Media

Enslaved by Devices, 1920s Version

by

One frequently observes people who appear to be the captives of their phones and other screen-based devices, and many concerns have been raised about the effects of this behavior. Reading Merritt Ierley’s book “Wondrous Contrivances: Technology at the Threshold”, I was amused to see the following passage in a chapter about a letter written in the mid-1920s concerning the then-new technology of radio. The letter was sent to NYC radio station WEAF by a man whose family had just acquired a receiver:

It is 5:25 PM–you have just finished broadcasting; you have practically finished breaking up a happy home.  Our set was installed last evening.  Today, my wife has not left her chair, listening all day.  Our apartment has not been cleaned, the beds are not made, the baby not bathed–and no dinner ready for me.

A little quick on the trigger, I’d say…good grief, they’d just gotten the radio the previous evening.  I wonder what happened over the next few days, and how common this experience/reaction was.

Some reactions, though, were much more positive about the influence of radio.  Writer Stanley Frost thought radio had the ability to reach out to “illiterate or broken people,” making them “for the first time in touch for the world around them,” and reprinted a letter received by WJZ in Newark:

My husban and I thanks yous all fore the gratiss programas we received every night and day from WJZ…The Broklin teachers was grand the lecturs was so intresing…the annonnser must be One grand man the way he tell the stories to the children.

And in an article titled ‘Radio Dreams That Can Come True’, Collier’s Magazine asserted hopefully that radio could lead to a “spreading of mutual understanding to all sections of the country, unifying our thoughts, ideals, and purposes, and making us a strong and well-knit people.”

Thoughts?

Kamala and the Constitution

by

Democrats and never-Trump Republicans assert that Trump must not be reelected because he threatens the Constitution.  Peggy Noonan goes so far as to say, in her most recent WSJ column, that Kamala Harris should move to a more centrist position on a range of issues in order to improve her chances of winning and thereby negating Trump’s perceived threat to Constitutional government.

The problem with this formulation is that the Democrats don’t much like Constitutional government, and indeed don’t much like the Constitution itself.  (And by ‘Democrats’, I mean not only the Democrat officeholders and politicians, but also the larger Party, including the academics, bureaucrats, and media people who are the party’s ideologues and the beneficiaries of its polices and who think themselves entitled to be the kingmakers or prince-electors of America.)

For example, here is Hillary Clinton, calling for Americans to be civilly or even criminally charged for ‘misinformation.’  Here is Kamala herself, asserting that Trump has lost his free speech privileges and that his Twitter account (this is from 2019) should be taken down…and expressing dismay that social media sites can speak directly to millions of people without any level of oversight.  Tim Walz says “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech”…the definitions of which, of course, he surely expects to be edicted by people ideologically aligned with himself.  Democrat Representative Jamie Raskin has been a leading figure in Congress opposing efforts to investigate and curtail massive censorship programs coordinated by the Biden administration.

Many academics and journalists–representing professions that are highly Democrat-aligned–have attacked the very foundations of free speech and constitutional government.  For example:  New York Times book critic Jennifer Szalai scoffs at what she calls “Constitution worship.”  In another New York Times piece, titled “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” two law professors (one from Harvard and one from Yale) call for America to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”  Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley law school, is author of “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States,” published last month. There are more examples at the link.

Democrats have also called for expanding the membership of the Supreme Court, for purposes of what used to be called court-packing, and been extremely tolerant of the ‘heckler’s veto’…indeed, often now the ‘thug’s veto’…to shut down speech which is considered Badthink.

This is not a matter of a few rhetorical excesses; there is clearly a very broad-based and multi-layered movement against free speech–and toward further centralization of power–among prominent and influential Democrats.

When Democrats cast themselves as defenders of democracy, I am reminded of the phrase ‘guided democracy’ as employed by the Indonesian ruler Sukarno to describe his system.

You Don’t Hate the Media Enough (1)

by

I had something longer to drop for tomorrow but I saw some stories that left me spitting Chiclets both about the Biden-Harris Administration and the media that works for them.

First, Arlington Cemetery Controversy Deepens as Trump and Harris Trade Attacks

This is a headline that doesn’t match the article. Kamala and Trump didn’t trade barbs. Kamala accused Trump of using Arlington as a campaign prop and in general impugned his character. Trump did not “trade attacks” but merely posted messages from the various Gold Star families who attended the ceremony. Those families stated that not only had they invited Trump, but they asked his team to take pictures and video. They also slammed Kamala and her administration for having no one there.

So what about the other nail that the Democrats are hanging their Arlington narrative on? That Trump’s use of pictures and video for campaign purposes was inappropriate? That’s what Army Secretary Christine Wormuth had said earlier. To CNN’s credit they quoted Sen. Tom Cotton saying that “neither the families nor President Trump violated cemetery regulations or policies.”

Of course they added the qualifier that Cotton was “…not present during Trump’s trip to the cemetery.” Neither CNN nor Wormuth were present, so Cotton had just as much right to comment as they did. CNN also failed to mention that Cotton wasn’t just an “Army veteran,” but had served in the Old Guard which is responsible for memorial affairs at Arlington; he also wrote a book about it. Seems like a critical factor.

Read more

Betrayal

by

Recent events make it quite clear, if it wasn’t already, that a high percentage of American media people–print, television, and Internet–have been involved in a multilevel betrayal:

–They have betrayed their supposed professional responsibilities to the truth, which they frequently assert to claim credibility and moral superiority.

–They have betrayed the American people through their frequently misleading and often outright false reporting. They saw Biden’s mental state on a regular basis, and either convinced themselves that they weren’t seeing what they were actually seeing, or flat-out lied.

–Given the importance of the United States in world affairs, they have betrayed not just Americans, but the people of the world. Issues of war and peace, prosperity or want, well-being or starvation for billions of people are affected by US policies and leadership.  The US possess the world’s most powerful military and its most devastating nuclear arsenal.  Thanks in large part to media irresponsibility, this is now under the control of a man who is in severe cognitive decline.  There are probably times in the typical Biden week when he could be convinced that the nuclear Gold Codes are things that he needs to provide to get a special discount deal on his favorite ice cream.

–This point is of lesser importance than the others, but given the most of these media people work for publicly-traded corporations, they have betrayed the shareholders who own the enterprises which employ them. These traditional media have not been doing exactly brilliantly in readership/viewership and financial terms. It seems likely that with a little more balance and a little less ideology, they could be doing significantly better. But the journalists chose to put their personal political beliefs ahead of this responsibility as well as their other responsibilities.

I have previously quoted something said to me once by a wise executive:

When you’re running a large organization, you aren’t seeing reality.  It’s like you’re watching a movie where you get to see maybe one out of a thousand frames, and from that you have to figure out what is going on.

If this is true about running large organizations–and it largely is–it is even more true for the citizen and voter in a large and complex country.  The individual can directly observe only a small amount of the relevant information, for the rest–from the events on the border to international and military affairs–he is generally dependent on others.  And that gives those others–those who choose the frames and the sequence in which they are presented in the movie analogy–a tremendous amount of power.

The rise of the Internet has provided an alternative to the information dominance of the traditional media, but social media has tended to reestablish centralized control points.  It is extremely fortunate–may indeed be lifesaving–that Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X) and has established a relatively uncensored policy on that platform. Substack, too, appears so far to be a truly open platform.  AM/FM broadcast radio has also played a relatively independent role, but this appears to be under threat by acquisition of large numbers of stations by Soros interests…and, potentially, given that radio has long been government-regulated, by legislation and FCC regulation under any free-speech-unfriendly administration and Congress.

A big part of the problem is the ‘professionalization’ of media. Journalists once tended to be blue-collar people making their way up in the world; now, they tend more toward being Ivy League graduates, fully inculcated into all the correct ‘progressive’ attitudes.  And, ever since Watergate, people entering the media field tend to see themselves not so much as observers and analysts, but as participants in government–even as kingmakers.

The 1954 novel Year of Consent, which I reviewed here, posits a future United States which–while still nominally a democracy–is really controlled by those who control the communications and specialize in influence of public attitudes. It seems disturbingly prescient.

 

 

 

The Munzenberg Method, Then and Now

by

I’ve previously cited the advice given to writer Arthur Koestler (‘Darkness at Noon’) by Stalin’s master propagandist, Willi Munzenberg, in the days when Koestler was stil a Communist:

Don’t argue with them, Make them stink in the nose of the world. Make people curse and abominate them. Make them shudder with horror. That, Arturo, is propaganda!

See also this post about memes, in which I note that:

A very high proportion of political memes today would cause Munzenberg to nod in approval.

Searching to an unrelated post the other day, I ran across this 2007 post from CB author Helen:

Munzenberg was a German Communist, one of the few from a working class background. He was a deputy in the Reichstag and the owner of two newspapers and a publishing firm. He was also the most skilled propagandist the Soviet Union and its cause ever had. He did not write propaganda, he organized it, setting up hundreds of committees, using front organizations to run other front organizations, inspiring intellectuals to become fellow travelers and to manipulate other, innocent and ignorant intellectuals. In other words, he was the man who created the atmosphere in which it is considered to be normal to be on the left of the spectrum and intensely moral to support some of the worst tyrants in the world, as long as they seem to be a left-wing cause.

As Stephen Koch, author of Double Lives wrote in the New Criterion:

He wanted to instill the feeling, like a truth of nature, that seriously to criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and marked by an uplifting refinement of sensibility.

Before 1933 he had been enormously successful in his organizational activity with his biggest achievement being the Sacco-Vanzetti case or, rather, the political activity around it. He took the case of two obscure Italian anarchists who had been accused of robbery and murder (of which Sacco was almost certainly guilty and Vanzetti possibly innocent) and turned it into a left-wing cause celebre, achieving two things.

The campaign pulled together disparate left-wing and well-meaning individuals and organizations under covert Communist control, in the process destroying the anarchist movement in the United States.

Secondly, it countered the potent myth of the Open Door and the American Dream for immigrants, a rival myth to that of the Soviet utopia, by creating an image of America of a murderous, xenophobic society that destroys innocent immigrants if they happen to have the wrong political view.

We can date the irrational anti-Americanism so prevalent in Britain, Europe and the American left from that campaign. Munzenberg’s work lives on.

Whether or not the above overstates the long-term influence of Munzenberg and the Sacco-Vanzetti case…after all, there were a lot of other influences and factors in play…Stephen Koch’s point is surely a good description of the climate that so much of the media and of academia have been working diligently to create and to impose.