Tag Archives: The Washington Post

No More Lecturing about Blacklisting

11 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in American History, Mainstream Media, Uncategorized

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joseph-mccarthy
Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy

The Daily Beast’s title pretty much summarizes the situation: The Washington Post has placed itself, however unwittingly, on a fake news hot seat.  And it may emerge from this debacle not only with a badly reddened backside but also with a deeply tarnished reputation.

By now, most informed Americans know the drill: A Post article published over the Thanksgiving holidays maintains that deft Russian propagandists have actively colluded with or deluded certain news U.S. news sources to disseminate fake news and with the goal of destabilizing American democracy and, in the course of which, undermining Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and electing Donald Trump.

Several of the news sites targeted by the article are enraged and threatening legal action.

The focus of the outrage stems from the Post’s use of a highly specious and secretive source, PropOrNot, whose media blacklist was posted online only a few days after the group launched its Twitter feed, according to The Daily Beast.

From my prospective, what has transpired almost exceeds the bounds of belief. As a late Baby Boomer, I was brought up within an educational environment in which the whole premise of blacklisting was roundly condemned and characterized as one of the more odious penchants of the American Right.

Now, of all people, The Washington Post, which built a journalistic legacy reporting on and condemning McCarthyist blacklists and Nixonian enemies lists, appears to have employed slipshod journalism – if this even qualifies as conventional journalism – to construct a blacklist of its own.

In the aftermath of all of this, I’ll say this to my liberal friends and acquaintances and left-wing posters to this site: Please don’t lecture me anymore about the authoritarian proclivities of the right unless you are willing to concede an inconvenient truth, namely that the left-leaning Establishment appears to harbor a few authoritarian aspirations of its own.

A Warning that Should Be Heeded

06 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by in Mainstream Media, U.S. Politics

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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.”