Propaganda: Media

"The modern press is at times sycophantic of the incumbent president and at other times trying to mimic Woodward and Bernstein; it all depends on which party is in office. With a Democratic president cut from the same cloth as they, many journalists have done everything in their power to set the national conversation in ways that favor Obama."

--Jay Cost, Weekly Standard

Our last post alluded to the fact that the establishment’s grip on the country is slipping. The “Blue Model”--the dominant coalition of big government, big business, and big labor that under Democratic leadership successfully ran America from 1933 to 1968--no longer works, and the establishment strains to hold its remaining pieces together.

Something similar is happening to the legacy media, the follow-on force that in effect ran the country as it in succession terminated the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter (1968-80), with CBS’s Walter Cronkite emerging at the time as our surrogate national leader. The media then were bigger than the White House, bigger than the Democrats. They were The Powers that Be, as David Halberstam described media giants at the time.

Long ago and far away. Now the legacy media are fighting for their collective lives against the immediacy of the internet and 24 hour cable news. No longer dominant, now with their continued high status dependent upon an Obama victory, the legacy media are content to serve as the establishment’s propaganda arm.

Yes, propaganda arm. From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

pro·pa·gan·da   noun

ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause

Propaganda. The work of today’s media.

Listen to Matt K. Lewis, in the conservative Daily Caller:

President Barack Obama was a guest at the wedding of vice presidential debate moderator Martha Raddatz. . . The bigger story is about the incestuous relationship that exists between the elite opinion leaders in America — and Democratic politicians. The Obama/Raddatz connection simply illustrates it.

And listen to Andrew Klavan, in the conservative City Journal:

The mystery Obama. . . is not a creation of his own making. . . It emanates instead from a journalistic community that no longer in any way fulfills its designated function, that no longer even attempts the fair presentation of facts and current events aimed at helping the American electorate make up its mind according to its own lights. Rather, left-wing outlets like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and the like have now devoted themselves to fashioning an image of the world they think their audiences ought to believe in—that they may guide us toward voting as they think we should. They have fallen prey to that ideological corruption that sees lies as a kind of virtue, as a noble deception in service to a greater good.

Also conservative Erick Erickson, in “RedState”:

Time and again, the media decides something is so or something is not so and reports it as the media sees it even when a sizable portion of the country disagrees with them, whether it be abortion, gay marriage, global warming, war, poverty, Hurricane Katrina, Mitt Romney’s campaign, Obamacare, and the list goes on and on and on.

Noemie Emery, writing in the conservative Washington Examiner, tells us why it’s especially difficult to separate the legacy media from liberal Obama:

It had been the real thing, not a commonplace fling with your generic Democrat, but the love of a lifetime, the genuine article, the sum of all dreams: He was not just a Democrat, he was also a liberal. He was not just a liberal, he also biracial, also multinational; also hip, cool, and clever. He was themselves as they wanted to be. Like them, he was gifted at writing and talking (and, as it turned out, not much beyond that), like them, he stood up for Metro America; like them, he viewed the people outside it with a not-very-measured disdain.

But it is Democrat Pat Caddell, a FOX News commentator, who is most upset at the legacy media’s failure to carry on the job to which the constitution in effect assigned it: question authority.  Says Caddell, in a tone of true despair:

We designed a constitutional system with many checks and balances.  The one that had no checks and balances was the press, and that was done under an implicit understanding that, somehow, the press would protect the people from the government and the power by telling—somehow allowing—people to have the truth.  That is being abrogated as we speak, and has been for some time.

The fundamental danger is this: . . .The press’s job is to stand in the ramparts and protect the liberty and freedom of all of us from a government and from organized governmental power.  When they desert those ramparts and decide that they will now become active participants, that their job is not simply to tell you who you may vote for, and who you may not, but, worse. . . what truth that you may know, as an American, and what truth you are not allowed to know,  they have, then, made themselves a fundamental threat to the democracy, and, in my opinion, made themselves the enemy of the American people.  And it is a threat to the very future of this country if we allow this stuff to go on.

Question authority. “Afflict the Comfortable”. Media, do your job.