Posted on 04/24/2010 8:12:03 AM PDT by thouworm
....in terms of the electoral map this November, youve only got to scare a relatively small percentage of squishy, suburban moderate centrists back into the Democratic fold, and how difficult can that be?
Hence, Bill Clinton energetically on the stump, summoning all his elder statesmans dignity (please, no giggling) in the cause of comparing tea partiers to Timothy McVeigh. Oh, cmon, theyve got everything in common. They both want to reduce the size of government, the late Mr. McVeigh through the use of fertilizer bombs, the tea partiers through control of federal spending, but these are mere nuanced differences of means, not ends.
(snip)
For a long time, tea partiers were racists. Everybody knows that when you say Im becoming very concerned about unsustainable levels of federal spending, thats old Jim Crow code for Lets get up a lynching party and teach that uppity Negro a lesson.
(snip)
Meanwhile, Comedy Central you know, the hip, edgy network with Jon Stewart, from whom young Americans under 53 supposedly get most of their news just caved in to death threats. From a hateful 83-year-old widow who doesnt like Obamacare? Why, no! It was a chap called Abu Talhah al Amrikee, who put up a video on the Internet explaining why a South Park episode with a rather tame Mohammed joke was likely to lead to the deaths of the shows creators.
(snip)
Yet in the end, in a craven culture, even big Hollywood A-listers cant get their message over. So the brave, transgressive comedy network was intimidated into caving in and censoring a speech about not being intimidated into caving in. Thats what I call hip, edgy, cutting-edge comedy: Theyre so edgy theyre curled up in the fetal position, whimpering at the guy with the cutting edge, Please. Behead me last. And dont use the rusty scimitar where you have to saw away for 20 minutes to find the spinal column . . .
Terrific. You can see why young, urban, postmodern Americans under 57 get most of their news from Comedy Central. What a shame 1930s Fascist Europe was so lacking in cable.
Nonsense.
One of Satin's minions...
You are missing Steyn’s point. His point is that the polls show that Stewart / Comedy Central have captured the hip and edgy market for “those who list TV as their news source”. VH1 and MTV do not have news programs so they are irrelevant in this discussion. Date My Mom and Parental Control may be “hip”, but they aren’t a source for news.
The same executives who pay Stewart (and others) a lot o money to be hip and edgy with current events, could have been real hip with this current event. But they got scared.
There's enough evidence to my satisfaction that ties all of these suspects together. One just has to dig a little, which the US government has ignored. Just follow Bill Clinton's nose.
“Everybody knows that when you say Im becoming very concerned about unsustainable levels of federal spending, thats old Jim Crow code for Lets get up a lynching party and teach that uppity Negro a lesson. “
LOLOLOLOL!!!
I do adore Mark Steyn.
LOL-— that’s the line that shouted out to me: Post this column as a thread.
His wit can wither any libtard argument and annihilate any marxist screed.
PLEASE FORWARD these links to anyone who has been lied to by the media and politicians about the Tea Party Movement, which of course is everybody.
The True Face of the Tea Partiers
Oh? Show me where.
Nevertheless, we should be grateful to [Comedy Central's] jelly-spined executives for reminding us that the cardboard heroes of the American media are your go-to guys for standing up to entirely fictitious threats. But for real ones? Not so much.
As a youth I had a black cocker spaniel who would make a fuss if the mailman came, but if a stranger showed up he would just wag his tail. I have often thought that when "the cardboard heroes of the American media" look in the mirror they should see, not a "watchdog," but the visiage of my dog.The reason American journalists set themselves up as "cardboard heroes" is painfully obvious - because they can. What could be more obvious than that it is profitable to do so? And what could be more obvious than that they can get away with it because they are in cahoots with each other - and that the mechanism which enabled and promoted their cooperation is the news service in general and the Associated Press in particular.For protection from real threats, you want the kind of person who goes to church to be reminded of the transcendent - and who takes a camera to a Tea Party rally in Washington wondering if anyone else will be there but Obama goons.
Since I began reporting for my own newsblog last summer, it has been fascinating to watch the actions and reporting of the “real” media with regard to local government - city hall, county commission, school board.
It is obvious the other media have been properly “domesticated” by the politicians and seldom report anything controversial or upsetting to the local Power Structure.
It’s a hoot to witness it all close up.
BTTT
Nevertheless, we should be grateful to [Comedy Central's] jelly-spined executives for reminding us that the cardboard heroes of the American media are your go-to guys for standing up to entirely fictitious threats. But for real ones? Not so much.How long have we known that "the American media" and "liberals" were joined at the hip? But we have struggled to articulate exactly why and how that is so. Here, Mark Steyn crystalizes the reason.The thing that unifies American "liberals" and American journalism and is that each, in his own way, systematically makes fictitious "threats" out of entirely unthreatening fellow citizens and then "rescues" us from them. All "liberals," whether journalists (who assign the laurel "objective" exclusively to themselves) or politicians or intellectuals (whom journalists assign the laurels ("liberal," "progressive," or "moderate" according to what will the public will receive best) are natural allies in the endeavor to bring entirely safe phantom "threats" to light, and to book.
Cardboard heroes, every man Jack of them.
The Right to Know
BTTT
Until I can establish otherwise, I date the break point at 1964, when Henry Luce gave up his position as Editor-in-Chief of Time, Inc. He had sufficient conservative influence within the media industry to leaven the tendency of journalists to lurch leftward.
http://www.timemediakit.com/us/timemagazine/press/bios/luce.html
So far my research shows no other event or series of events that would explain it. IIRC, LS was working on a book that would establish about that time frame as when the media shed all pretense of being “objective,” if ever they were.
Update: our research did NOT show what I thought-—a sudden lurch during or after JFK. Rather, it showed a very steady but consistent move further left by ALL major papers every year. The implications are that you cannot tie this leftward lurch to a specific event, but rather to larger forces that are more difficult to quantify. It is across the board-—At. Constitution, Cleveland Plain Dealer, NYTimes, WaPo, and LA Times moved at about the same rate.
A historian's study of that issue is much to be desired. Larry's A Patriot's History of the United States, good as it is, omits any mention of the telegraph that I was able to find. He said that the book had to be ruthlessly cut down to fit within the covers of what his publisher was willing to print . . .IMHO that is like omitting any mention of radio and TV in a discussion of politics in the 20th Century.
Very interesting.
Perhaps the shift leftward is a result of the collectivists purposely going into journalism to co-opt the trade.
That Luce was not well thought of amongst the “elite” media is quite evident in some of the biographies that I’ve read. The pejorative term they used (and still do) is LucePress.
This is the one I’m working on now.
http://books.google.com/books?id=rl_-_sdlxNsC&source=gbs_navlinks_s
The press gang: newspapers and politics, 1865-1878
By Mark Wahlgren Summers
Relations between the press and politicians in modern America have always been contentious. In The Press Gang, Mark Summers tells the story of the first skirmishes in this ongoing battle. Following the Civil War, independent newspapers began to separate themselves from partisan control and assert direct political influence. The first investigative journalists uncovered genuine scandals such as those involving the Tweed Ring, but their standard practices were often sensational, as editors and reporters made their reputations by destroying political figures, not by carefully uncovering the facts. Objectivity as a professional standard scarcely existed.Considering more than ninety different papers, Summers analyzes not only what the press wrote but also what they chose not to write, and he details both how they got the stories and what mistakes they made in reporting them. He exposes the peculiarly ambivalent relationship of dependence and distaste among reporters and politicians. In exploring the shifting ground between writing the stories and making the news, Summers offers an important contribution to the history of journalism and mid-nineteenth-century politics and uncovers a story that has come to dominate our understanding of government and the media.
Summers has been a good historian in the past. I haven’t read this book.
First part true. Last part, no, I think it is the natural self-selection process.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.