Institutionalized wrongness

Whatever is meant by the term ‘mainstream’ media, they don’t reflect mainstream America anymore.

Some say 2008 was the year the media died (and some of them have written books about this), but I think they just self-destructed into irrelevance, for the most part. The American Thinker has this interesting piece on their artificial reality, which fits the whole ‘Emperor’s Clothes’ fairy tale we’ve been through for so many months in the US.

The reality is that journalism is alive and well — outside the mainstream media.  As for the latter’s journalism, by the third millennium it was not only dead, not only laid to rest, but fossilized and buried under the stratum containing the hula hoop and pet rock.  And it would take a Jurassic Park-like effort to reconstitute its DNA and resurrect the ancient beast.  Thus, a more accurate statement about 2008 is: It was the year that many more illusions about the validity of mainstream journalism died.  Let us now take a look at a media that has made malpractice an art.

This ‘media matrix’ thing is interesting. Good examples there.

Sure, we all have an obligation to speak the Truth, but a liar only rises to prominence in a culture of lies.  And if the so-called watchers in the media deal in deceit, how can we expect the watched to be any different?

The budget con of the 90s is just one of innumerable deceptions.  The reality is that the mainstream media are thoroughly corrupt — manifesting itself in a lack of both conscientiousness and honor — which leads to incompetence and duplicity.  It deals in half-truths, the suppression of facts, the exaltation of evil and savaging of the sublime, and outright lies all the time.  And we could use up countless gigabytes compiling examples.

Let’s take one…

During the 2008 campaign, for instance, CNN correspondent Drew Griffin interviewed Sarah Palin and, to discredit the governor with the notion that even conservatives were lambasting her, said,

“The National Review had a story saying that, you know, I can’t tell if Sarah Palin is ‘incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt, or all of the above.'”

What is the truth?  Those words were taken grossly out of context.  The point of the NR writer, Byron York, was that the media coverage of Palin was so biased that based upon it one couldn’t tell if she was “incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt, or all of the above.”  And the irony is bittersweet.  By taking words designed as a defense of Palin and indictment of the media and using them to impugn the governor, CNN reinforced the very point York was making.  That is, among the small minority of the population that actually heard the truth from alternative media sources.

Very frustrating, these big media folks and their big image (artificial though it may be).

But while we can argue about what percentage of the media’s untruths are actually lies (when you tell an untruth knowing it’s untrue), the number of untruths – as well as half-truths and distortions — is staggering.

Take a few more…

They perpetuate the Malthusian myth that the world faces inexorable population increases, when the truth is that man is poised to experience a “demographic winter,” a population implosion.  The media inundated us with stories about the relatively minor Abu Ghraib affair, which hurt our nation’s image, while ignoring the huge oil-for-food scandal, in which foreign nations were complicit.  They publicize fabrications about transgressions against Islam — such as the story about the Koran being flushed down a toilet — while suppressing news about Moslem atrocities.  They gleefully impugned Pope Pius XII by promoting the “Hitler’s Pope” myth, when the truth is, as Rabbi David Dalin says, that Pius saved more than 800,000 Jews from the Holocaust and, consequently, was hailed as a “righteous gentile” by prominent WWII-era Jews such as Golda Meir, Albert Einstein and Moshe Sharett. 

The above is a set of truly disparate examples with a very definite pattern — one of deception.  The hard, cold, sad truth is that the mainstream media distort virtually every important issue of the day.

This is the best, most incisive analysis I’ve seen. And accurate.

This is tragic because the media have a sacred trust.  It’s a cliché, but it’s said that knowledge is power, and the media are the relaters of knowledge….

Unfortunately, also powerful is misinformation, as it engenders a misshapen world view.  For how can people make correct decisions regarding what policies and politicians to support if they aren’t given correct information?  Why would they defend the good if they were lead to believe it was bad and fight the bad if they were lead to believe it was good?

Selwyn is eloquent in this comprehensive critical review of the press. But once you get into the scope and breadth of this problem – and its consequences - it’s hard to nail it.

If I’ve been a bit verbose, perhaps it’s because I’m trying to describe something for which words are insufficient.  It’s much like when the Morpheus character in the movie The Matrix said that no one could be told what the Matrix is, that you have to see it for yourself.  Our matrix media (along with academia and the popular culture) has constructed an all-encompassing faux reality that cannot truly be understood unless you step outside of it.  For the average person this means, first, being willing to question all his basic suppositions about political and social reality, as these have been shaped by the matrix media.  The second requirement is to embark upon a Reality 101 course on the Internet, where the wheat can at least be found amidst the chaff.

Where you can find great analysis and commentary like this one in the American Thinker, among other. Because there’s no chance the ‘mainstream media’ will change what they don’t even know is wrong. Fish don’t know they’re in water.

They are like an insane man who knows nothing of the world beyond his insane asylum and thus can relate only insanity.  You might say they have become one with their mistaken notions.  Call it, The Zen of Being Wrong.

And do your due diligence in finding good news sources. They’re available and proliferating in the alternative media.