Tea Party Triumphs, Mainstream Media Desperately Tries to Ignore It, and This Doesn't Work!
Clarice Feldman, in "Tea Party Unbound" (American Thinker, August 5th 2012), observes
For several years now it seems to me that voters throughout the country in a perfectly peacable way have demonstrated their revulsion at the ruling class's political, academic and media elites, and the media's disparagement or utter refusal to cover this civil revolution has not succeeded in killing it. Instead, as more people join in and see how the media distorts or refuses to report what they see with their own eyes, the sooner all of the major media will be joining Newsweek and CNN and the NYT and the Washington Post in their death throes.
Ms. Feldman makes two major points here, both of which are true and need repeating.
The first is that the Tea Party represents a genuine revolt of the ordinary workers and owners against the political, academic and media elites. It's not some sort of "astroturf," and the accusation of astroturfing has backfired against the MSM because too many non-Tea Partiers know Tea Partiers. The MSM should have thought twice before they tried to smear in such fashion a genuinely widespread group. However, the MSM may not even realize that the Tea Partiers are a genuinely widespread group, they may believe their own lies.
The second is that the Main-Stream Media is exhausting its own credibility on this issue. The MSM seems to imagine that the people will automatically believe whatever the MSM chooses to say about any topic, and ignore it if the MSM chooses to ignore it, but the truth is that people only pay attention to the opinions of sources they consider credible. Each time the MSM lies and is caught lying and fails to take being caught in a lie seriously, people trust the MSM less. And now, with so many alternate information sources, the MSM has lost its oligopoly on information.
She then describes in some detail how the Tea Parties organized in response to Obama's first year as President, how the MSM attempted to ignore or, failing that, demonized them (which worked all too well, alas, on the weak mind of my former friend Vincent Westerband), and how despite the media campaign, the Tea Parties went on to help the Republicans win the 2010 midterm elections. The MSM shot their bolt, and missed the mark.
She then summarizes the implications of this development
For some time now the cultural elite have played mind games with people. By declaring views contrary to theirs to be "hate speech" with the full complicity of academic leaders and media style setters, they have precluded debate on things important to voters. Your thoughts are simply made unspeakable in public.
What the MSM miss -- maybe because they have absorbed the self-flattering notion that style matters more than substance (self-flattering because it makes them the Secret Masters of the World in their own minds) -- is that they don't get to set the rules of logic. Most people have enough common sense that when they hear an answer such as "that's hate speech!" to a question, they are very much aware that the responder didn't really answer the question. And as the MSM's credibility continues to drop, their power to shape and frame the debate erodes.
Some people think that this is all because of the "new technologies."
I disagree. I think that with or without the "new technologies," other media formats would have led the revolution against the MSM. Rival newspapers, magazines, maybe even xeroxed newsletters. I say this because I remember the first such revolution, the Reagan Revolution of the 1980's, and we did that with niche political talk shows and talk radio and print magazines.
Not so incidentally, it was probably the success of the Reagan Revolution that convinced the MSM that they needed to crack down, that they'd been "too tolerant" by merely slanting the news against the Republicans in the 1980's. In part their current intolerance reflects a determination to never ever again give a charismatic conservative the chance to be heard.
The problem for them is that to do this they had to be so unreasonable -- slant their coverage so far, that their dishonesty became all too apparent. The mask is off, and they have lost the trust of the American people.
The Tea Parties are stronger than before, and the people are listening to the MSM less than before. Come 2012, let's hope that Obama and the Democrats suffer the consequences, and that America is freed to go on to a glorious future.
For several years now it seems to me that voters throughout the country in a perfectly peacable way have demonstrated their revulsion at the ruling class's political, academic and media elites, and the media's disparagement or utter refusal to cover this civil revolution has not succeeded in killing it. Instead, as more people join in and see how the media distorts or refuses to report what they see with their own eyes, the sooner all of the major media will be joining Newsweek and CNN and the NYT and the Washington Post in their death throes.
Ms. Feldman makes two major points here, both of which are true and need repeating.
The first is that the Tea Party represents a genuine revolt of the ordinary workers and owners against the political, academic and media elites. It's not some sort of "astroturf," and the accusation of astroturfing has backfired against the MSM because too many non-Tea Partiers know Tea Partiers. The MSM should have thought twice before they tried to smear in such fashion a genuinely widespread group. However, the MSM may not even realize that the Tea Partiers are a genuinely widespread group, they may believe their own lies.
The second is that the Main-Stream Media is exhausting its own credibility on this issue. The MSM seems to imagine that the people will automatically believe whatever the MSM chooses to say about any topic, and ignore it if the MSM chooses to ignore it, but the truth is that people only pay attention to the opinions of sources they consider credible. Each time the MSM lies and is caught lying and fails to take being caught in a lie seriously, people trust the MSM less. And now, with so many alternate information sources, the MSM has lost its oligopoly on information.
She then describes in some detail how the Tea Parties organized in response to Obama's first year as President, how the MSM attempted to ignore or, failing that, demonized them (which worked all too well, alas, on the weak mind of my former friend Vincent Westerband), and how despite the media campaign, the Tea Parties went on to help the Republicans win the 2010 midterm elections. The MSM shot their bolt, and missed the mark.
She then summarizes the implications of this development
For some time now the cultural elite have played mind games with people. By declaring views contrary to theirs to be "hate speech" with the full complicity of academic leaders and media style setters, they have precluded debate on things important to voters. Your thoughts are simply made unspeakable in public.
What the MSM miss -- maybe because they have absorbed the self-flattering notion that style matters more than substance (self-flattering because it makes them the Secret Masters of the World in their own minds) -- is that they don't get to set the rules of logic. Most people have enough common sense that when they hear an answer such as "that's hate speech!" to a question, they are very much aware that the responder didn't really answer the question. And as the MSM's credibility continues to drop, their power to shape and frame the debate erodes.
Some people think that this is all because of the "new technologies."
I disagree. I think that with or without the "new technologies," other media formats would have led the revolution against the MSM. Rival newspapers, magazines, maybe even xeroxed newsletters. I say this because I remember the first such revolution, the Reagan Revolution of the 1980's, and we did that with niche political talk shows and talk radio and print magazines.
Not so incidentally, it was probably the success of the Reagan Revolution that convinced the MSM that they needed to crack down, that they'd been "too tolerant" by merely slanting the news against the Republicans in the 1980's. In part their current intolerance reflects a determination to never ever again give a charismatic conservative the chance to be heard.
The problem for them is that to do this they had to be so unreasonable -- slant their coverage so far, that their dishonesty became all too apparent. The mask is off, and they have lost the trust of the American people.
The Tea Parties are stronger than before, and the people are listening to the MSM less than before. Come 2012, let's hope that Obama and the Democrats suffer the consequences, and that America is freed to go on to a glorious future.