In Their Animosity Towards the Media, Modi and Trump Think Alike

In both the United States and in India, it’s striking to see how political leaders are framing the independent media as an anti-national force of opposition. Donald Trump built his entire campaign on demonising the supposedly liberal and elitist media, stoking the passions of his conservative base. He seems set to conduct his presidency the same way. He dismisses reports he dislikes with that now ubiquitous and meaningless phrase (so often tweeted in caps lock): “FAKE NEWS.” And last week he borrowed from the unimaginative phrasebook of all authoritarian leaders in branding the media both his enemy and “the enemy of the people.”

Trump is far more prolific and committed in his abuse of the media than an often taciturn Narendra Modi. But though the Indian prime minister has claimed that he lives “in fear” of the distortions of the press, the actions of his government and its allies in targeting certain journalists and networks suggest that the media has more to fear from him. His desire to launch a Chinese-style university to train journalists in the arts of propaganda reflects poorly on his commitment to an independent press.

The parallels between Trump’s and Modi’s relationships to the media are clear. Both leaders enjoy using Twitter to circumvent traditional channels. Both try to limit journalistic access and to centralise the flow of information (Modi has been far more successful here than Trump has so far). Both have a large following of fervent supporters who are convinced that the media (that they disparage as “liberal” in America, “secular” or indeed “sickular” in India, and as “presstitutes” in both countries) is biased against their dear leaders. And both seek to delegitimise the media to insulate their rule from criticism and to distract the public on questions of policy.

In response, the likes of CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post have taken up the task of questioning and challenging Trump with gusto. But these outlets have also lapsed into a self-congratulatory mood. As the acerbic critic Hamilton Nolan has observed, a news anchor like CNN’s Jake Tapper has assumed an almost heroic mantle for the simple of act of “doing his job.” Similarly, Indian media personalities have been keen to drape virtue around their celebrity, casting themselves as intrepid warriors battling to safeguard the soul of the nation.

I am naturally a little suspicious of these self-righteous icons basking in the media limelight. There are, of course, many journalists who deserve adulation for the bravery of their work, for doggedly pursuing stories in the face of intimidation, threats, even violence. But we should never forget that the establishment media, like the organs of government, is an institution of power. Neither rulers nor journalists are worthy of slavish devotion.

I came of age politically when I was in university here in the United States, during the build up to the Iraq War. At the time, I was incensed by the cynicism and manipulations of the administration of George W. Bush, and I was saddened by the apathy of my peers. But I reserved a good deal of my frustration for the media. It seemed to me that the establishment media, including TV networks like CNN and the “paper of record” the New York Times, were falling lockstep behind the White House’s drive to war.

They didn’t do enough to question the administration’s claims, they adopted the president’s talking points, and they even seemed excited by the prospect of the invasion. Though the war was dreamed up by neoconservative ideologues in Washington, I blamed the media for its execution. The media helped beat the drums, fan the flames, and obscure the humanity of Iraqis. A quiescent public then let its government start a monstrous war that has so poisoned these early years of the 21st century.

I've e been thinking about this period 15 years ago as that same establishment attempts to grapple with the Trump administration. The White House as a matter of tactics may now vilify the media, but not long ago that media was a meek handmaiden to power. The lesson here is that while a free press is of course necessary, it is not in itself sufficient. We can only demand rigor and professionalism from our journalists. The harder task lies, largely through education, in developing an engaged, civic republican culture among the public. With authoritarian politics on the rise, the future of democracy in both India and the United States rests on a citizenry willing to challenge and be challenged by the whirring narratives of the information age.

I guess Mr. Tharoor hasn’t spent the last 45+ years reading the NY Times and Wash. Post or he would have shot himself because of the openly, blatant leftwing bias that both newspapers have shown.

Accuracy In Media was born to fight both papers for bias over the writings from the Vietnam war (not all of which were bad, but the ones that were slanted were). Over the decades, the NYT has slide into a Little Pinch Marxist hate-fest of America, only to be joined by the totally blatant far-left bias of the Wash. Post on a daily basis.

Since I don’t read the NY Times much anymore, I won’t say that everything is bad because a few of the writers/articles have been very objective and information.

However, with the Wash. Post, I’ve noticed a shift from their usual anti-conservative, cover up for the communists smear and disinformation writing (from editorials, articles, columns, the Metro section columnists, the Arts/Culture Style section and even in the Sports section), to a position of sheer vitriol and 24 hour non-stop smear jobs against conservatives, anti-jihadists and immigration reform individuals and organization.

I have never seen anything like this in my almost 50 years of journalism (I covered Vietnam/Cambodia/ Congress, street demonstration, the PLO Lobby in the US, communist movements in the US, and media bias as both a card-carrying reporter and a columnist).

Sane rhetoric by Post reporters and columnists has gone from “it comes with the territory” writing to rants and smears that would make the Marquis de Sade and Charlie Manson seem sane. Everything is now “far-right, Alt-Right (whatever the hell that is), extremists, mysoginistic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, and words I didn’t even know existed. I threw out my dictionary because I couldn’t find some of their words in it.

The shrillness of their banshee-like screeching-writings is a 100 times greater than that of someone dragging 3 inch nails across a slate blackboard.

The Inquisition of conservatives by the Post is on the same scale of lunacy as the Spanish Inquisition was. I sometimes wonder if Torquemado was made the editor of both the news and editorial desks. And the letters to the editor reduce the supposed educational level of DC area residents to that of a writers group in an insane asylum.

Rational, logical, and factual thought have gone down the crapper to be replaced by LSD-laced comments that are often rebutted by the writer in the same letter (or article/column).

The facts of history are often totally ignored, either by ignorance of it, or deliberately in order to propagate their views. Unsubstantiated “disinformation” is used instead of cited sources and provable “facts”.

In reading old Soviet theoretical publications and propaganda publications, I’m struck by the overwhelming similarity between what the NYT and WP editorials and some columns have.

I feel as though I’ve gotten into the “Wayback Machine” and travelled back to Stalin’s 1930’s and 40’s, or Hitler’s attacks on everyone in the 1930’s.

The “Big Lie”, the anonymous source, the distortions of history, the twisting of facts and the use of words to destroy other Americans is, to me, unparalleled in modern American history. And with the Soros, Clintons, and Obama “shadow groups and government” emerging from the political sewers of the Democrat Party/Marxist Left, it is only going to get worse.

When you read one of their articles on “climate change”, “global warming”, etc., and see the words of their writers or from the studies they are quoting that say, “maybe”, “probably”, “possibly”, “modeling”, and “potentially”, you know that real science and scientific facts have been flushed down the Middle Ages hole of ignorance that punished Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, and those whole believed that the earth revolved around the sun, and that the earth was round.

And the Left Media is just warming up, with some waiting for their George Soros blood money to get them up and running like the Marxist propaganda machines and hatemongering “yellow journalists” that many of them are.

Will the last honest journalist turn off the printers and the lights because we are heading towards a new “Dark Ages” of media bias, ignorance and disinformation that is going to make the past 50 years seem like a paradise.

"There is, however, one flaw in all these predictions. All these predictions, even if they are based on trends that we can anticipate and technology we know will be developed, are flawed. These predictions are not going to happen. These future technologies far exceed the technology predicted in the book of Revelation. We already have the technology necessary to fulfill the technological requirements for Revelation and the Tribulation period. If humanity were to continue along its present rate of technological development then the technology we would have in just twenty years would begin to far exceed the technology necessary for the tribulation period to occur. "

Exactly.

We are in the technological fertile ground. The technological innovations up to this point were not sufficient to enforce that which is prophesized in Revelation, and because of the exponential growth of technology, we are unlikely to advance towards technologies on the horizon that are not described in Revlelation.

According to some prophetic dreams and visions, the mark on the hand will look like this:

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