Real
journalism is dangerous for elites, which is why we have so little of it. By Stella Morabito, 11/21/16
“They’ve
decided you’re to go into journalism. It’s a great honor. We have to strengthen
the press. It’s full of bourgeoise elements and reactionaries. We don’t send
just anyone there.”
In
the screenplay “Angi Vera,” newspaper editor and Communist Party hack Anna
Trajan speaks to her young protégé, groomed to destroy anyone standing in the
way of the party’s narrative.
President-elect Donald Trump’s win
proved how useless is the current state of journalism for investigating and
conveying real news about real people. And that’s putting it kindly. Not only
were mainstream journalists blind to the pain of so many in the
country—particularly the long-neglected Rust Belt voters who showed up in
droves to elect Trump—but they shamelessly cheered Hillary Clinton’s campaign
and smeared all Trump voters while doing so.
The quote above, from an old foreign
film, gives us a glimpse into how power elites seek to control the media and
subvert objective journalism. I’ll elaborate on that below. But the high level
of collusion we see today between Democrat power elites and the media goes back
a long time. The collusion continues post-election, as the media gives lopsided
coverage to angry anti-Trump protests organized by Moveon.org, which are
stirring up calls for violence.
So it’s high time we analyze more
closely the relationship between the media and power elites. To do that, we
need to look at how and why elites conscript journalists, and why journalists
can’t resist the bait. The enticements come as access, privilege, prestige,
fame, influence, and very high salaries for those in the limelight.
Not all mainstream journalists are
fallen, but those who resist bias tend not to be household names. For example,
I highly recommend this superb post-mortem on the election by
Will Rahn of CBS News. It is more introspective and
insightful than anything else I’ve seen. In the end, we should remember that
journalists’ weaknesses are simply human weaknesses. There are several reasons
their level of prejudice has risen so high. But prime among them is how much
our society has come to de-value the old ideals of virtue and honor.
Power
Elites Will Always Recruit Messengers
An interesting study in
corruption—and of journalism in particular—is the 1978 Hungarian film “Angi Vera,” which I quoted
above. The setting is Stalinist Hungary in 1948, just after Soviet forces
imposed a communist system there. The entire human infrastructure of the
nation, including journalists, teachers, medical personnel, and factory
foremen, is being replaced by people trained in education camps to comply with
the Communist Party line. Politically incorrect administrators, officials, and
thinkers are discredited and purged wherever they are found.
The movie superbly displays the
predatory nature of one-party states. Its title character, an angelic-looking
young nurse named Vera, is an orphan from a working-class family. She has a
superb instinct for pushing all the right buttons and kissing up to all the
right people in a system based on psychological manipulation. In the end, Vera
earns herself a comfortable life as a well-connected elite journalist in a
rigged system.
Vera’s brown-nosing and betrayals
did cost her others’ trust. That upset her. For a while. But she kept her eyes
on the prize, and in the end it’s clear she’ll get used to a life of material
and social privileges in a society built on planned scarcity.
The film (which only recently came
out on DVD, with English subtitles) is a
little-known masterpiece. It may not be a direct study of the corruption of
journalism. But it definitely serves as a window to the personal
qualities—corruptibility, malleability, and conformity—that power elites look
for when recruiting journalists, and rewarding them.
How
Does Journalism Become Propaganda?
Objective journalism is actually a
very new idea. A fourth estate that serves as a back-up check against abuses of power
doesn’t sit well with power-mongers. As the quote above attests, those in power
always hope to prevent any perceived critic from having a voice. Those who
believe in a fourth estate expect to have critics. But totalitarians find it
compulsory to turn journalists into their propagandists.
Of course we often behave as though
objective journalism is a given. I mean, what other kind is there, right? But,
alas, the human species has a thing about power. No doubt, evolutionary
psychology can explain a lot. Whatever the reason, that quest for power seems
to be the default setting of Homo
sapiens.
But somewhere along the line—perhaps
beginning with Aristotle and moving down the centuries of Judeo-Christian
thought and greater recognition of natural law—a new idea started to dawn on
more and more folks. All of that law-of-the-jungle stuff was a waste of human
potential. So, maybe, just maybe,
if we just put checks on
power so no one could so easily lord it over others, well, that social balance
would open more avenues to the pursuit of happiness. In fact, it would evolve
into a system tailor-made to abolish slavery in all forms. A republic of sorts.
Central to this: all people would
have access to objective information. That could only happen by prohibiting
laws that abridge freedom of religion, speech, the press, and, perhaps most
critically, freedom of association.
The whole idea was based on de-centralizing power:
preventing too much power in the hands of too few people. In such a system,
people could actually live in peace. They could trade freely, raise their
families in peace, and build self-governing communities without meddling from
the central state, the Leviathan.
In fact, all could prosper in a
system that protects the natural right of every human being to express his
beliefs, exchange his ideas, and have real conversations with others without
being gagged. For centuries we considered the First Amendment a no-brainer. Yet
today free speech is blatantly under attack on multiple fronts, in all of our
institutions, especially in the very place where it was supposed to be most
enshrined: the
universities, where even the idea of having a conversation about having conversations is
being shut down. What happened?
Back
to the Default Setting
Somehow, large parts of our civil
society have succumbed to that base but instinctive drive in people to lord it
over others. That drive, as always, motivates those who tend to seek the reins
of power. History is filled with unsavory characters determined to reset the
universe so it revolves around them.
They have always—always—had major quibbles with
the free flow of information. They view objective journalism as a bad joke, or
in the words of Vera’s mentor above, a “bourgeois and reactionary” thing.
The point is that freedom of
expression, when legally protected and practiced universally, stands in the way
of their accumulation of power. So the first order of business for a power-monger
is to break down free expression, to control the language. That’s a tall order
when the public is well-informed. To combat a high-information public,
community “organizers” have been hard at work pushing policies that cultivate
ignorance, vulnerability, and scarcity.
As they march through the
institutions of a society, these conditions produce a culture of confusion,
dependence, fear, and resentment. Once power-mongers control all the outlets of
communication—particularly the media, Hollywood, and academia—their propaganda
can do its work. The work of propaganda is to condition people through
political correctness to get with their program. This, in a word, means to
promote the elites’ accumulation of power in perpetuity.
Journalism
in the United States of America
Obviously, those whose job it is to
report the news are never going to please everyone. That’s always been the
case, and complaints of biased journalists have always been with us. But
today’s journalism has an especially blatant disregard for objectivity, not to
mention the old concept of honor. Precious few media outlets permit deviation
from politically correct agitprop. Today’s journalism has an especially
blatant disregard for objectivity, not to mention the old concept of honor.
Pre-election there were copious
examples wherein journalists colluded with the Democrat Party machine.
WikiLeaks emails from Clinton operative John Podesta confirmed that the media
lavished all
kinds of special favors on the
Clinton campaign. Democrat strategist and CNN commentator Donna Brazile fed
interview questionsin advance to Clinton’s campaign.
Undercover Project Veritas
interviews exposed how Clinton operative
Robert Creamer bragged about inciting violence at Trump rallies, operations that
had the apparent consent of the Clinton campaign. None of this was investigated
by the media. The mainstream media’s coverage imputed this violence to Trump
supporters, while ignoring incidents of fire-bombing
against Trump headquarters in North Carolina.
On other fronts as well,
particularly in defense
of Planned Parenthood, the media colluded with
the powers that be. Media compliance with Clinton’s campaign turned the recent
re-opening of the FBI investigation of her email server into a media
investigation of FBI Director James Comey. (It worked, as Comey did a 180 with
a second “exoneration” of Clinton.) Then there was the utter lack of media
interest in looking at the Clinton Foundation’s highly questionable operations,
including its money-laundering and pay-to-play schemes.
Of course, the list could go on and
on and on. Today’s media is hopeless at independent reporting or thinking. Most
people can see this. A recent USA Today poll revealed that people believe—by a 10 to 1 margin—that the media
wanted Clinton to win the election. In a Suffolk University Boston poll asking
1,000 people what they thought was the primary threat to election
integrity, 45.5
percent named the media, followed by 27
percent claiming it was the political establishment.
How
Does a Journalist Get This Way?
Corruption on such a mass scale is
most likely in a culture that rejects the idea that humans are by nature highly
corruptible. This false assumption allows people to operate under the illusion
that they are not susceptible to manipulation. That illusion provides optimal
conditions for manipulation. Corruption on such a mass scale is
most likely in a culture that rejects the idea that humans are by nature highly
corruptible.
Again, as Communist Party operative
Anna Trajan stated to her protégé Vera in “Angi Vera:” “You’re to go into
journalism. It’s a great honor.” Indeed, journalists see great privilege in
having access to purveyors of influence, and then enjoy their approval and
continued access when affirming their narrative. This is especially true in a
rigged system like communism, in which privilege is the only currency of value
in a stagnant economy. The shameless pandering of our current cast of
journalists proves our system is also not immune to this perverse symbiosis.
Political correctness is the job description of most journalists today. It
aims to saturate the masses in the elite’s preferred narrative while
suppressing any competing narrative. The idea is to make sure that only those
willing to play this intimidation game get a piece of the power pie. In that way, the
cronyism worms deeper into the system. There is no logical end point, as it can
only keep feeding on itself and get more extreme and polarizing unless
something from the outside manages to stop it in its tracks.
It’s plain old-fashioned hubris,
dangerous and commonplace. So journalists get this way the same way anybody
gets this way: through pride, through greed, and all of the other oh-so-quaint
“seven deadly sins” that our elites would tell us do not exist. Left unchecked,
these tendencies metastasize. If we allow ourselves to be unaware of the
dangers of unchecked pride and greed—or for that matter envy, anger, sloth,
lust, and gluttony in all their forms—we fall. That’s a law of human nature,
just as gravity is a law of physics.
No
One Checks the Checkers
Why do people even go into
journalism? Is it because they really want to report the news? Is it because
they have natural curiosity and—like cub reporters of old—want to sniff out a
story and really report what happened no matter whose goose may get cooked in
the telling?
Not so much anymore. I would guess
most now do so for the prestige, and if they have a sense of purpose it is to
change the world, to be heroes as so many “social justice warriors” like to see
themselves. They are already pre-disposed to a narrative that matches up with
the “social justice” power agenda of elites who run the show.
Anyone who tries to report
objectively won’t make it through the meat grinder of political correctness and
the filters they must penetrate. This drives any hint of independent thought
out of journalists who may have been inclined towards independent reporting.
Now combine a lapdog mentality in
the media with elites who have a problem with freedom of information because it
levels the playing field. Freedom of information results in the most equal
distribution of power possible. Well, that can’t be good for power elites
intent to keep and exercise power, right? So wherever power elites regulate the
flow of information, you’re only going to get propaganda instead of hard news.
The
News as 24/7 Thought Reform for the Masses
What do you see when you tune into
any of the networks today? Or social media, which is shamelessly in the pocket
of the Democrat Party? For the most part, it is cherry-picked “news” that gets
re-hashed and re-cycled ad nauseam based on the agendas of the political elites
who have enlisted journalists as their messengers.
Without real journalism and a free
flow of real information, people lose the ability to exercise real thought. Today, when I hear a news outlet
talk about its “programming,” I can’t help but think of programming computers
or cult recruits. Listening to the news is more like an exercise in thought
reform—in which you are being told or nudged in how to think about an
issue—than it is the objective flow of actual news you can digest and think
through on your own.
Obviously, conservative talk radio
is biased. We all know that. But what is the only response to talk radio on the
Left these days? It’s a taxpayer-funded gig that pretends to be objective:
National Public Radio. One cannot listen objectively without noticing that its
FM-subdued voices are blatant shills for the Borg
government it represents at every turn.
NPR’s claim of objectivity is stunning, although I imagine its hosts do believe
their own propaganda.
This goes for the recent explosion
of infotainment programs as well. From Oprah Winfrey to Ellen DeGeneres to so
many TED talks, the formula is pretty much the same, even if the format
differs. You have an oh-so-earnest host or presenter who massages a passive
audience into accepting ideas they deem “worth spreading.” Yesterday it was the
idea of the pregnant man. Today it’s the idea of assisted suicide.
Tomorrow, who knows?
Groupthink can
go pretty far when pushed to the limit. Then
what about those news-comedy schticks, like Stephen Colbert’s or Jon Stewart’s,
that are neither particularly newsy nor funny?
The tragedy is that without real
journalism and a free flow of real information, people lose the ability to
exercise real thought. Without being able to actually think things through with
the grounding of objective morality, there is no morality, period. Unchecked
propaganda that suppresses real communication is extremely dangerous because it
turns all of the above into a certainty. Sadly, journalists have become all too
complicit in that.
Stella
Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist.
http://thefederalist.com/2016/11/21/journalism-turns-propaganda/
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