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If you were around in the 1980’s and old enough to pay attention to the news, you remember the debate about the news media. One side, the conservatives, complained about the media bias against them. The other side, the liberals, dismissed the claim as something like a conspiracy theory. For its part, the media spent time trying to prove they were not biased at all. They would point to the one conservative story in the back pages as proof they were giving both sides equal treatment.
The funny part about that debate is everyone was right. The conservatives were right in that self-described conservatives outnumbered self-described liberals two-to-one, but the media was almost entirely liberal. The liberals were right in that it was not some sort of conspiracy to silence conservatives. The media simply reflected the opinions of the people who were in the media and politics. The media was being generous to conservatives, given that everyone they knew was a liberal.
Fast forward to the present and the media is insane. Right now, they are claiming a Mexican immigrant, who shot up a Texas mall, is a white supremacist. Here is the Washington Post version of this whopper. Here is Rolling Stone. Here is the Daily Bleat hyperventilating over it. Of course, the volunteer army of regime toadies is uncritically posting this on social media. The thing missing from all of these stories is a picture of the shooter, Mauricio Garcia.
Of course, by the time they get around to showing a picture of the shooter, someone will have doctored the photo to make him look like a German. The previous Texas spree killer, also a migrant from Mexico, was whitewashed so he could look the part, but the real photo was soon on the internet. The media did the same trick with the Uvalde, Texas shooter last year, then they edited their own news articles when the fraud was detected, but by that point it was too late.
Texas seems to be having a problem with migrants going on killing sprees and not just the mass shooting variety. Over the weekend a migrant drove into a group of migrants, killing eight and wounding ten. This does not get the same attention as the Texas mall shooter, because we are supposed to think it is perfectly normal for illegal immigrants to drive cars into pedestrians. Sadly, it is becoming normal as the country is being invaded by tens of millions of migrants right now.
The regime media telling us that brown people are now the face of white supremacy is just the next click of the ratchet in terms of media perfidy. Over the last year they told us the Russians bombed their own pipelines and the Azov battalion, festooned with Nazi iconography, are freedom fighters. Before that they told us the unvaccinated people cause vaccinated people to get Covid. Before that, they said Russians used mind control to alter the 2016 election results.
In other words, there is a pattern here. The lies from the regime have become more common, but also more outlandish. The crossdresser who shot up a Christian school was characterized as the victim. Imagine what it must be like to sit in a room with an editor who is explaining how the narrative position on the school shooter will be that the little kids she murdered are to be ignored, while the shooter is the victim. Imagine that being the new normal in the media because it is.
Lost in the mounting vulgarity is the question at the center of that old debate from forty years ago regarding media bias. Back then, people in the media could not see their own bias because from their perspective, there was no bias. Everyone they knew agreed that the media was playing it fair. If anything, the media was being too generous to those horrible conservatives. We are seeing the same thing about the grotesque dishonesty in the regime media today.
The reason the crew of eight people responsible for that Washington Post story are willing to post nonsense about the brown guy being a white supremacist is everyone they know thinks this is obviously true. When the FBI guy told them on the sly that the shooter was their primary bogeyman, they had no reason to question it. Normal people would have laughed themselves silly, but not Post writers. For them, it was confirmation of everything they know to be true.
Forty years ago, media bias was simply the result of media culture. What had been a working-class profession came to be dominated by credentialed professionals from the same upper-middle-class backgrounds. Media bias reflected the class of people who working in the media. The paranoia and penchant for wild conspiracies involving fictional bogeymen we are seeing in the regime media today also reflects the culture of the people in media. They really believe this stuff.
In fact, it reflects the managerial elite as a whole. These crackpot tales about Mexican white supremacists are not intended to sway the public. They do not care about the public, so they do not care about public opinion. They do care about opinion in the increasingly isolated elite circles. You can be sure that all of the flunkies, seat warmers and coat holders in Washington read that Post story and believed it. They believe because their bosses believe and everyone they know believes it.
That is probably the hardest thing for normal people to accept. Forty years ago, conservatives were sure they could talk their liberal friends in the media out of their obvious bias. Forty years on, normal people still think the media must know what they are doing is madness. They have to know it is fake. The truth is, they think these nutty conspiracy theories and outlandish whoppers are real. Our ruling class is as nuts as they appear to be, maybe even worse.
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A few years ago the left shifted from being willing to debate as long as the terms of the debate skewed in their favor, to the modern approach where debate is not permissable, and all work should be focused in simply silencing their enemies.
Then they will unironically post the Popper meme that states intolerance can not be tolerated, unaware he meant by the intolerant those who were not willing to have open debate.
The Fox News shakeup is going to be interesting as they become more and more grossly left-wing with just slightly more jingoism. Once the right realizes none of their opinions, no matter how innocuous, are allowed, you’re going to see a lot of quiet exits and subtle sabotage from people the empire is reliant to keep things going. There’s nothing in the character of the average late soviet man that can’t be replicated here.
10
The great lie in that explanation was the presumption that journalists just do whatever they want with absolutely no input or direction from the managers of the media outlets. Editorial control was supposedly nonexistent. Except when any conservative made any attempt to buy a media outlet – then they all would freak the f—k out at about fascism.
3
“Our ruling class is as nuts as they appear to be, maybe even worse.”
And how do you break this reality to your liberal neighbor who feeds on ruling class gruel daily? My strategy is to bait them on Ukraine and tell them to ignore my opinion, keep on watching their usual sources, then keep an eye on unfolding events this summer while comparing those events to what they have been told in the past. Russian armies on the move will be a bucket of cold water in the faces of these gullible fools.
6
Good idea. And we can keep the exchange friendly while “their faces are sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
1
> And how do you break this reality to your liberal neighbor who feeds on ruling class gruel daily?
Option 1: Change the ruling class gruel and he will follow.
Option 2: Share with him a non-political hobby that shifts his interests.to something real. Media is just entertainment, so change the entertainment.
2
“keep on watching their usual sources, then keep an eye on unfolding events this summer while comparing those events to what they have been told in the past.”
There is one issue with your approach. You seem to be assuming they’ll remember from day to day what they were told yesterday. The ultimate accomplishment of the 24-hour news channels, as well as social media, is the strip away any and all awareness of what was said or done in the past, including the previous day.
Did the average Soviet citizen read and believe Pravda, or was it treated as a joke like Post/Times/CBS/ NBC/ABC/NBC is today?
Notice I didn’t include MSNBC because I refuse to believe even the wokest of woke believes them. I don’t care if it’s not reality, what’s left of my faith in humanity could take the blow.
3
The standard joke on the street went something like this:
“Back then there was a standard joke about Izvestia, whose title literally means “news,” and Pravda, then the Communist party newspaper, whose title literally means “truth.” The joke went like this: “In ‘News’ there is no truth, and in ‘Truth’ there is no news.””
2
I can give anecdotal evidence for China. Their Pravda is called the Renmin Ribao or “People’s Daily News”. It was sold everywhere, along with other regime organs. I saw people buying it. Being a free-speech-having American, I would sometimes ask my friends, “Do you believe this crap?”. The answer was almost always no, and they were well-aware that the media lied to them and/or supported the CCP. But the CCP was all-powerful, so of course the media was biased! What about you, American, do you really think your media is telling the truth? 哈哈 ! Naïve white person!
5
“Over the weekend a migrant drove into a group of migrants, killing eight and wounding ten.”
One of the victims said they were sitting on the curb near a bus stop when a gray colored Range Rover slammed into the group.
Nice to see migrants are moving up from Chevrolets and Fords. America Del Norte, land of opportunity, eh?
“Forty years ago, media bias was simply the result of media culture. What had been a working-class profession came to be dominated by credentialed professionals from the same upper-middle-class backgrounds.”
Journalism was better when reporters chain smoked and drank themselves to death. Prove me wrong.
Thing is though, Journalism has always had an element of bunkum (Hearst and Pulitzer in the lead up to the Spanish American War, Ben Hecht and The Front Page, Orson Welles and Citizen Kane “You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war”, reporters covering for FDR, etc.). At least in the past if you picked up The Bugtown Democrat or The Bugtown Republican Gazette you had a pretty good idea where their views fell.
Now as you say reporters are, Goodness Forbid, JOURNALISTS. Stamped out of Journalism Schools like widgets out of a machine.
And Journalists cannot simply report. No sir, Journalists Must Change The World! ™
All thinking the same way, all acting the same way, all seeing the world the exact same way.
I go back to Upton Sinclair’s line that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
These people don’t want to see the truth. They Are Right, and We Are Wrong.
3
Where did he get that Range Rover I wonder, if he’s supposedly a poor immigrant himself. They aren’t cheap. And it looked like the news blurred out his chest tattoos.
4
Stephanie:
https://cdn.dimsumdaily.hk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/08091146/Texas-suspect-742×1024.jpg
1
Late-model grey Tange Rover you say?
I’m sure that the Los Zetas, Sinaloa, or New Jalisco cartels had nothing to do with that.
Nope, nada.
The Christian school mass murderer looked to be dressed up as a Trump supporter. This Texas mall shooter was supposedly wearing a right wing patch.
Hmm…
3
You have to remember that there’s a selection process.
First, you select for people who want to be in the media in the first place. That eliminates any conservative leaning person in the first place. It also attracts people who love words over reality.
Second, the big media outlets select by college and background, so wealthy kids who went to top schools and thus have been marinated in the narrative their entire lives and have never had to live around diversity.
Third, only the true believers move up the ranks. The higher you go, the crazier they get on average.
Finally, these people all live in very narrative-believing areas, whether that be posh neighborhoods in DC, NYC or LA. Nothing they see in daily life causes them to question the narrative. It’s actually quite remarkable that Tucker broke away at all and, even more shockingly, managed to stay in the game as long as he did.
For people in the media, the narrative has never been challenged in any real way for their entire lives. There’s no reason for them to doubt it.
10
Apparently there is nobody in charge at the major news outlets that approves or disapproves of the produced content. The woke mobs are simply running wild without any oversight
4
So I think the meta Narrative here is more important than the micro narrative. The micro narrative is about who, what, where, when etc. The daily march of disaster in AINO is mind-numbing, so nobody can really absorb the micro narrative. I mean, I’m having trouble keeping track of all the mass murders.
The meta Narrative – why? and who benefits? – is way more interesting. Obviously this “country” is having a nervous breakdown. Why? It’s pretty clear that drugs, Rx and illegal, are involved in nearly all these disasters. But when the Rx industry is the biggest advertiser on TV, you’re not going to hear anything.
And who benefits? The Regime. It wants you to believe that things are spiraling out of control and that only the firm hand of the benevolent Regime can keep things under control. This is just a terror campaign basically. It won’t abate until you cede more power to the Regime.
3
I don’t necessarily disagree that many of the lies are a product of the warped culture from which they originate. However, they have become so egregious that I’m becoming increasingly convinced that many originate from an organized cabal of intelligence and organized crime operatives. In particular the operations in Ukraine cannot be blamed upon biases in outlook. We were directly lied directly into our faces.
3
As is usually the case, there are multiple factors. The Kagan cult may be blind to their madness, but they know they are lying about the war. And yes there are profiteers happy to endorse the crazy lies and conspiracy theories for money. None of this happens without a media and political culture that believes this stuff. The FBI man who gave the Post this whopper knows they are willing to believe it.
1
The regime is moving rapidly to only allowing uniformity of opinion. Even the shows of the past that allowed debate, such as CNN’s Crossfire or the McLaughlin Group, with the exception of Pat Buchanan, and maybe a couple of others, it was generally liberals vs. Neocons.
As far as I know, those kinds of debate shows have disappeared now. I realize Bill Maher has various guests, but they’re generally not the type to veer off the narrative. Even the upcoming Democrat challengers to Biden won’t be allowed to debate. The vise of free speech suppression is tightening.
3
2 takes:
As to the migrants, the Cartels are another form of NGOs, and the cartel terror spree is about to be unleashed.
Summer of Love ll in time for the election.
******
As to the media, newspapers were a blue-collar industry; not the words, but the medium of printing (and broadcasting) itself.
Newspapers were factory assembly lines. A bunch of shaggy guys showed up at midnight or swing shift to get those presses rolling; I remember seeing them all chatting, yelling, and joshing over loud machinery as they lined up to get those sheets stacked into the bales our mothers delivered. I still have a spindle of string from the shed where paper route drivers folded and tied their newspapers before we started using rubber bands.
The drivers frequented the bosses’ offices, even knew the owners by name, even of large operations such as the Bee in California. The delivery truck distributors servicing the bulldogs (newspaper stands), and those madmen, the printers and hot press operators!
In broadcasting, it was also all about the equipment in the booth. George Noory, America’s best interviewer, was joking with another old industry hand, “Hey, remember the ol’ DEC-3 where we had to slot in an 8-track? Those were the days.” In TV, production was about the cuts, the background, what content was overlaid didn’t really matter to the craftsmen.
The production guys in TV and radio, in press and paper, were all regular blue-collar joes and janes like the car factories of Detroit. Both of those industries are pretty much gone now, along with the family hubs they formed.
1
Funny how the perpetrator went from being “LatinX” to a Yakub creation when the smoke cleared.