The Free Press Is Now a Propaganda Organ

In some cases logical thinking does not require empirical verification. That’s why ideologues love it. If you say that it will either rain or not rain tomorrow, the weather cannot verify or falsify your statement. The same is true of the statement, when referring to the current pandemic: it might have been better. This should be coupled with the statement: it might have been worse. Empirical evidence can neither prove nor disprove either statement. 

This means, when deciding how to judge leadership in a time of crisis, it serves no useful purpose to say that things might have been better. Because they might also have been worse.

Neither statement requires that we dispense with all considerations about fact. You can certainly find facts to demonstrate the truth of either statement. 

You know and I know that if our president was a Democrat in a time of pandemic, and if he had done exactly the same things that President Trump had done, the media would be rising up with hosannas, to praise his brilliant leadership. Same leadership, same results, different judgment.

If Bill de Blasio and Nancy Pelosi were telling people to go out and have a good time a few weeks ago, this has had no impact on the number of virus cases in New York City. The media tells us that the fault lies entirely with President Trump. 

For media intellectuals and politicians, everything is politics. Everything is about getting a few shots in at the president. This becomes more urgent when your own doddering fool of a candidate cannot utter a sentence without sounding demented.

You know and I know that if Obama were the president, the media would be blaming everything on Fox News. As of today, they are still doing so, because they blame everything on Fox News. The same is true of President Trump. We can only hope that the general public, having tired of the folks who cried wolf, would have seen through the fraud. One hopes, but one still retains some doubt.

Anyway, the media is hard at work spinning the virus as a condemnation of the Trump administration. It began its work explaining that the virus in China was a clear sign that the government of Xi Jinping had lost the mandate of heaven. The media said the same thing in 1989, and...how did that work out. Now that China seems to be on the path to returning to normalcy, the current media narrative is that the coronavirus is an indictment of the Trump administration.

Writing on Real Clear Politics, Richard Benedetto collects some Washington Post headlines, to give us the flavor of propaganda. (via Maggie’s Farm) I would note in passing that we often denounce countries in Asia for not having a free press, for exercising dictatorial control over the media, but have we also measured the extent to which our own mainstream media, guaranteed first amendment freedoms, has been abusing that freedom to be the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party?

The Page One banner headline, splashed across the full six-column width in bold type, read: “Death toll surges past 2,000 in the U.S.” To dramatically illustrate that point, the paper carried a photo of face-masked military police carrying a coffin.  But the caption tells us the coffin was not in the U.S., but in Italy where the death toll has surpassed 10,000.

Other apocalyptic March 29 headlines on the Post front page:

• “The U.S. economy’s downturn has exposed preexisting flaws”
• “Inside Trump’s risky push to reopen the country”
• “World’s poor face grave new hardships while in isolation”
• “States’ needs overwhelm unprepared stockpile”

At the least, they are spinning as fast as they can. They no longer even pretend to be doing objective reporting.

Benedetto turns over the pages and discovers these headlines:

Turning inside the A section, a reader seeking solace would have found, well, none. The headlines included the following:

• “Underfunding, command changes hamper allocation of supplies from stockpile”
• “Major New York City hospital system is at a tipping point”
• “Lack of water is stumbling block for many Americans amid pandemic”
• “Loneliness, poverty grow in isolation”
• “Trump sows confusion as he invokes wide-reaching presidential powers”
• “Battle to reopen U.S. pits Trump against multiple governors”
• “Urban centers across the nation brace for devastating outbreaks”
• “Latest sign recession is intensifying: White-collar workers are being laid off”

Let’s gin up the anxiety. Let’s induce panic. Let’s manipulate emotion to turn the nation against the president in a time of crisis. 

Have any of these crack journalists and editors considered the damage they are doing by undermining Americans faith in their institutions? I doubt that they have. 

But, the Post has found leaders to love: those would be Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. The fact that Pelosi larded the latest stimulus bill with a raft of leftist projects, thus delaying passage, was not noted. The fact that Schumer has been doing everything in his power to prevent the Trump administration from governing effectively-- by holding up confirmations of government officials-- was surely not noted.

To the Post, it does not matter:

Yet, the Post’s  editorial page staff figured their readers could use a pick-me-up after wading through all that woe, so they furnished an oasis – at least for readers who are partisan Democrats -- in the form of  three full pages of opinion extolling the leadership skills of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

 It opened with a nearly full-page color portrait of the speaker, the likes of which are rarely seen in print newspapers these days, let alone the Post, except maybe on inauguration days of new presidents.  (This followed a news section puff piece on Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. Its headline reads, “After years as partisan brawler, Schumer takes leading role to help his country.”)

The Post would have done well to read my post of March 24, wherein I demonstrated that the Democrats had become stupid and malicious. The initial Democratic proposals were so awful that they had to beat a quick retreat and voted for the stimulus bill. 

Of course, the Post editorial pages are rife with suggestions that Trump resign, or, if not resign, get out of the way. People who extol democracy while violating the first rule of democratic decorum-- that would be, to respect the result of fair elections-- are still consumed by their impeachment mania.

But wait, we haven’t come to the editorials and opinion columns yet.  They were uniformly dripping with negativism and criticism of President Trump’s handing of the coronavirus crisis. The Post’s lead editorial bears the headline “We need wartime leaders.” The editors don’t mean an elected chief executive. “The president should hand over the task to others,” they assert. “Then he should get out of the way.”

The editorial does not name who those “others” should be. All the writers seem to be sure of is that Trump should not be in command.  The editorial cartoon by Tom Toles, never a friend of Trump’s, shows a corpulent, pig-like president (his usual depiction by Toles) wearing bunny ears and rolling dice instead of eggs at the 2020 Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn.

“His plan is to roll a fourteen,” Toles writes in the cartoon. I guess Toles assumes savvy Post readers all know you can’t roll dice higher than 12. How clever. It’s a joke on Trump’s candlepower. Get it?

Benedetto concludes:

This is not to say that the media should be painting rosy pictures of a very dangerous situation. At the same time, they should not be using the crisis to frighten people and further their own political agenda.The American public, which is anxious enough in these perilous times, doesn’t need its trusted news sources to be playing political games.

For my part, I would make a small suggestion. The media is not playing political games. It has become a full-on full-throated propaganda machine. It has given up on reporting the news and has definitively broken down the wall between reporting and opinion. 

Just think, we want other countries to adopt our liberal values, when we cannot even practice them ourselves.