The Media Today is Vastly Different than it Was in 1971 but Remains as Free as it Ever Was
I watched Steven Spielberg‘s film, The Post last night: about the Washington Compost and its publishing of The Pentagon Papers (obtained from Daniel Ellsberg).
I was struck yet again by the fact that it’s been so long since the Democrats and liberals (I generalize, but accurately) actually stood for Liberal Causes and Issues that Catholics and other Christians could agree with; things that are not immediately immoral by our moral standards and principles.
It was good to expose an immoral foreign policy and philosophy of how to proceed in the Vietnam War. Both Democrat (St. JFK and LBJ) and Republican (Nixon) administrations participated in the outrage, resulting in 58,000 dead American soldiers. It didn’t have to be.
And so, the anti-war movement (apart from its many excesses and extremities on the edges) and the exposing of the broken laws and mischief of Watergate were basically the last Big Causes and Daily Headline Grabbers for months on end where liberals and Democrats could heartily be agreed with; where they had the moral high ground. Imagine! How the mighty have fallen since then . . . I was a good old liberal myself in those days.
Since then (for 45 years!), they have championed one immoral cause after another: radical secularist unisex feminism, the sexual revolution, childkilling, anti-military policies, erosion of religious freedom, continuing advocacy of the Great Society despite massive evidence that it is a complete failure (broken homes and devastated hellhole inner cities), hostility to Christianity, easy divorce, homosexual “marriage”, legal drugs, winking at terrorism (the ISIS debacle), and now attacks on the very rule of law itself (sanctuary cities, the outrages of murder in Chicago and other major cities, utter lack of concern for a sane border policy that virtually every other country of the world follows).
It was a good movie, once one deliberately overlooked (as a given) the inevitable self-lionization and self-glorification of liberals. In the features, Spielberg and Tom Hanks tried to pretend that all of this is so completely relevant and analogous to today: as if Donald Trump is trying to shut down a free press. Of course, this is utter nonsense. Liberals are nothing if not paranoid and utterly convinced that conservatives are Bad Guys: the big bad boogeymen.
To point out that the media has become ultra-left and thus relentlessly hostile and slanderously opposed to Trump and conservatives (summed up accurately by the phrase “fake news”) is not at all the same (not one bit) as saying, “there should be no media and press and free speech at all.” It’s a sign of the times that the liberal mind is so bigoted against conservatives and moral tradition that it can’t make this basic, elementary distinction.
The media is not what it used to be. In the late 60s and early 70s it still had some good and moral causes to champion, and didn’t have to constantly lie in order to do so. Now that’s not the case. We know that the coverage of Trump is 90% negative in all the major venues except for Fox, where it is half-and-half (it was a Harvard study that established this, among many others).
We now have to regularly listen to bilge and asinine claims that Trump is literally insane, unbalanced, a nut and a wacko, a psychotic narcissist and buffoon who must be removed immediately or else nuclear destruction and the End of Western Civilization (and/or the World) looms near. There is not the slightest attempt to be “fair and balanced” (as Fox claims and credibly pulls off). It’s a continual assault against the intelligence of non-liberal viewers. This is quite different from the usual age-old liberal disdain towards anyone who deigns and dares to become uppity and different from themselves. It’s exponentially worse. Even the hated and despised Nixon and Reagan were not treated remotely this badly (and they hated Nixon even more than the Soviet Union).
Liberal media today is vastly different from the days of Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw, Ted Koppel and David Brinkley, and MacNeil-Lehrer (all of whom I watched and enjoyed and learned much from). Now it is literally worse than the National Enquirer (tabloid journalism / trash). Maybe liberals (out of natural bias) and folks under 40 or 30 don’t realize how drastically things have changed, but those of us who remember the older liberal press and the days when liberals were actually for Good Causes, do. All we can do is point out the changes for the worse.
The booting of one reporter (Jim Acosta) from the White House Press briefings because of rude, disrespectful, boorish, and asinine behavior for months on end is not the End of Free Speech as we Know it. It’s merely the continuation of time-honored protocol regarding how the President is to be treated respectfully, due to high office. And it was also a matter of his touching a female aide who tried to take his microphone away. CNN denied this, but they have now been shown to be lying about this as well (what else is new?).
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White House press secretary
Sarah Sanders stated after the President’s post-election press conference:
Contrary to CNN’s assertions there is no greater demonstration of the President’s support for a free press than the event he held today. Only they would attack the President for not supporting a free press in the midst of him taking 68 questions from 35 different reporters . . . over the course of 1.5 hours including several from the reporter in question.
The fact that CNN is proud of the way their employee behaved is not only disgusting, it‘s an example of their outrageous disregard for everyone, including young women, who work in this Administration.
President Obama would never have put up for a second with the treatment that Trump and Sarah Sanders receive daily. Of course, the issue never came up with him, because the liberal media worshiped the air he breathed, and it would never have occurred to them to even ask him a hard question, let alone engage in character assassination. If he had kicked someone out, it wouldn’t have been news at all. He would have been praised to the skies for upholding the dignity and integrity of the office, and the offender would have been tarred (yawn) as a racist.
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There is rank hypocrisy here, as always, when it comes to Self-Righteous Liberal Crusades. It was under Obama that the IRS was weaponized against conservative organizations and individuals. This is a matter of record. It was under his watch that systematic outrageous and illegal spying (involving the FBI and fabricated dossiers and FISA warrants obtained under false pretenses) was done against Trump and his associates, for the purpose of making him lose the election and (once elected) to try to remove him from office, with this ridiculous charge of “Russian collusion” that still has not one shred of evidence to support it after two years.
Not to mention the culture at Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social media, which is also inveterately hostile to conservatives, pro-lifers, and Christians, and which has been documented time and again to be involved in flat-out censorship of views other than their own Immaculate Liberalism and Marxism.
All of this has been going on (truly alarming developments), yet the media can only moan and groan about one reporter being removed as a result of being a jackass and acting like a moron? That is supposedly opposition to free speech and a free express and free exchange of ideas, with all these other documented things going on? It’s classic, textbook live in a bubble / deny reality / “hear no evil” behavior from liberals. They can’t see what is utterly obvious and apparent. The rest of us can.
They squeal about Trump and Republicans supposedly being against a free press, while they wink at perversion of the rule of law, and illegal spying and attempted character assassination from Hillary Clinton’s camp and her comrades in various high places in the stinking, amoral Washington swamp-establishment.
But this seems to be the latest liberal tactic: falsely blame your political opponents for the exact same thing that you yourself are doing. That deserves an A for ingenious (devious) cleverness but an F for ethics and integrity.
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