The Media Make History

WASHINGTON -- This week I am going to do something unusual. I am going to enter into a conversation with another columnist. Doing so was not so unusual a few decades back. Bill Buckley and James Jackson Kilpatrick did it when provoked, and it was always interesting. But today columnists are godlike figures. They communicate solely with Mount Olympus, and the result is often a bit tedious.

I propose to address the New York Post's Michael Goodwin and congratulate him on noting that mainstream media, or MSM, have passed yet another milepost in their decline. In his column this weekend, Goodwin wrote:

"Donald Trump may or may not fix his campaign, and Hillary Clinton may or may not become the first female president. But something else happening before our eyes is almost as important: the complete collapse of American journalism as we know it. The frenzy to bury Trump is not limited to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House. They are working hand in hand with what was considered the cream of the nation's news organizations."

Goodwin writes for a Rupert Murdoch newspaper, and I write for the good Washington Times and The American Spectator. None is a member of the MSM, and I would venture that neither of us is as tyrannized into homogeneity as the writers for the MSM. In fact, there exists more diversity of opinion about Trump and Clinton where we write than within the MSM. We trust our readers to decide for themselves.

My only quibble with Goodwin is that I doubt the MSM had much credibility before it began its ambush of Trump, though for certitude it has now gone beyond the point of no return. As he says: "The mainstream media's reputations will likely never recover, nor will the standards. No future producer, editor, reporter or anchor can be expected to meet a test of fairness when that standard has been trashed in such willful and blatant fashion." This is a historic moment. Mainstream Americans will continue their migration to the internet. That is their alternative. And in using it, they will continue the steady bankruptcy of the news organizations of MSM.

Their abandonment of the standards for fairness and accuracy is completely willful. They find themselves indignant by the looseness with which Trump says certain things. Most egregious was their hysteria over a sentence fragment about what Second Amendment advocates might or might not do in response to Clinton's attacks on the amendment. The MSM insisted he was encouraging violence. Among mature adults that response was considered preposterous.

The MSM are aroused by Trump's words, but unbothered by actions that Clinton has actually taken. It seems to think that Trump's misfired jokes or loosely formulated statements are more dangerous to the commonwealth than Clinton's decisions with her emails and her mendacious cover-ups.

Evidence of what FBI Director James Comey called Clinton's "extremely careless" mishandling of classified documents does not arouse the MSM's sense of alarm. Even evidence of repeated conflict of interest in her commingling of Clinton Foundation work and State Department work does not trouble the MSM. Their aphorism is not that actions speak louder than words, but that words are more alarming than actions.

Actually, Clinton's server will be to her candidacy what Monica Lewinsky's DNA-bespattered dress was to Bill Clinton's presidency. That is to say, her server will be remembered as high-tech proof that Clinton is a liar. Consider her polls. A recent poll shows that 68 percent of the electorate already considers her "untrustworthy." And as of Monday evening, we were informed of the discovery of 14,900 more emails that she failed to turn over to the authorities.

The MSM may think that Clinton's actions do not reverberate as loudly with the American people as a handful of cavalier utterances from Trump, but I think they are mistaken. Her acts and the lies she has repeated to cover them up are going to become increasingly consequential in this race. They will be repeated on the internet, within the alternative media, in the conservative press and -- at least transiently -- in the MSM itself. Repeated conflicts of interest and lying about mishandled intelligence may not be serious matters to the MSM. My guess is they are to the average American.

Michael Goodwin has drawn our attention to an important historical development. With the trashing of Donald Trump and the celebration of a career criminal, the mainstream media have become passe.

The Ministry of Propaganda has dropped all pretense of objectivity.

Eerily familiar...

Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.

16. Ministry Of Truth

.......

The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.

The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.

Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.

There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

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