Media-DNC Complex “Tilting” Us Toward Cliff

The media are doing everything they can to insulate Obama from the charge of “partisanship.”  They know Americans want to see both sides come together.  So they are making sure in advance to excoriate Republicans for any “not coming together.” If Republicans don’t embrace Obama and the Democrat agenda, the media intend to do everything in their power to make sure they pay dearly for it.

Basically, there’s the Democrats, and then there’s the “divisive, partisan, ideological Republicans.”  And, of course, obviously the former are better than the latter.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, because we live in a world in which appearances – shaped and distorted by the media as they are – have become more important than reality.

Bias is easier to immediately identify in the small things than in the big issues, because the big issues are invariably more complex, and the media can conceal its bias in all the subtle details by choosing which issues to cover and which specific aspects of which issues, which subject or expert to interview and which questions to ask them.  So let’s look at the small matter of presidential fitness and see if the media treats Republican and Democrat presidents the same way.  Britt Hume reported on how the media marveled over how “fabulously fit” Obama is due to his exercise regime; but how the media used words like “obsession,” “indulgence, ” and even “creepy” to describe Bush’s exercise.

Look at this presentation of Obama as some Greek ideal of the demi-god come down from Olympus by The Washington Post:

Between workouts during his Hawaii vacation this week, he was photographed looking like the paradigm of a new kind of presidential fitness, one geared less toward preventing heart attacks than winning swimsuit competitions. The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games.

And contrast that with the links about Bush compiled by Newsbusters:

–Reuters from August 2005:  “But some of his critics view his exercise obsession as an indulgence that takes time away from other priorities.”

– The Los Angeles Times from July 2005: “….. Bush has an obsession with exercise that borders on the creepy.

Given the importance of his job, it is astonishing how much time Bush has to exercise.”

Let’s get something straight: if the media can’t even be trusted to be objective in the small things – but demonstrate snide, smarmy, vindictive and unrelenting bias and prejudice that provides the climate of propaganda – then how on earth can you trust the same people to show objectivity in the big matters?  If you can’t even trust a guy to pay you back the buck he borrowed for you to feed the vending machine, are you going to front him the money to buy a damn house?

The media is constantly and on every imaginable level tilting the playing field to favor liberals and Democrats and hurt conservatives and Republicans.  It is simply unrelenting.  They keep coming at us with naked bias again and again on every single issue under the sun.  And they often do this by means of presenting the key political differences in terms that favor “their side.’

Let me provide a concrete example that has been going on both before and since the election. Take gay marriage.  There has never been such a thing as “gay marriage.”  There has never been such thing legally, culturally, socially or linguistically as a marriage that has NOT been between a man and a woman.  The very phrase “gay marriage” is an oxymoron.  But do you get to hear that in news coverage?  No.  What you hear about all the time is oppressed homosexuals trying to get the right to marry, and you hear about people depicted as religious bigots who refuse to wake up and smell reality trying to keep a discriminated-against minority from having their basic rights.  A gay man denied the right to marry another man and move next door to your family is tantamount to a naked black man toiling under the taskmaster’s lash in the abject bonds of slavery.  And it’s just an unfortunate detail that over 70% of African-American Californians voted against gay marriage.

All the while, the liberals who are attempting to impose the radical, unprecedented agenda of homosexual marriage by force of judicial-activist fiat – even against the clearly expressed will of the people in state after state (30 out of 30 now) – are routinely depicted by the media as “inclusive”, “broad-minded” and “tolerant” while those who stand behind 2,000 years of solid Western Civilization and 389 years of American civilization are routinely portrayed as “divisive”, “narrow-minded” and “intolerant.”

And the media does the same thing with other social or political issues such as abortion, or gun control, or Intelligent Design, or income redistributionism, or Iraq, or Iran, or absolutely anything.

The media is not merely tilting the playing field in a direction that favors Democrats over Republicans.  They are employing the tactics of liberalism to redefine the playing field and the permanently alter the rules of the game.  They are using their power over the airwaves and the printing presses – the power to shape opinion and to literally shape how we view the world – to define the debate in liberal partisan terms.

A blogger named Taffy posted to my article, “For Obama, Only His Opponents Can Be Capable Of Partisianship,” and says:

I have come to understand that when one looks up ‘liberal’ in the dictionary, definition #1 should be ‘hypocrite.’  I say this because, as you point out, every liberal I have ever known demonstrated their perceived “tolerance” by telling me some version of, ‘If you don’t think what I think, your views are intolerant.’  They say this every time, and the sheer gall and hypocrisy of their statement eludes them.  On the occasions I tried to demonstrate the fallacy of their perspective, I discovered there is no explanation that works.  They are so busy thinking they are right that no opposing information can be digested.

The media plays this game all the time.  But no one ever gets to stick the microphone in their faces and force them to question their own presuppositions.

The result is a degree of bias that excludes even the chance of a fair debate.

Wes Vernon of Newsmax says of journalists:

Many of them don’t consider that they’re leaning in any political direction. They really think they are simply mainstream. There is no other side of the argument except what you hear from a few right-wing nut cases. In their world, mainstream conservatism doesn’t exist.

As one Washington news correspondent once said to me, “There is no left wing.” There’s just normal goodness, as opposed to the extremists.

Bernard Goldberg, who wrote the explosive book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, said in an interview:

These guys, media elites, live in an elite, comfortable, liberal bubble, in places like Manhattan in New York. They can go for a week, a day, a month, a year, they can practically go a whole lifetime and never run into anybody who has a different point of view than they have on all the big social issues, whether its gay marriage or affirmative action or abortion or other race issues or feminist issues. After a while, a kind of group think takes over. They think everything to the right is conservative, which it is, and everything to the left is middle of the road. They don’t even notice. These people are so in the dark they don’t even know that their views on these controversial subjects are liberal. They think they are just reasonable and civilized because all their pals inside the bubble have these same views.

He went on to say:

I think the nature of bias, any kind of bias, is a preconceived notion about something, whether it’s racial bias or media bias or any kind of bias — bias toward a certain kind of car. It’s like you go into it with your mind pretty much made up. So when they call and they want a sound bite and you say that they are not even listening to what you are saying, you’re right. It’s because they have already made their mind up about what they are calling you about, and they just need you to fill in some blank.

So when reporters go out and cover stories on these big hot social issues, they don’t go out to learn what this side thinks and what that side thinks. They already have their take on these issues, and their take is overwhelmingly a liberal take on these issues. And then they go out and they interview somebody and they put that person in and, well, let’s put it this way, the conservative point of view is very often the other side of the argument. There is a main side and an other side. The main side in affirmative action, for instance, is that affirmative action is a wonderful thing. The main side in gay marriage is who would be against gay marriage except some bigot. And then they go out and they find that other side. Because otherwise it would be so blatantly biased that they couldn’t get away with it.

But they do go into these stories with their minds, if not totally made up, tilting in a sort of leftward direction.

Bernard Goldberg – winner of 7 Emmy Awards, by the way – wrote his book in 2002.  The problem is that in the six years since, the “tilting” he described has approached the point of being a vertical slope toward hard-core Kool-Aid propaganda.

Barack Obama, in mandating tax-payer federal funding on abortion, said:

“For too long, international family planning assistance has been used as a political wedge issue, the subject of a back and forth debate that has served only to divide us,” Obama said in a statement released by the White House. “I have no desire to continue this stale and fruitless debate.”

Yet he is completely oblivious to the obvious fact that he is merely flipping the “political wedge issue” to the other side of the same card.  And he’s able to get away with this baloney because the media – which shares both his ideological goals and his partisan tactics – is phrasing the political debate in the same exact terms.

With this, let me pick up with Taffy’s comment, in which she continues:

They are so busy thinking they are right that no opposing information can be digested.  I think this may be because, in truth, their position is built on a faulty house of cards, and deep down they know it. If they have to acknowledge that even ONE card may have another side to it, their house of cards will start to wobble.  Once that sucker is wobbling, they might have no choice but to see that ALL the cards have flip sides, at which point their whole world would come crashing down around them.  So, liberals spend a lot of energy keeping their house of cards intact, looking only at one side of every card, which of course is the right side, and insisting either that there is nothing on the flip sides of their cards or that if there is something on the flip side of any card that side is wrong. And, not to put to fine a point on it, belittling someone else’s perspective, acts, behavior and beliefs is just one of their favorite techniques for minimizing the crumbling of their house of cards. It’s a sad way for them to live, and it’s even sadder for those of us who choose not to live that way when we get caught in the fallout of their folly.

We are seeing a frightening convergence of “lock-step liberalism” between the Democratic Party – now in total control of government in the most critical time in our nation’s history – and the mainstream media which has rapidly become the propaganda wing of the Democratic Party.  Some have used the term “media-industrial complex” (i.e., “military-industrial” complex).  I prefer to call it “the media-DNC complex.”  In their mutual commitment to the liberal secular humanist worldview as the only view that should be considered or treated as ‘rational,’ the two entities are becoming a complex which feed one another, draw upon one another for strength, and protect one another.

Already, we are seeing what amounts to a Democrat-controlled show-trial-like “truth commission” to investigate the Bush Administration and essentially criminalize political differences.  We have House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi changing rules that have been in place for a 100 years in order to streamline hyperpartisan politics.  And meanwhile – as Nancy Pelosi contemplates re-imposing the Fairness Doctrine that would shut conservatives out of the media altogether – we have the beginings of a process that may well transform our market-based economy to a government-based economy, with literally trillions of dollars of government money that is already clearly flowing into political special interests.

Meanwhile, Obama is “too big to fail.”  He has been shaped into a glowing figure who strides above us, who leaves those who have encountered him basking in the shekinah glory.  Chris Matthews of MSNBC has literally put the phenomenon of Obama on epic biblical terms, telling the NY Observer that “I’ve been following politics since I was about 5.  I’ve never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy.  [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament. This is surprising.”  When the media is literally talking about their new President in terms of worship, you have a crisis of journalism.

I would argue that we have seen the death of journalism, and the rebirth of 1930s-style propaganda.

I see this nation sliding – or “tilting” if you will – right off a cliff with no one willing or able to warn us of the impending disaster because they will all be on the same page and all dissension will have been purged from the lock-stepping ranks of those who should have warned us but would not.