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Tag Archives: Mainstream Media

Liz Cheney’s Brief Moment of Fame

13 Thursday May 2021

Posted by Jim Langcuster in Uncategorized

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impeachment, liberals, Liz Cheney, Mainstream Media, Trump

Congresswoman Liz Cheney

Two things are worth pointing out about the imminent passing of the Liz Cheney media phenomenon.  First, she is the type of elite that our Founders, namely, Jefferson, warned us about: The sort of person who, once ensconced in the capital city court culture, acquires most or all of the affectations and vices of the very  governing elites he or she previously had sworn to oppose.

This has always been a temptation for newcomers to Washington, even those who start out as brash conservative or populist firebrands. Indeed, two of the most reviled anti-Establishmebr figures in American nation politics, Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, both yielded to these temptations. And why wouldn’t they?After years of assiduously seeking and holding onto power in the capital of the most powerful and influential nation on earth, men and women expect a return on such a long investment and, even more, r-e-s-p-e-c-t from their peers.

They have rubbed elbows with colleagues, mostly liberals, who are lionized after retirement or death, by the court (i.e., Mainstream) media. How can they help but envy that? They’re politicians, after all.

Many conservatives from former presidents to sitting Supreme Court justices have yearned for some measure of hagiographic treatment – an acknowledgement within elite quarters that they have “grown in office” and, in the course of which, acquired a measure of the intellectual depth and gravitas afforded their more (in the opinion of elite media) deserving liberal counterparts.

Recall that the late Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee and the graduate of night law school, embraced affirmation action dogma, apparently with the intention of brandishing his intellectual bona fide.

But again, they’re only human.

Yet, in many cases, this grudging respect or tempered adulation, however it is expressed, is invariably extracted at a price. And in Cheney’s case, she can virtually rest assured that the media will consume and digest her, disregarding every bit that can’t be extracted to their advantage.

She will be briefly hailed as a thoughtful and courageous GOP maverick, perhaps invited as a speaker at the 2024 Democratic Party Convention, and then tossed aside and forgotten until, some 30 years from now, when she’s afforded a limousine ride from her assisted living facility to the Kennedy Presidential Library to receive a “Profiles in Courage” Award presented by some distant Kennedy descendant.

Of course, that is what our elite class and their media enables do: They enlist and rehabilitate for temporary political expediency conservative political leaders whom they have previously reviled as reactionary, if not racist.

The Silence is Deafening

20 Saturday Mar 2021

Posted by Jim Langcuster in Censorship, Imperial Decline, The Passing Scene, U.S. Politics, Uncategorized

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Biden, Biden's Dementia, Jim Langcuster, Late America, Mainstream Media

Biden’s Conspicuous Fall

Mainstream media’s conspicuous silence in the aftermath of Biden’s very conspicuous fall on the steps leading to Air Force One is one of the many reasons reason why I will NEVER be lectured ever again by any liberal about anything.

If you’re old enough, you recall the unrelenting fun that SNL made of Republican President Gerald Ford’s repeated stumbles.

More recently, #AmericaPravda spared no effort to analyze anything and everything associated with Trump’s presumed physical and mental decline. But that is not surprising because Mainstream Media are Establishment media. They have been in service to a narrative since at least the FDR presidency and arguably earlier.

Whatever the case, American liberalism is nothing but a sick self-parody now days, evidence of this empire’s precipitous decline on all fronts, which is significantly of liberalism’s making. #LateAmerika #BrezhnevRedux

Of Electoral College Coups and Popular Uprisings

19 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in American Federalism, Mainstream Media, U.S. Politics, Uncategorized

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Donald Trump, Electoral College, Jim Langcuster, Mainstream Media, Political Uprising, Ukrainian Revolution, West Coast

ukrainian-uprising-2014

2014 Ukrainian Revolution. Reference Photo Credit 

There are a few things associated with this media-driven Electoral College spectacle that really intrigue me.

First, the electors who vote today in their respective states  have been verbally harassed and, in some cases, even threatened with bodily harm.

Imagine if electoral fortunes were reversed and Hillary had won under identical circumstances – an Electoral College victory but a popular vote deficit.  Likewise, imagine that red state Americans were engaging in the same sort of angry behavior, bombarding electors with harassing e-mails and even threatening physical harm. The Obama Administration, characterizing all this outlandish behavior as a full-blown crisis, would have fully mobilized all of the resources of the Justice Department.

Within this electoral reality, however, the President has  focused solely on the specter of Russian interference in the presidential election, which remains more speculation than hard fact, while entirely ignoring what, in constitutional terms, should be his first priority: to ensure a safe environment for the 538 individuals charged with undertaking one of this country’s most critical constitutional tasks.

Second, who among thoughtful conservatives isn’t amused by the newfound affinity of Hollywood for the Founding Fathers and the hallowed institution of the Electoral College.

Ponder this irony for a moment: The Electoral College was conceived roughly a quarter millennium ago by these reactionary white-privileged WASPS to thwart the unbridled democratic impulses – the very impulses to which the vast majority of glitterati have paid such perfervid lip service for generations, certainly since the advent of FDR’s New Deal.

Talk about elite political discourse turning on a dime!

Third, I’m shocked that mainstream media are actually indulging talk of incipient revolution – a popular uprising that could topple Trump, much the same way that Ukrainians deposed ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.

Red state Americans raised similar concerns about what could follow a Hillary Clinton presidency throughout the election cycle, and many of their arguments were valid. Clinton Foundation shenanigans, the underhanded dealings of the Democratic National Committee to throw the nomination in favor of Hillary, and the Obama Administration’s politicization of the Justice Department and intelligence gathering apparatus really pointed to a regime resembling far more a Latin American banana republic than the historic Anglo-American republic bound by an ironclad commitment to the rule of law.

Yet, imagine the outrage within the mainstream media that would follow if the the specter of an popular insurgency were raised by right-leaning news sources and opinionators in the aftermath of a Hillary victory.  And to add an extra layer of irony to all of this: These are the same people who are devoting serious discussion to the topic secession, now that West Coast progressives have evinced an interest in the topic.

Fourth and finally, I am no less intrigued by the lengths to which the New York Times and other elite media have underscored the smallness of the Trump win.  Quite conveniently, as as the Electoral College meets today in state capitals throughout the country,  the New York Times posted an article with considerable graphic enhancement illustrating that Trump’s electoral victory ranks 46th among 58 presidential elections.  The Times stresses that among presidential victors Trump edges out only the rock-bottomed ranked Rutherford B. Hayes and John Quincy Adams in his popular vote share.

Yet, there is really nothing small at all about this election outcome when one considers it within the wider context of American  political history.  The biggest political maverick among all presidential contenders, minimized, scorned and denigrated by elites as the mouthpiece of the most socially and culturally marginalized segment of the electorate – Flyover Americans – overcame a series of what were considered at the time mortal blows to win what will likely be recalled by historians as the biggest political upset in American history.

In that respect, Trump’s victory was not a small one, not by a long shot.

The only other presidential maverick/victor who comes anywhere close to this electoral upset is Andrew Jackson.  And almost two centuries since Jackson’s victory, we still recall how he completely re-sifted the American political and cultural landscape.

Donald Trump presents an immediate, perhaps even mortal, threat to the interests of the American ruling class.  And I believe it’s this existential threat that accounts for all this talk within Establishment media of Electoral College coups and popular uprisings.

A Warning that Should Be Heeded

06 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in Mainstream Media, U.S. Politics

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', Business Insider, Culture Wars, Mainstream Media, Media Bias, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Tucker Carlson

tucker-carlson

Tucker Carlson, Host of Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight”

A couple of very thoughtful friends have chided me occasionally because I have had the temerity to post partisan pieces to social media. But despite my professional communications background, I do regard much of mainstream media with profound ambivalence. My personal view is superbly expressed by libertarian-conservative Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson in a recent Business Insider interview.

As I see it, there arguably is very little news that should be regarded as nonpartisan and unbiased. Borrowing from techie parlance, this is because the filters of even so-called elite news entities are as badly contaminated as others.

I, for one, subscribe to the digital editions of The New York Times and Washington Post and read those papers faithfully.  I’ll even concede that I find much of this reading deeply enlightening and informative.  But I take much of it with a grain of salt  and balance it with other sources regarded as partisan, most of which I garner from RealClearPolitics.com, an excellent source of political news.

As I see it, this sort of eclectic reading is required of all of us in a digital media age that more closely resembles the freewheeling reportage in the Age of Andrew Jackson than the slow, methodical, even plodding reporting associated with the age of Walter Cronkite.

Why?  Because I think that Carlson and other media observers make the strong case that so-called mainstream media are largely unreliable because they reflect the opinions of elites who operate with their own badly damaged filters.  They believe nothing “unless it comes from The New Yorker, [The] New York Times editorial page, or The Washington Post.” And to add an extra layer of complication to all of this, many of our elites operate with a profound contempt for many for many of us, namely the ones who occupy the deep-dyed red American heartland.

Yes, plenty of red state Americans despise the Establishment, but this animus is more than compensated by the contempt in which our elites hold us, as Carlson stresses in this interview.

Quoting Carlson: “What bothers me is the lack of self-awareness. I don’t know if I have ever met a group less self-aware than political reporters. They honestly don’t believe that there are legitimate alternative views of anything. And like most small-minded and dumb people they are very, very quick to dismiss anything they don’t understand as crazy.”

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