San Francisco, trip down Market St, 1906

 Just before the devastating 1906 earthquake and fires...

Media’s censorious gatekeepers are mad

 

Media’s censorious gatekeepers are mad — because they’re losing power

Glenn H. Reynolds, NY Post. 

With Donald Trump out of office and de-platformed, you’d think mainstream media gatekeepers would be happy. You’d think wrong.

Though the media-Big Tech regime is doing its best to silence opponents and seize control of the high ground, the news from within is grim. They aren’t happy with how things are going. 

That’s because they know they’re losing. Some are losing audiences and revenues. But more important, they’re losing control of the narrative.

And since control of the narrative, and the power and self-importance that accompany that control, is the most important thing in their lives, they can’t be happy.

Consider the cri de coeur of Washington Post public editor Hamilton Nolan, inspired by Tesla’s decision to scrap its media-relations department. How could that happen?

Nolan knows how, and that’s what bothers him: Tesla scrapped its media-relations department because the media don’t much matter to it. Tesla has plenty of ways to get its story out without relying on the media, and that makes the media much less important — and much less powerful. And it’s the power part that hurts the most.

Writes Nolan: “We are living through a historic, technology-fueled shift in the balance of power between the media and its subjects. The subjects are winning. . . . As journalists, we all view this as a horrifying assault on the public’s right to know, and on our own status as brave defenders of the public good. And that is all true, for what it’s worth. But this is about power.”

It sure is. And the media have less. Some of that is because of technology, but more of it is because reporters and editors have lost their standing with the people whose “right to know” they allegedly uphold.

The “right to know” claim rings hollow when The Washington Post, along with virtually every other mainstream outlet, did its best to kill the still-undisputed Hunter Biden stories published in these pages ahead of the election. Do the people have a “right to know” things in general? Or just the things Nolan would want them to know? Seems more like the latter, and people have noticed.

Right now, much of the media regurgitate news releases for those they favor — like the stories about President Biden’s firewood or First Lady Jill Biden’s scrunchie that were served up as news this week. And the media shut down stories they don’t want people to know about, like Hunter’s. Why should Tesla or any other news subject go along with that?

Meanwhile, The New York Times ran a hit piece on the “Slate Star Codex” blog, on the basis, apparently, that lots of Silicon Valley people read it and it says un-PC things sometimes. As Matt Yglesias wrote, the coverage boiled down to this: “Scott Alexander’s blog is popular with some influential Silicon Valley people. Scott Alexander has done posts that espouse views on race or gender that progressives disapprove of. Therefore, Silicon Valley is a hotbed of racism and sexism.”

As Reason’s Robby Soave commented, “one starts to get the feeling that the Times simply wants to tarnish every view that exists outside its own narrow purview, perhaps because the Times has appointed itself the gatekeeper of the unsayable and resents having to relinquish this role to newer media ventures.”

One starts to get that feeling because it’s true. The Times has also gone after the Clubhouse app, an audio forum that lets people talk about things in real time, also apparently because the paper doesn’t like the idea of free speech. In a tweet, the Times warned that “unfettered conversations” are taking place on Clubhouse. Quelle horreur! Bring out the fetters posthaste!

Actually, fetters seem to be what the Times wants. In an earlier episode, New York Times hall monitor Taylor Lorenz falsely accused Clubhouse participant Marc Andreessen of using the word “retard” in a conversation, then issued a non-apology apology when cornered. Other journalists complained that because Clubhouse doesn’t keep or allow recordings, there’s no way to hold people “accountable” for saying something controversial.

In all cases, the complaint is that people are bypassing the gatekeepers and saying what they want to say. Given the behavior of the gatekeepers, that doesn’t seem like a bug but a feature. Bypass away!

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.

Will Hard-Left Turn Lead to Pushback?

 

Will Hard-Left Turn Lead to Pushback?

Victor Davis Hanson, Daily Signal  

The corruption of the Renaissance Church prompted the Reformation, which in turn sparked a Counter-Reformation of reformist, and more zealous, Catholics.

The cultural excesses and economic recklessness of the Roaring ’20s were followed by the bleak, dour, and impoverished years of the Great Depression.

The 1960s counterculture led to Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, as “carefree hippies” turned into careerist “yuppies.”

So social, cultural, economic, and political extremism prompt reactions—and sometimes counterreactions.

The Bush-Clinton-Obama continuum of 24 years cemented the bipartisan fusion administrative state. Trump and his “Make America Great Again” agenda were its pushback.

The counterreaction to the populism of the Trump reset—or Trump himself—is as of yet unsure.

President Joe Biden’s tenure may mark a return to business as usual of the Bush-Clinton years. Or, more likely, it will accelerate the current hard-left trajectory.

Either way, it seems that Biden is intent on provoking just such a pushback by his record number of early and often radical executive orders—a tactic candidate Biden condemned.

On almost every issue—open borders, blanket amnesties, canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, promoting the Green New Deal, and hard-left appointees—Biden is touting positions that likely do not earn 50% public support.

When Biden made a Faustian bargain with his party’s hard-left wing of Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to win the election, he took on the commitment to absorb some of their agenda and to appoint their ideologues.

But he also soon became either unwilling or unable to stand up to them.

Now they—and the country—are in a revolutionary frenzy. The San Francisco Board of Education has voted to rename more than 40 schools honoring the nation’s best—Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln—largely on racist grounds that they are dead, mostly white males.

Statues continue to fall. Names change.

The iconic dates, origins, and nature of America itself continue to be attacked to meet leftist demands. And still, it is not enough for the new McCarthyites.

Social media are banning tens of thousands. Silicon Valley and Wall Street monopolies go after smaller upstart opponents.

A wrong word destroys a lifelong career. Formerly sane pundits now call for curtailing the First Amendment. Thousands of federal troops blanket a now-militarized Washington, D.C.

If Trump’s pushback tried to return to traditions ignored during the Obama years, Biden’s reset promises to become far more radical than Obama’s entire eight years.

Trump likely lost his second pushback term for two reasons—neither of which had anything to do with his reset agenda.

First, the sudden 2020 pandemic, quarantine, recession, summer-long demonstrations and riots, and radical changes in voting laws all ensured that 100 million ballots were not cast on Election Day, derailed a booming economy, and finally wore the people out.

Second, Trump underestimated the multitrillion-dollar power and furor of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the media, Hollywood, and the progressive rich. Those forces all coalesced against him and swamped his outspent and outmanned campaign.

With 24/7 blanket ads, news coverage, endorsements, and social media messaging, Trump sometimes was easily caricatured as a twittering disrupter. The inert and mute Biden in his basement was reinvented as the sober and judicious Washington “wise man” antidote to Trump’s unpredictability.

Had Biden continued his moderate campaign veneer, the current left-wing radicalism might not have prompted a counterreaction.

Instead, Biden is now unapologetically leading the most radical left-wing movement in the nation’s history.

Pundits thought Biden’s prior hints of a single four-year term would make him a weak lame duck. Instead, the idea of just one term has liberated the 78-year-old Biden. We forget that septuagenarians can be as reckless as 20-year-olds. Some old guys can feel their careers only have a few remaining years and might as well go out with a bang—and a legacy.

For now, Biden enjoys a congressional majority for the next 24 months. He has no plans to run for reelection. He sees both realities as a liberating blank check to accomplish what the much more heralded rock star Barack Obama never could.

Experts assured voters that Biden would work on a bipartisan consensus and bring back “normality.” He would “unite” the country.

That will not happen. How ironic that Biden will not just be pushed and pressured by the radicals whom he brought to power, but he may be leading them forward to cement an even harder-left legacy.

Will there be a reaction to this extremism?

The left is assured that radical changes in voting laws and demography, the fears of COVID-19, the Antifa-Black Lives Matter uprising, and anger at Trump over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot have all permanently changed the electorate—and pushed it further leftward.

If they are wrong, they have instead alienated and insulted the American people, and will reap the whirlwind in 2022 of the wind they are now sowing.

(C)2021 The Center for American Greatness.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.