Last week I mused on how so many sports and entertainment figures were walking away from being entertaining to at least half the audience. All the money and most of the viewership in China must be just so much more enticing to the suits who produce movies and the front offices for guys who play sports professionally. The bed is made, let them now sleep in it seemed to be the reaction of commenters to that post. Now we’ll watch old movies, foreign movies, or even take up a fascinating new hobby – model railroading, gardening, building replicas of medieval weapons, raising chickens, remodeling the house from stem to stern. That kind of thing.
Our establishment news media is going down the same road to irrelevancy; probably farther along down that road since they first got that head start. When was that? The first step from being impartial, to at least being seen as impartial; Was it in publicly yielding the victory in the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War to the NVA, against the actual facts on the ground? Or when Woodward and Bernstein took down a president with the behind-the-scenes assistance of a disgruntled and resentful FBI administrator, giving inspiration to a whole generation of college-trained journos who lusted after being in the news spotlight themselves even more than actually relaying ‘just the facts.’ (And perhaps inspiring other resentful bureaucrats in more recent times on how best to slip the knife in, without ever leaving fingerprints; just leak to the nearest sympathetic journo-List.)
The partisanship got a bit more blatant when Dan Rather went with a bogus document, the TANG memo, trying to sink GWB just before election day. A faked memo, passed to the 60 Minutes team by a man with a grudge against GWB anyway, and a production team willing to swallow it all whole and regurgitate a political hit piece. That’s when I personally began to wonder how many other bogus documents had been perpetuated by 60 Minutes in order to slime the target-o-the-evening, and gone undetected because no one on the outside of the newsmaking machinery ever got a good look at them. Another click in the ratchet of doubt during that very same election was how the major news orgs deep-sixed mention of the Swiftboat veterans who had served with John Kerry and considered him an unsavory cross between Eddie Haskell and Frank Burns. The Swiftboat veteran controversy was all over the interwebs but was essentially embargoed by the national establishment news organizations for weeks. By the time the 2008 election rolled around the partiality was blatantly obvious,: I even wrote about it then, thusly –
It’s not been unknown for members of the working press to have sentimental favorites – look, they about got down and drooled over John. F. Kennedy, and the deity knoweth some of the old press guys and gals still view him through a hagiographic haze. Similarly, Lyndon Johnson was so universally despised by the press and the intelligentsia that I (as a middle school kid just getting interested in that kind of stuff) rather felt sorry for him. Nixon was loathed, and Gerald Ford lampooned as a clumsy oaf – but in between all that, the serious media still were capable of some kind of detachment … Which sense of impartiality still lingered long among us- but it just seems now the lunatic fringe is driving the whole thing. And that sense of even-handed detachment is what the media is losing, or has already lost this season. …they are become the organ of state, or the state that they hope will be, once they drag the juggernaut over the finish line. It’s as if NPR and the New York Times were about to morph into Pravda, or the state media in one of those third-world nations where el Presidente’s cousin is the head of the national press council – and no one dare print or broadcast a critical word about either of them. What a pity – for a lot of the last century, being a journalist in the mainstream American media was a respected profession . . . and now they are reduced to shoveling out propaganda and dragging the juggernaut along.
Talk about prophecies. Really, where do I get my Cassandra certificate? Is there a central office where I might file an on-line application? Because the national news media has, with a few notable exceptions, gone full out progressive organ-of-the-establishment in the twelve years since I posted that observation. Now, they are at the point where social media giants – Twitter, Facebook and the like – are even blocking tweets and posts to links to the last few news organizations which will call out corrupt numbskulls and their substance-abusing sons in stories which appear to be based on … well, something that looks suspiciously like hard evidence. Discuss as you wish. How the once-mighty American media organs have fallen!
Some people believed you, so no Cassandra certificate for you.
One of the interesting things about watching this is seeing how many writers are racing to show how corrupt the old media were back in the old days, especially about racial matters. Maybe the media were as biased back then and nobody noticed, or maybe they’re trying to hide their own flaws in smoke from the past.
It really started with Kennedy. My parents were lifelong Democrats in Chicago and they were upset when I told them I had voted for Nixon. I remember Kennedy appearing on campus where I was a USC student. I didn’t go but I remember one girl who I thought was level headed but who became “a jumper” at the rally. The Kennedy people saw these girls so excited that they jumped to see the candidate over the crowd. The TV debate added to the image. Those who listened on the radio, thought Nixon won. It was TV that made Kennedy, especially color TV.
We’ve been saying for nearly 4 years now that social media companies were going to do everything possible to defeat Trump, and today was the day they stopped pretending otherwise. It’s going to get much worse for the next few weeks, and who knows where the limit will be.
Who would have dreamed a few years ago that today it would be the right that was opposed to foreign wars, reflexively distrustful and opposed to the FBI and CIA, and in favor of regulating social media out of existence?
I guarantee you that Trump’s twitter account will be suspended sometime on election night…anyone want to predict otherwise?
@ Brian – or suspend a lot of other accounts instead and then brag how openminded they were to keep Trump open despite all the “dangerous” things he tweets.
As for the athletes and entertainers, it’s because the Chinese government enforces as a block. China is not the audience, the PRC is.
It takes some dignity, responsibility, some sense of duty to believe your role is to record, report, find facts rather than persuade. Your point of view is what’s important – to you and you think others.
I think all of us are worse off because we boomers gave an inappropriate reverence to our egos and de-valued duty. In the old days, that would be described as prideful and pride the greatest of sins. But I can’t say we spent much time restraining our egos – and in a couple of generations the idea of pride as anything but a virtue seemed lost.
Rather still seems unembarrassed – indeed, in an interview, he seemed to see himself as the victim here.
AVI, both FB and Twitter have deleted postings by Trump in the past. Most of his supporters are fairly sure Twitter is shadow-banning him right now because of a drop off in volume. They suspended Kayleigh McEnany’s account, as well as locking the entire account of the NY Post.
They don’t care at all that anyone thinks they are openminded.
One hopes that the Trump campaign’s big “plan” wasn’t to drop a whole bunch of dirt on Dirty Joe and his filthy clan the last 3 weeks of the campaign. Let’s hope they had a plan for how to get their message across when all their access to Twitter and Facebook is shut down during that same time.
What would be the effect if Trump switched to another platform, like “Gab” for example? I never joined Twitter so have no experience. I use Facebook almost exclusively for friends and family and refuse almost all “friend” requests.
Twitter blocking the Trump campaign is the single least surprising event since Epstein’s non-suicide.
I’d have expected this to happen immediately after some dumb tweet that was nasty or stupid from Trump, not after the Trump campaign linked to a story about Hunter Biden’s glorious life and career.
My apologies in advance if I’m getting the details wrong, but from what I’ve seen of this story so far I think it is a notable own goal for the Biden campaign and his media allies.
Again, it was rather obvious that the leftist tech companies and media were going to take action against Trump at some point. I even recall reading that Trump expected it to happen. So, again, not a surprise.
What is a surprise is that they’ve managed to block Trump such a way that it makes them look bad and not the demon Trump, or his evil campaign. They’ve taken such an obvious action to aid the Biden campaign that it might even make the ignorant voters the democrats rely upon pause and reconsider.
Not most, or many, but perhaps some. And it surely gives ammunition to the people complaining about leftist bias from the tech monopolies.
If this leak was some sort of action by the Trump campaign or Trump’s allies I’d say it worked much better than waiting for twitter to ban Trump for some trumped up reason – ha ha – in a week or two.
Also, Streisand Effect, anyone?
There’s gonna be 3 weeks of stories based on the crack head’s laptop, probably getting worse and worse. The media has to suppress them from the start, because they can’t cover them now and then try to ignore them when they get really juicy…
The media tried to “control” Clinton/Lewinsky and got Drudge and a steadily declining audience ever since. Drudge seems to have decided to throw himself on his own sword over some undisclosed “principal” supposedly violated by Trump that leaves several other sites competing for his former audience.
Every time Facebook/Twitter/Google pull one of these stunts, they’re reminding people how stupid it is to depend them for information. They all exist at the pleasure of the government and may yet come to rue the day. If you’re able to sue the deep pockets of Facebook for anything posted by several billion users, their business model collapses. This is already happening in one way or another outside the U.S.
I think Xennady hits closer to the mark but I might be optimistic. My understanding is the provenance of the hard drive is somewhat sketchy, or can be made to appear that way, and hitting Giuliani as a partisan operative would have worked too. They could have simply quietly throttled distribution of the story or thrown up ‘unapproved material’ disclaimers to viewers. Given the Twitter melt down last night, I have to wonder if the account locking was panic on the part of SJWs at the lower levels. There might even be a bit of a war going on between the Twitter managers who realize how the brand is being trashed (even Dorsey felt compelled to give a kinda sorta apology) and the SJW employees who want to double down on getting Trump. Waiting 24 hours would likely have given them something from Trump that would have made the banning and lock downs more plausible. As it was it certainly gives the impression they jumped because they knew the story was true, and that was confirmed by the waffling from the Biden campaign (going from ‘never discussed business’ to ‘well, maybe there was a meeting not on the official schedule’).
As it was it certainly gives the impression they jumped because they knew the story was true…
If this story wasn’t true they would have reacted completely differently. They’d have been waving a giant flag, attempting to get Trump to react in such a way as to make him look corrupt or incompetent.
Instead, pants-piddling panic.
And if the provenance of the hard drive is sketchy, so what? What was the provenance of Trump’s tax returns? Or the origin of the FISA warrants, and indeed the entire origin of the years-long Russia-gate lie? Turnabout is fair play.
I think we’re past the point where anything like that matters, for either side. I’ve watched the FBI and CIA conspire together to overthrow the elected government for the past few years, making a mockery of the law.
I see no reason why my side should be hamstring by rules the other side completely ignores.
Along the lines of the obvious truths that “we” are all supposed to never, ever, ever say as talked about in the other thread, you can add “Joe Biden’s crackhead kid was used as a pass-through for Slow Joe to extort vast sums of money from Ukraine.”
As for the notion that the provenance of the laptop is somehow in doubt, come on man. Note that the media and Joe’s Potemkin campaign have to pretend this whole thing doesn’t exist, because if they deny it, they have no idea what will be released next to prove they’re lying.
The Roman army had a method to encourage the soldiers to always do their best: Decimation. Screw up? Every tenth man gets killed. Seems to me the FBI should start at the top.