Dear Jen/National Post,
You accuse Trump of being a “callow 14-year-old girl trapped in the body of a 70-year-old man” when he tweeted “Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me “old,” when I would NEVER call him “short and fat?” I laughed out loud when I heard in on the news because it was a rather clever way of skewering the preposterous North Korean leader. And I’m a 70+ woman who reads the National Post, Calgary Herald and many news magazines (paper & digital, national & international) and watches one TV newscast a day to stay current with what’s happening at home, next door in the US, and around the world.
But I have given up on the mainstream media because its left-liberal bias has become too blatant and pervasive to bear. The Post is the exception—its reporters still don’t ask the obvious questions, such as “How did you get here?” to the radical environmental protesters at every building site—but its columnists are a breath of fresh air compared to those at the Globe and Mail, New York Times, Washington Post, etc., etc. (I won’t even mention the Toronto Star, which may as well be a Liberal inhouse rag.) The most maddening of all is the CBC because my tax dollars help pay for its socialist propaganda.
So to stay sane and informed, I’ve been forced to seek out other sources of what was happening in governments and bureaucracies at all levels. Your statement that “there is little question that the country (Russia) certainly tried” to elect Trump is a mainstream truism that isn’t. Russia certainly tried to influence the American election but to what purpose is very much in question. Contrary to the mainstream media’s leftie take, Putin was confident he could handle Clinton; not so much
Trump. As for subjecting Clinton to demonizing ads during the campaign, Trump has been demonized in every way, shape and form every day in every leading mainstream media organ from Day 1 of his campaign to be the Republican presidential candidate. In fact, the mainstream media is so obsessed with Trump that it’s amusing, much more amusing than many of their frantic attempts at making fun of him—and he is a particularly easy target. So be it. But I am still waiting for a two-sided investigation by the mainstream media into Clinton’s handling of the Benghazi terrorist attack and her illegal use of private email for State business and her involvement in the Uranium One sale to Russia and her paying for the Fusion GPS’s “Russia dossier” to smear Trump during the presidential campaign and Comey’s refusal to investigate Clinton’s involvement in any of this.
And I do not get my information from social media, so much NOT so that my younger friends and colleagues chide me for being a dinosaur. A dinosaur perhaps, but certainly a conservative—and therein lies the problem. So I will counter your conclusion that “The greatest weaknesses in Western democracies is us” with “The greatest weakness in Western democracies is a heavily left-leaning media and culture that shut down—and out, if possible—opinions that differ from what they consider correct.” Among conservatives, on the contrary, we will disagree, forcefully even, but will not shut down the conversation.
So no, Ms. Gerson. One of our greatest weaknesses is the mainstream media’s overwhelmingly left bias.
Yours sincerely,
Bevelyn MacLise Park
(Naturally, I was disappointed, but not surprised, that my letter wasn’t published, but I was disappointed, and surprised, that Ms. Gerson did not respond. Not even with a “Thank you for your letter.” Newspapers and magazines are dying all over for lack of readership, and she doesn’t have the courtesy to appreciate those few of us who still subscribe.)
Fake news
Matthew Continetti wrote in “Fake News and the Victorian Gentleman”, Commentary, December 14, 2016, “The press, Tom Wolfe wrote, is a Victorian gentleman, the arbiter of manners and fashion, the judge of right conduct and good breeding. Donald Trump has upended this position. The media went from telling readers what had happened to telling them what to think. Now so many people have the means to disagree and challenge the media, which is profoundly disturbing to their sense of authority and self-worth.”
When Trump labeled much of the mainstream media’s coverage ‘fake news’, they and their fellow progressives went berserk. So instead of presenting counter arguments—and reporting the story rather than slanting it with commentary—their aim became to ‘resist’ Trump. They would do whatever they could to overturn the duly elected POTUS and replace him with one of their own. A year has gone by and Trump’s still the president and they are still plotting his demise.
As evidenced in the mainstream media’s distorted reporting of the protests in Iran. Thomas Erdbrink, Tehran bureau chief of the New York Times, downplays the evidence of Iranians of all stripes and sectors of the economy rebelling against the tyranny of the mullahs and the Islamic
Revolutionary Guards’ brutal enforcement of that tyranny.
Obamans, that is, the mainstream media, are defensive about the pusillanimity of the Iranian nuclear deal and the protests repudiating everything Obama said would happen as a result of the deal. Also, these protests, once again, repudiate appeasement, which the Iran deal was. Progressives will do anything to protect Obama’s legacy, even if it means throwing Iranians under the bus.
The mainstream media’s ‘reporting’ of the Iranian protests echoes Walter Duranty’s of the USSR in the 1930s. As Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times (familiar, eh?), he wrote a series of reports praising Stalin and his government for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize—coverage that is now universally condemned for its lies, omissions and sympathetic portrayal of Stalin’s brutality.
Trump’s support of the Iranian protests and the revelation the $100 billion the US gave to Iran as part of the deal is being used to shore up the mullahs’ and military’s power, not to benefit the people as was its claimed purpose, have sent the mainstream media into a tailspin of frothing indignation.
So much for caring for the middle class, as our prime minister and progressives repeat ad nauseam. Fake news, indeed!
Reporting ≠ Commenting
Conrad Black wrote in “Media and its message”, National Post, August 18, 2017, “The tenor of the heavy comment I receive from Canadian readers indicates that there are large numbers of Canadians who are alarmed by the failure of almost any media outlet in the country to separate reporting from comment, and are offended by the sanctimonious do-right, feel-good, uniformity of perspective.”
This severe left turn by so much of the mainstream media has led me to cancel magazine after magazine after a lifetime of subscribing to a wide variety of news, analysis and commentary publications: The New Yorker, The New Republic, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Walrus, even The Economist started to swim with the progressivist current so that, too, had to go. As soon as one ventures outside that band of leftist brothers and sisters, that current becomes so clear and strong one concurs with Mary McCarthy’s judgement of Lillian Hellman, “Everything she (they) wrote is a lie, including ‘the’ and ‘is’.” Even though magazine subscriptions are expensive, good writing deserves to be paid for, and I willingly do so. But I refuse to pay for leftist propaganda.
There are some alternatives, which I wrote about in a previous blog, and again I urge you to subscribe to The Dorchester Review for a Canadian perspective, Commentary for an American perspective and The Spectator for a British perspective, to name three publications that dare to write against the current.
Atheist saviors
And then there’s Alec Baldwin’s resurrection of his fading career by his caricature of Trump on SNL, wildly funny to all the progressives who tune in to a show that gets less and less funny week by week.
Naturally, The Atlantic (May 2017) did a full-blown profile, “Can Satire Save the Republic?”, extolling his courage to portray Trump in the protected environment of the left-liberal haven of SNL. Really? The American Republic is not about to crash and burn, but it sure sounds like this is something devoutly to be wished by the progressives.
Baldwin’s portrayal of Trump as an uncivilized boor comes from a man who called his 11-year-old daughter Ireland “a thoughtless, little pig” during his custody battle with ex-wife Kim Basinger. His phone message was, “You don’t have the brains or decency as a human being…I don’t give a damn that you’re 12 years old or 11 years old or that you’re a child or that your mother is a thoughtless pain in the ass.” Which led to an LA court order to Baldwin to stay away from his daughter. Actually, the resemblances between Baldwin and Trump are quite striking: a celebrity acting like an idiot; and an old man married to a young, beautiful wife—Trump (1946)/Melania (1970) and Alec (1959)/Hilaria (1984).
Failure to communicate
“What we have here is a failure to communicate,” Luke (Paul Newman) says to the lawmen surrounding his last redoubt just before they fatally shoot him in Cool Hand Luke. I only hope the mainstream media doesn’t suffer the same fate, this time self-inflicted. I sincerely hope they recover their will to report the news, being as objective as humanly possible, and then include commentary and analysis from as many viewpoints as possible. Otherwise, they will continue to die one by one from lack of paying readers and viewers, and the Western world will be poorer for it. We will be left with the cacophony of the internet—Sad! as their favourite target would say.