There’s a lot going on in Media World these days. Some of it is routine stuff, like Netflix straining to de-Christianize the Chronicles of Narnia. Some of it is self-protective, such as the flurry of self-exculpations over their concealment of Biden’s deterioration. But some of it is forward-looking: attempts to select and promote new leaders for the Democrat Party:
While the Democrats’ go-to media sources for prevarication dissemination have been weakened, they still have a lot of fight left in them. This battle is far from being over.
Because the Democrats are bereft of policy ideas that can attract voters, their only play at the moment is to try and disrupt President Trump’s efforts to clean up the Biden administration’s messes with noise. Lots and lots of noise. Sadly, it’s a ploy that still works. D.C. politicians on both sides of the aisle are still rattled by rage mobs that get a lot of social media attention.
So are some voters who don’t spend their days consumed with politics (they really exist!). True, there aren’t as many of them as there used to be, but there are enough to swing elections. The Democrats may be flailing right now, but flailing people are usually good at making a lot of noise, too. Right now, the Dems are banking on their noise machine. They’ve recently had Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez traipsing about the country, screeching about “OLIGARCHS” to the low-info left crowd. The mainstream media hacks have been covering these events as if there is some sort of spiritual revival going on.
Not to be outdone by America’s richest commie senator, or America’s dumbest bartender, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, hasn’t shut up since January 20 and is being fêted in the propaganda press as someone who could lead the Democrats out of the political desert in which they’re currently wandering.
Please read it all.
As one who thinks a lot about political dynamics, I put a lot of effort into discovering motives: specifically, the desires, fears, and convictions that cause individuals and institutions to choose and promote a political alignment. Of course, those things vary greatly in their details, but beneath all of them, regardless of surface differences, lies the Axiom of Action:
- Human action is, in the main, conscious, and therefore volitional.
- Humans pursue what they want, and attempt to avert what they don’t want.
- Such goals, whether positive or negative, are synthetic: that is, they take into account, as far as possible, the aggregate of incentives and disincentives associated with the goal before choosing whether or not to pursue it.
- A positive goal to which excessive costs or penalties are immovably attached will be set aside. Likewise, a negative goal (i.e., an undesirable outcome that a human would like to avert), if it is less costly or painful than accepting and enduring it, will be accepted and (hopefully) endured.
- For many reasons, our decisions about these things are not always accurate.
(At this point, a lot of Gentle Readers will be saying to themselves “Yeah, yeah. We’ve been here before, Fran. Get on with it.” Yet the Axiom, believe it or not, is controversial among the very people who need it most: economists. When Ludwig von Mises formulated it, near to the end of his career, it was regarded as a revolutionary conception – even dangerous to state explicitly! Go figure.)
Institutions are driven by the same considerations as individuals, sometimes even more strongly. What do we want? What are we desperate to avert or avoid? The collective behavior of institutions, while it’s not always simple to determine “whose hand is on the tiller,” reflects the desires of those who guide it – and you may rest assured that they will have the support of the majority in their choices of direction.
Note that in the above, I wrote “reflects the desires,” and stopped there. For institutions cannot have beliefs or convictions. They do, however, share a desire, though it’s a desire that’s never expressed openly.
That desire is to survive.
Whether an institution will survive is determined by the balance between its nutrients and its adversaries. Its nutrients, if plentiful and not endangered, will keep it going – unless its adversaries are strong enough to pull it down. It’s much the same sort of equation as would apply to an organism.
The American news media, viewed as an institution, needs “eyeballs:” viewers and subscribers. To get and keep them, it must feed them “news.” Therefore, the sources of “news” are critically important to the media. In the era of Big Government, the principal source of news which can be fed to a mass audience is government: politicians, bureaucrats, and hangers-on.
Some time ago – I’d put it in the early Hearst years — the news media began to favor intimate relations with government officials as their best source for “news.” A synergy developed wherein government officials and journalists assisted one another with news and reciprocal support. Journalists and organs that favored other sources for news stories gradually became uncompetitive and fell away.
But the party of Big Government is the Democrat Party. Republicans since McKinley have espoused small, Constitutionally limited government, regardless of their decisions in practice. Thus journalists found alignments with Democrats more congenial to their aims. Both media and the Democrats waxed fat on that relationship for a long time.
But politically-aligned journalism is propaganda. When the major media deliberately deceived its audience, whether by omission or outright lying, its actions strengthened its adversaries: the alternative media and the political Right. Today, the legacy media are endangered, owing to the public’s disgust with their prevarications and dissimulations. They must strain to retain the audience that still attends to them: hardcore Democrats and Leftists. The effort includes post hoc rationalizations for those prevarications and dissimulations, such as the ones Ace cites here.
But the survival effort is two-pronged. The helmsmen of the major media feel it important, perhaps even critical, to assist the disheveled Democrat Party back to internal order and a politically profitable direction. Their promotion of loud, radical Democrat spokesmen – Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jasmine Crockett – even if their choices may not be to the tastes of “moderate” Democrat voters and donors, are best understood in that light:
In times of extreme disorder,
Any leader is better than none.
It’s vital that conservatives not “count the Left out.” Yes, they’re on the mat, taking a nine count. But they possess substantial reserves: the giant megaphones of the national media, and the thousands of multigeneration Democrat families who will never abandon them. And now and again, their political opponents extend them a helping hand. Republican politicians are no more reliable than any other sort.
For conservative activists, it remains important to separate party affiliation from political principles and aims. Whatever they may say on the stump, Republicans are not necessarily conservatives in practice. That includes some of the most vociferous Republican politicians in the political arena. Give your support only to candidates and officeholders who have demonstrated their conservatism. And watch out for those who “grow in office.”
For us of the “alternative media,” who are not indissolubly wedded to any party or politician, it remains our role:
- To unearth the facts;
- To present them without fear;
- To reason calmly, accurately, and without bias.
The rest is in God’s hands.
