-come-latelys. “Homophobia” was always absurd: people who are antipathetic to gays are not afraid of them in any real sense. The invention of a phoney-baloney “phobia” was a way of casting opposition to the gay political agenda as a kind of mental illness: don’t worry, you’re not really against same-sex marriage; with a bit of treatment and some medication, you’ll soon be feeling okay.
On the other hand, “Islamophobia” is not phony or even psychological but very literal – if you’re a Dutch member of parliament or British novelist or Danish cartoonist in hiding under threat of death or a French schoolgirl in certain suburbs getting jeered at as an infidel whore, your Islamophobia is highly justified. But Islam’s appropriation of the gay lobby’s framing of the debate is very artful. It’s the most explicit example of how Islam uses politically correct self-indulgent victimology as a cover. You’ll recall that most Western media outlets declined to publish those Danish cartoons showing the Prophet Mohammed. Thus, even as they were piously warning of a rise in bogus “Islamophobia” – i.e., entirely justified concerns over Islamic terrorism and related issues – they were themselves suffering from genuine Islamophobia – i.e., a very real fear that, if they published those cartoons, an angry mob would storm their offices. It was a fine example of how the progressive mind’s invented psychoses leave it without any words to describe real dangers.
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