Friday, September 14, 2012

The Problem of the Knee-Pad Media

You tell it like it is, baby!  Or, as the saying goes: You go girl!  Yesterday a concerned citizen in Virginia had something to say to the media assembled at a Romney event:
I think you’ve been suck ups…I think you've got your embroidered knee pads from the White House, buddy. That’s what I think.
Welcome to the Age of the Knee-Pad Media, Jan Crawford of CBS News, Patron and Founder!

No, that wouldn't be fair to Jan who, according to some chap at the American Spectator, is a fair-minded journalist.

Look, we all know that the mainstream media runs interference for the Democratic Party, and liberals generally.  Hey, that's life, and that's why Republican presidential candidates like Ronald Reagan can appear out of nowhere in the polls and win.  Because for a brief interlude every four years, paid media can push back against the relentlessly liberal free media and win.

But there's a Bigger Problem here.  When the mainstream media and the educated elite gang up to produce a single, vetted view of reality, it means that the whole place could be going to hell in a handbasket and nobody would know, because nobody in the knee-pad media was writing stories about hell and handbaskets.

My favorite poster-boy issue for this is the collapse of marriage in the lowest 30 percent.  Back in 1960, 66 percent of the white lowest 30 percent aged 30-49 was married.  Now it's 48  percent.  What about the top 20 percent, the educated class?  Marriage down from 90 percent to 83 percent.  This problem manifests itself in a retreat from work and marriage among lower-class males.  What do liberals do?  They write about how well women are doing like Hanna Rosin and her End of Man: The Rise of Women.  Don't you get, Ms. Rosin, that the whole point of modern society is to put the men to work so that they will stay out of trouble.  The word "career" is a clue to the cunning plan, because it comes from the French for racetrack.  Make the men run around a racetrack instead of raping and pillaging, and selling women and children into slavery.  Get it?  Yet you brilliant liberals are all pushing women into the working, career world, while men wither on the vine.  You just don't get it.

The fact is that the liberal welfare state is collapsing.  That is the truth behind the Crash of 2008 and the death-throes of the Euro.  There. Is. No. More. Money.  The Crash of 2008 was caused by egregious subsidies for mortgage debt combined with government penalties for lenders that didn't lend to sub-prime borrowers.  But liberals are still wittering about greedy bankers.  Don't you read history, liberals? Governments always blame the bankers when their finances go south.  They punish the bankers then go right back to borrowing from them.

Government education?  A disaster area from government K-12, especially in the inner city, thru the college education bubble where gullible students are picking up $100,000 in debt for a degree in Communications just so that Democrat-voting professors and administrators can stay in the pink.

Government healthcare?  Obama's brilliant ObamaCare has provoked business to go on a hiring freeze, because nobody knows what it will all cost.  Anyway, health care doesn't really make that much difference.  It's the basic stuff, from public health to asepsis to vaccination to antibiotics, that makes the difference.

Government pensions?  They have got all the states bankrupt, and worse to come.

Here we have a gathering storm of incalculable risks, and the mainstream media is focused upon Republican extremism and gay marriage.

Back in the day, lefty Antonio Gramsci fulminated about the injustice of the bourgeois "cultural hegemony."  He meant that the bourgeoisie got to define "common sense", what Juergen Habermas called the taken-for-granted culture, the reality that everyone agrees upon.  So he set in motion a lefty attempt at creating its own cultural hegemony, where liberals and lefties would define commonsense reality instead of the bourgeoisie.

The problem is that the bourgeoisie had never set up a Committee of the Whole Bourgeoisie to define cultural reality.  The common-sense reality that developed in the 19th century just growed.  When people like Marx and Engels insisted that reality was not what the bourgeoisie said it was, they had a chance to change hearts and minds.  And they did.

But in today's culture, with the left self-consciously trying to control the culture, we are in a situation where the cultural elite is consciously trying to prevent alternative voices from getting a word in.  Liberals are deliberately removing the canary from the mine, tying down the safety valve.  That is what the whole paraphernalia of multiculturalism and "hate speech" is for.  Suppose things are badly wrong. Suppose that we need to change our government radically before the US enters sovereign default and all the little people find themselves "eating the paint off the wall?"  How would anyone know before we drive off the cliff?

Look.  Yesterday the Federal Reserve Board announced that it would be buying $40 billion in mortgage backed bonds every month until the economy improves.  It is basically saying that the Obama economic policy has failed and that now, after 3 years of recovery, the government needs to goose the economy.  Is the knee-pad media writing about that?  Oh no, they are criticizing Mitt Romney for daring to criticize the brain-dead Obama foreign policy.  As the Wall Street Journal says today:
Mr. Bernanke is also tacitly admitting how lousy the Obama-Bernanke economy really is.  For all the back-slapping by the Fed and the White House about how they've saved us from a Great Depression, four years later the Fed is aknowledging that the \recovery is rotten, that job creation stinks, and that their policies haven't helped the middle class.
 "A bold plan" says the knee-pad New York Times.

If the mainstream media were doing its job, President Obama would be down 10 percent in the polls.  Instead we are still getting knee-pad reporting about how intelligent and wonderful the president is, this about a president, the nation's commander-in-chief, who attends about 50 percent of his daily intelligence briefings, and didn't attend one in the week leading up to the eleventh anniversary of 9/11.

1 comment:

  1. Your are right about what is happening to marriage and to young girls. It used to be a pleasure to be a young woman 18-25, going to business school and to college to get a business degree so she could be independent and take care of herself, and to get an MRS degree. The best businesses are ran by families, or if they dont have one, the best jobs that a couple could have are those that dont compete with each other. Now young women in college are lucky they could get a DATE much less an MRS degree. Another 'side effect' that they didnt plan on is that young women have to carry on with the household finances just like a guy, when she is 8 months pregannt and nauseous.I'm seeing something else: could this be what happened 1000s of years ago? did the women of the village or whatever, went on a liberated jag until they were hemmed in because few men were able to care for them? so they doubled up on rich guys? just askin' BTW, im also a woman

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