America No Longer Has a Critical Media

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Hannah Arendt, one of the foremost scholars of totalitarianism, explained that “a totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality.” In today’s “woke” America, media elites determine what is and isn’t appropriate. The system suffers no dissent from within, its practitioners policing the boundaries of acceptable – that is, left-wing – opinion. Other views are deemed “controversial,” a euphemism warning readers that these are wrong.

The press that existed in America from the end of the 19th century until the turn of this one was designed to inform. But it is now more like Pravda in the old Soviet Union.

Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion, contends that the American mainstream media “has dropped any pretense of professional objectivity” and are “partisan political actors who try to shape what they’re reporting to achieve a political purpose.”

Over the past four years, they have shared a single overriding preoccupation: consolidating an social consensus that justifies itself by the claim that Donald Trump’s presidency is an existential threat that makes every action by the White House a national emergency.

The media both demonstrates and justifies its role in opposing this extraordinary threat by hyping one supposed crisis of American democracy after another, be it the advent of fascism, Russian control over Trump, the danger from white nationalists, and so forth.

In an article published in the Columbia Journalism Review Sept. 8, Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Columbia University, observed that the quantity of coverage devoted by the print media to Donald Trump is without historical precedent.

The New York Times, for instance, has increasingly embraced advocacy journalism. Its new reporting eschews balance and objectivity in favour of a more revolutionary narrative.

In 2018, “Trump” was the fourth-most-used word in the New York Times. On average, Trump was directly mentioned two to three times in every article, writes writes al-Gharbi, and indirectly mentioned an additional once or twice. “Trump has ceased to be just a topic of news, he seems to be the prism through which we interpret and discuss everything.”

A new tool from Stanford University’s Computer Graphics Lab revealed that cable news has undergone a similar transformation. In other words, he concluded, “news media have basically been running with 2016 campaign-level attention on Trump for four years straight now.”

Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, owns the Washington Post, which has always been a liberal newspaper. But, writes Michael Anton, a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College, it was never “so shamelessly dishonest.”

Lee Smith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, concurs, noting that each day brings a new story “trumpeting a new mortal threat to the republic or some dastardly revelation based on sources that are usually anonymous.”

On the other hand, the disinterest evinced by this media complex toward the violence and destruction carried out over the past few months is a striking case of the collectivized decision-making process that now governs them. For details of the chaos one needs to read local newspapers.

That’s because the media establishment is increasingly driven by narrative constructions based on theories of identity and power. For these journalists, the “dangerous majoritarian mob lurking in the middle of the country plotting to oppress vulnerable minorities” must be countered, asserts Jacob Siegel, a senior writer at the Tablet magazine website.

The proper aim of politics, therefore, is to wield the power of elite institutions to enforce “correct” thinking. Hence dissenters are regularly vilified as racists and reactionaries.

These ritual denunciations help enforce cohesion among journalists and within the larger educated professional class. They provide an deterrent for anyone tempted to notice the gap that separates elite moral crusades from the priorities of ordinary Americans.

“I think over the past few years, there’s been a kind of new groupthink developed on a number of topics among institutional progressives and a lot of people who are involved have the same zealousness as the convert to a new religion,” according to Zaid Jilani, a journalist who considers himself left-wing but refuses to follow the “party line” on every issue.

Much American journalism has abandoned the traditional standards and practices that once defined reporting. What’s left is a media largely controlled by “woke” progressives.