JESUS OFFENDS OPPRESSED GROUPS
Fails to include women, gays, or transgendered in the Beatitudes
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REAGAN HOSPITALIZED FOR GUNSHOT WOUND
Sleeps through entire operation
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HAITI’S ECONOMY BOOMING, UNEMPLOYMENT AT 1%
Social activists worry about growing inequality
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EARTHQUAKE DEVASTATES MANHATTAN
Poor and minorities disproportionately affected
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–Past and Future Headlines from the New York Times
In every opinion survey conducted over the past few decades, journalists have ranked somewhere between politicians and used car salesmen in terms of trustworthiness. And yet, as a profession, journalism continues to be respected. In this regard, journalists enjoy the same presumption of innocence as teachers. Why, I have always wondered, are teachers so uncritically admired? If the telos of the teaching profession is to confer an education upon the young, the briefest conversation with today’s graduates of Self-Esteem High—if they are capable of conversation, beyond non-verbal ejaculations of “like”, “you know”, and “awesome”– ought to dispel any illusion that its practitioners have succeeded in fulfilling it. But anyone who points this out invariably lights a fuse of defensive sanctimony about how hard educators work, how much they sacrifice, and how little they are paid. (Try to imagine your plumber demanding regular raises after every pipe he’s installed in your house has sprung a leak, and then, in self-exculpation, bleating about long hours and cramped working conditions.)
In the contemporary world, the teaching profession and the press have both been exalted to the status of sacred cows, which, like the Hindu originals, are immune from criticism in spite of the stinking messes they leave behind. Questioning the honesty or impartiality of the media as Trump has recently done provokes a flood of rodomontade about the democratic urgency of maintaining a free press as a bulwark against governmental abuse and tyranny.
It doesn’t much matter that the news media’s reputation for dishonesty has been earned precisely because of its insouciant betrayal of the very ideals in which its members piously enwreathe themselves. In the Middle Ages, the conventional symbol of hypocrisy was the mendicant Friar, who preached poverty and asceticism, while demanding a free meal of roast swan every evening from the householders on his penitential route. Today, the personification of Fraus is the New York Times or Washington Post hack who, after a career of penning sycophantic encomiums of Clinton and Obama, temporarily re-growing an adversarial spine under George Dubya, shilling shamelessly for the Hillary campaign, then succumbing to Trump Derangement Syndrome, reacts to Trump’s remonstrations by sermonizing on the mortal threat any criticism of the press poses to its hallowed “independence”. Does anyone recall such anguished concerns being ventilated by the media when Clinton, and later Obama, denounced Rush Limbaugh and Fox News as sowers of hatred and divisiveness, confabulators of fake news, and the orchestrators of the vast right-wing conspiracy? But that was then. Today, the courageous members of the press will not allow a sitting President to intimidate them. No, they will continue to “speak truth to power”; to fearlessly pursue their sacred vocation as free-thinking and independent echo-chambers of the Democrat Party.
Like the judiciary, the fourth estate has “evolved” over the decades. Just as judges once saw themselves as the impartial arbiters of the constitutionality of laws enacted by the legislative branch, so journalists once saw themselves as disinterested chroniclers of contemporary events. And just as the judiciary has become (in the phrase of George Jonas) “the Zeitgeist in robes”, so professional journalists are no longer passive observers but active shapers of society.
In the case of the latter, the transformation began so long ago that to say that the media is overwhelmingly liberal is by now a tautology. The selective reportage that currently discomposes President Trump was a skill honed by the press over the course of much of the past century, when such moral enormities as the Soviet Gulag, Mao’s re-education camps, and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge were considered scarcely newsworthy, or else explained away as the inevitable growing pains of a providential world-process whose fulfillment would usher in an era of universal justice and equality. To the journalists who covered the Cold War, the real crime wasn’t communism, but anti-communism; and communism’s “growing pains” were in any case nothing by comparison to the moral atrocity that was “McCarthyism”. Along with slavery, McCarthyism has since descended into popular consciousness as one of America’s “original sins”, and Hollywood has produced more movies in the past decade about the heroic victims of the paranoid Senator from Wisconsin than it has produced in its entire history about the hundred and fifty million citizens who were murdered, worked, or starved to death by their own socialist governments. It’s a measure of the progressive culture at the New York Times that for decades “journalists” like Walter Duranty built successful careers upon apologizing for the Soviet Union. Duranty did this, as we eventually learned, as a paid agent of the Kremlin; and nobody noticed, probably because so many other journalists were doing the same thing pro bono.
That the press is at this moment singing a different tune about Russia—“a dangerous adversary”, “authoritarian”, “imperialistic”– is merely a function of the fact that the exigencies of the Democrat Party have recently changed. Having lost fair and square at the polls, the Democrats have fallen back on the tried and true strategy of the banana-republic caudillo: the victorious candidate is “illegitimate”; the Russians manipulated the election process in favour of Trump, “Putin’s tool”. Finally, fifty years after the fact, liberals are convinced that there’s a Russian hiding under every bed.
It is by now obvious that the press is interested in covering the Trump presidency in the same way as a gravedigger is interested in covering a corpse. Trump is a “subject” of journalism as cadavers are the subject of the funereal arts. A recent study undertaken at Harvard (not exactly a bastion of conservatism) found that during Trump’s first one hundred days, between 81 and 96 percent of stories about the President, in American newspapers, political journals, and on network and cable news, were negative. (These are aggregate figures, by the way, which include Fox News—the only network whose coverage was even remotely balanced, at 49% negative–, as well as newspapers from fly-over country.) But the Harvard study is hardly—if you’ll forgive me—news. Over the past five decades, study after study has revealed that of those “journalists” who are registered in, or contribute to the major American political parties, consistently upwards of 95 percent are Democrats. The talking heads at CNN and MSNBC, who are now admonishing with doomsday gravity that Trump’s criticisms will have a chilling effect and turn the press into an official, sycophantic organ of the State, needn’t worry. The American news media has always been the de facto Communications Department of the Democrat Party, scarcely more “independent” of the DNC than Pravda or Tass was of the Politburo. (Of course, journalists will always protest that they are capable of being objective, in spite of their sectarian affiliations. But that’s about as plausible as inviting the head of the Cubs fan club to umpire at Wrigley Field.)
It’s long overdue for the idolaters of journalism to answer the question of just how a multi-party democracy could possibly thrive in the context of a monolithically one-party press. Russian meddling? Interference in the electoral process can hardly get any more brazen than when 19 out of 20 of the reporters and commentators who cover the campaign are invested in the victory of one, and inimical to the other, of the two competing candidates. This datum in itself makes a mockery of the hallowed democratic ideal of press independence, and is the real scandal besetting American electoral politics, though you won’t see any hand-wringing over it at the New York Times or the Washington Post.