Monday, December 09, 2024

Today's News: What is wrong with our media, part umpteenth


You know how it feels when someone puts into words something you felt but couldn't describe? 
Well, here's an article from George Washington University professor Dave Karpf that describes exactly why the media have such problems covering political leadership. 
(And yes, Karpf is that guy who broke the internet back in 2019 when he made the joke 
Anyway, here is his latest insight:

Dave Karpf / The Future, Now and Then
Uncouth.
On Hunter Biden, and the unspoken value system that our media and political elites seek to defend
...Our political and media elites have made it clear through their actions that they value the appearance of order and propriety over anything else.
Donald Trump was elected President. Ergo he is legitimate, and must be afforded the same polite treatment offered to any other President-elect. Wipe the slate clean, so as to not sully the office he is set to occupy. We must all hope against hope that he behaves himself better his time around. And, if he does not, then it is our duty to cluck our tongues and register respectful, muted disapproval.
.... Now that he is, once again, the President-elect, our media and political elites are reverting to their core social behaviors. Joe Biden is taking polite photo-ops with the President-elect, and promising to attend his inauguration. Democratic governors are promising to seek common ground and find bipartisan consensus with the administration.
It isn’t that they did not mean it when they called Donald Trump a fascist and a threat to Democracy. They meant it. But they lost anyway. And now the social order is imperiled, and they are reverting to form, doing all they know how to do to shore up trust and faith in the system, in the hopes that it will all turn out alright.
All these behaviors, like the tut-tutting over the Hunter Biden pardon, are contrivances.
Donald Trump attempted to overthrow the government when he lost the 2020 election. He was never held accountable for it, because holding him accountable would have been uncouth. And now he has legitimately won re-election. So it would be uncouth to dwell on those past actions.
This farce will continue, indefinitely, until the system utterly collapses.
Hunter Biden’s pardon is front page news — not because anyone cares about Hunter Biden at all, but because it is the type of Presidential misbehavior that our elite media knows how to object to.
Kash Patel’s intent to turn the FBI against his “enemies list” is a lesser news story, right up until the moment he throws those enemies in prison. Because we wouldn’t want to undermine public trust in the FBI, would we? That, too, would be uncouth.
There is, ultimately, a simple reason why most of our journalistic and political elites will fail to offer meaningful opposition to the incoming Trump regime.
Doing so would be improper. And their unspoken-but-genuine value system, all along, has been to defend propriety and the social order.
So they’ll bicker over Hunter Biden, and then they’ll bicker over the next thing, and it will all be contrivances and pleasantries, while the regime installs itself.
I wish it were not so. I wish for a great many things.
But if we are going to maintain democracy, it will require a type of counter-pressure that does not place social stability and propriety above all other values.
We shouldn’t look to our media or political elites to offer that resistance. They have self-selected to never provide it.
Yes indeed. 
And we've seen this same kind of subservience to political leaders in our own Ottawa Press Gallery too, the willingness to just shut up and retire in confusion when a politician refuses to answer a question. It has taken months and months of Chantal Herbert talking about how Poilievre lies all the time, and Andrew Coyne describing Poilievre's unfitness for office, before other reporters sometimes are willing to challenge his three-word slogans and report on his weak responses to important events.
Even CBC is finally getting into the act:
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