H/t
Maggie's Farm, the MSM "pouts about
lost norms" (so many links popped up I couldn't begin to include them all), when what's really bugging it is a lost leverage:
Imagine this … we now live in a world where the media has zero leverage. They can't blackmail Trump into behaving a certain way because 1) they have nothing he needs -- to reach the people, he can easily go around them; and 2) they can't put pressure on him by hammering him with coordinated narratives because they have lost all moral authority with the public. Nothing they say matters. Nothing they do moves the needle.
Sure, there could be a downside here. If the Trump administration gets wrapped up in a legitimate scandal, we might not listen to eunuchs who cried "disqualified" thousands of times already. But to me, that's like lamenting the lack of trains running on time after the death of a dictator. Whatever downside that comes will be well worth the defeat of outright evil.
10 comments:
Illustrative of the NLMSM's newfound irrelevance, is this remark by Christiane Amanpour: I learned long ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence....
Why on earth she would need to experience that horror before she could understand that lesson is...typical of pressmen.
And she worried openly that Trump--and now more folks--are bypassing the NLMSM, not permitting the NLMSM to filter the "news" they choose to present, and talking directly to the people. The NLMSM did the same, only with less hysteria, when Reagan would go "over the heads of Congress" and talk directly to the people. Of course, he had still to use the ordinary television and radio stations....
I don't miss the "traditional" media's abuse of their leverage.
Eric Hines
The articles found from Googling "lost norms" tend towards Trump breaking the norm of playing nice with the press or opposing Democrats, where even if the press or opposing Democrats attack you first, you do not attack back. Trump attacked back. Sometimes Trump was first to the attack. Trump was not my first choice, but I very much liked his attacking the press. Not to mention his attacking Hillary.
While I have great scorn for the MSM overall, I have some respect for individual members of the press. My niece, for example, who is a business journalist. The PC narrative, while it is not nonexistent in business journalism, doesn't work as well there. A peer from my high school, who used to live three houses up from me but a mile away [in the countryside], won the Pulitzer price for journalism. He dealt with culture, not politics, and his idiosyncratic viewpoints couldn't be fit into the PC straight jacket. Ever.
I certainly appreciated his breaking the norm of pretending that Hillary Clinton wasn't guilty of serious crimes. Boy, they went ape when he did, too.
Amanpour writes some gems. For example:
I never in a million years thought I would be up here on stage appealing for the freedom and safety of American journalists at home.
Let me rewrite that for her:I never in a million years thought the American people would see through and get angry at the blatant partisanship of American journalists- journalists who simultaneously claimed they were objective.
She is really out of touch.
She's worried that journalists will be captured and endangered here in the U.S.? Doesn't speak well for her judgment or sense of proportion. What a self-obsessed little crybaby. The only things in danger are her paycheck and her prestige.
One of the things I like best about Trump's campaign is that he removed the stigma of "bad" things in a candidate's personal history. Maybe now we can have a broader selection of candidates because the public has shown they will vote for a candidate who is less than perfectly virtuous.
It was beginning to seem like if a conservative candidate's 3rd cousin's 2nd wife's nephew's son-in-law was arrested for doing drugs, the candidate was oh so not acceptable.
Right, but you could be joined at the hip with Bill Ayers and the Rev. Wright, and that was completely OK. But now the norms have been lost, boo hoo.
And you could trade on family ties for personal gain so long as you were the brother of a President of the Politically Correct Party.
Eric Hines
One of the things I like best about Trump's campaign is that he removed the stigma of "bad" things in a candidate's personal history. Maybe now we can have a broader selection of candidates because the public has shown they will vote for a candidate who is less than perfectly virtuous.
One of the sayings of the Chinese Chan Buddhists I've always admired runs, "Make the way wide, or you will find you have nowhere to put your foot either."
The Chan are the predecessors of the Zen Buddhists, and Buddhism has always had a way of creating new schools. This was intended as advice for those developing a new school of Buddhist practice, but it's excellent advice in general.
On the other hand, as with all human wisdom there's an incompleteness to this formula -- and to the idea that it is good to have thrown off the ideal of virtue in the selection of political leaders. Confer George Washington's dictum: "Discipline is the soul of an army."
I think this idea about 'bad things in a candidates personal history' is important. Trump did things that most of us feel are distasteful or offensive, or bullying, but probably not illegal (or at least shouldn't be). The Democrats have repeatedly committed criminal acts and had that minimized to oblivion by the press, so there's still nothing near equality, nor do I want there to be. I think it's important that we hold to our ideals as exemplified in George Washington, but at the same time we should realize that most people aren't that good if you dig enough- and in todays 'camera in every pocket' world, almost no one is going to be good enough if you dig much. So we must at once hold ideals, and also understand that ideals aren't the average in reality- that we yearn for a Washington, Lincoln, or Reagan, but may have to settle for a Trump. Such is life.
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