In the fortnight since the Durham Report was released, the nation’s tectonic plates have been strained to the breaking-point. It turns out that the “silent coup” Donald Trump had long suspected was actually quite real: two impeachments and “Russian collusion” originating primarily from a fictional dossier spun by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Columnist Robert Knight recently posed the most penetrating question about this lawlessness, “Officials who swore to uphold the Constitution have committed serial crimes that add up to sedition and even treason. Many Americans are asking when someone, anyone, will pay a price for subverting our self-governing republic.” https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/may/21/exposing-moral-evil-and-defrocking-those-who-weapo/
There was once a time in this country when those systematic abuses might have brought mobs into the streets. A timely reminder of that history was published last year by Stacy Schiff in The Revolutionary, her brilliantly, Pulitzer Prize-winning portrait of firebrand patriot Samuel Adams. “With singular lucidity, Adams plucked ideas from the air and pinned them to the page…He muscled words into deeds, effecting…a revolution that culminated in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence.”[1] Royal governors throughout the 13 colonies and even King George himself had good reason to tremble when Adams’ pen attacked their petty tyrannies. How sad that the FBI, an organization established in the last century to safeguard American liberties, has in this century been seduced and became the preferred political weapon of the governing elites (whose double-standards and snooty snobbishness have much in common with their Loyalist predecessors).
It is now considered the worst form of political incorrectness to recall in polite company the memory of our Founding Fathers. Yet whatever name you apply to those Old White Dudes, even a cursory reading of their lives and times is sufficient to establish that they had limited faith in the institution of Government. Actually, very limited faith Not only would they have been unsurprised that governmental excess would re-appear (while sporting shades, tailored suits and artfully concealed weapons) in our times: But they would have instinctively relied upon the institution of The Media to help correct any imbalance. Thomas Jefferson, whose exquisitely tuned mind provided the inspiration for most of our liberties, had an unwavering faith in the power of a free press. In his 1789 letter to Richard Prince, Jefferson wrote that, "Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights." https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.010_0744_0750/?sp=1
OK, so nothing lasts forever, maybe not even the faith to keep “the people well informed” once placed so unquestioningly as a core media virtue. But ever since the Vietnam War, “objective journalism” has been mostly ignored – either as an obsolete feature or one overcome by the ghostly ideal of the “crusading journalist;” either way, today we rarely hear anything other than what our media elites believe to be important. Now well-known as media bias,” over the last two decades, this phenomenon has attracted a long and distinguished group of analysts – from Bernard Goldberg who effectively invented the term in 2001 to Mark Levin, whose Unfreedom of the Press, is the genre’s latest jeremiad.
However, my favorite media analyst is Tim Groseclose, currently a professor of economics at George Mason University. In his 2011 book Left Turn, Prof. Groseclose provided persuasive, evidence of a startling conclusion: Overwhelmingly liberal “Newspapers, television, radio and online media are extremely influential, especially over consumers’ political views.” He found that over time the liberal bias of the media provided a “slant quotient” moving the “political quotient” of the average voter 24 points leftward. Worse yet, “thinking more liberally…makes us less able to detect the bias.” With startling foresight, he concluded, “It’s time the public wakes up. Media bias is more significant, complex and pernicious than people realize.” https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jul/26/pernicious-effects-of-media-bias/
A decade later, there is an especially pernicious relationship between liberal media and the abuses of government now widening into a daily cascade. While it is hard to know whether media or government corruption came first, together they provide a terrifying synergy, like a forest fire spread by strong winds. At the conflagration’s height, a former FBI general counsel was seconded to Twitter, acting as an information “traffic cop.” But this same arrogance is on stark display at every White House press “briefing” – an ongoing charade between the know-nothing briefer and timid “journalists” unwilling to risk their burgeoning careers with an incautious question.
Could someone please tell Sam Adams that we need a clean-up on Aisle 7?
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