The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Wile E. Coyote of Liberal Journalism

Posted on | November 9, 2024 | No Comments

Everybody remembers Wile E. Coyote was a Super Genius, right? That old Looney Tunes character came to mind this week when I read liberal journalist Michael Tomasky’s hot take on the election:

I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on.
These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president? . . .

(You see the set-up here? Tomasky believes every word of Democratic Party propaganda, every partisan talking point, as do all of his acquaintances, who are “incredulous” that not everyone does.)

The answer is obviously no — not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”
But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.
The answer is the right-wing media. . . . .

(Obviously! Why didn’t anyone else think of this? Quick, let me log onto the Acme website and order some rocket skates!)

Today, the right-wing media — Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more — sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win. . . .

OK, I’m going to stop the italics fisking here, because there’s probably only so much of Tomasky’s implausible bullshit you can handle without giving into the urge to hurl your coffee cup across the room.

It’s like he’s demanding a place in the Not-Getting-It Hall of Fame.

Who is it that has “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information”? Is it really Fox News, Newsmax, Joe Rogan, et al.? If it were so, were there are no other media outlets to which people might turn to seek information that was not “slanted and distorted”?

Coverage of the 2024 presidential campaign by major national broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) was the most biased against Republicans since the Media Research Center began keeping track. Campaign coverage by the three networks was 78% positive for Kamala Harris and 85% negative for Donald Trump. In essence, network “news” coverage was a massive in-kind contribution to the Democratic Party. This bias has prevailed for decades in the major media, despite every effort by conservatives to call attention to the problem, to expose errors in reporting (e.g., “RatherGate”) and to counter-balance this bias.

In fact, I consider it inarguable that liberal bias in the media has actually gotten worse in the past 30 years. It seems that the success of Fox News has caused major media to become even more liberal, to the point of just blatant partisanship on behalf of Democrats. Much of the media’s “reporting” is indistinguishable from DNC press releases. It is this leftward shift of media coverage that has created an audience of people eager to find reporting and commentary that doesn’t conform to the DNC-approved Official Truth™ formula provided by major media.

Tomasky bemoans the influence of “right-wing media” without once acknowledging the reason for the existence of such a phenomenon. His obsession with “right-wing media” is a sort of conspiracy theory, as if there were some secretive cabal of GOP operatives compelling people to watch Fox News or listen to conservative podcasters, when in fact what is happening is that news consumers are “voting with their feet,” so to speak, by deserting liberal-dominated media in favor of alternatives. Tomasky is not so stupid that he can’t understand what’s happening, but he refuses to acknowledge that consumer choice — the ability of free people to exercise their own independent judgment — is the real secret of the success of “right-wing media.” And now, if you’ll put you coffee cups safely out of reach, I’ll get to the part of Tomasky’s column where he suggests action to solve the problem:

If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people — specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs — take some action. . . .
This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.
And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. . . .
This is a crisis. The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and this is the reason. . . .
The reason? The right-wing media. And it’s only growing and growing. And I haven’t even gotten to social media and Tik Tok and the other platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is.

So “rich liberals” must “do something” to counteract “the right-wing media” which is exclusively responsible for Donald Trump’s existence.

Paranoid much, sir? Well, there is a certain amount of truth to what Tomasky says because it was our late friend Andrew Breitbart who, in 2011, got the idea of inviting Donald Trump to CPAC. Breitbart had become famous during the 2009-2010 Tea Party years and it was his idea that someone like Trump — an outsider, a celebrity, a wealthy business tycoon who wasn’t beholden to the Republcan establishment — might be the best person to lead such a populist uprising. Sadly, Breitbart died before his prescient instinct could be vindicated by events, but it was certainly no accident that Steve Bannon, a founding member of the board of Breitbart News, became a top adviser to Trump. From the first time I met Andrew Breitbart, at CPAC 2007, I recognized him as a superior mind, someone with deep insight into how the media created what he always referred to as The Narrative. I can still hear Andrew saying that word with a sinister tone: “Their precious narrative.”

The spirit of Breitbart lives on, and many people who perhaps never had the opportunity to meet him are still carrying on Andrew’s legacy. Look at the work that Eric Abbenante did this election cycle:

Eric gives big props to Maze Moore, by the way. It was a team effort that helped inform America about who Kamala Harris actually is, during those weeks when the media were hyping up the “joy” of her campaign.

Much of the most useful work done by “right-wing media” is not done by Fox News or any other corporate entity, but by individuals using social media — independently, often with no compensation except what they might get from Patreon or PayPal tips — and there is simply no way for Democrats to counteract this effectively, except through censorship, which was what they were doing on Twitter before Elon Musk bought it. There’s still censorship on Facebook and YouTube, but so long as there is any space online where people are free to spread the truth, falsehood can never prevail. This is what’s driven Michael Tomasky into a fit of helpless depression and impotent rage toward “right-wing media.” The truth is that Kamala Harris was a very bad candidate, running on a very bad agenda. It’s not surprising she lost, and also not surprising that most Americans rejected the idiotic “Trump is Hitler” nonsense that was Kamala’s last-ditch argument in her doomed campaign.

Michael Tomasky represents the Wile E. Coyote tendency of all liberal journalists, who predictably are always shocked when that anvil they bought from Acme comes crashing down atop their own heads.



 

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Category: Conspiracy Theories, Election, Media Bias

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