The Donks’ Press Agents Are Panicking As more portents of doom appear. Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-donks-press-agents-are-panicking/
Last week more portents of doom appeared for the Dems’ mouthpieces. The Washington Post’s owner Jeff Bezos, once a center-left stalwart, announced a radical shift in the paper’s editorial orientation. Going forward, commentary will now defend two pillars: “personal liberties and free markets.” Adding insult to injury, Bezos also said that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
We knew Bezos was wobbly before the election when he didn’t endorse a presidential candidate, exercising Falstaffian discretion rather than endorsing Trump. But this shift to the right burns a bridge for the progressives, whose hatred of Donald Trump is all-consuming and absolute.
Another bad sign for progs, though not as certain as Bezos’ decision, regards the Associated Press’s failure to secure a court order that halts Trump’s banishment of the wire service from the White House, the Oval Office, and Air Force One, for thumbing its nose at Trump’s renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And, according to The Wall Street Journal, the banishment was also for “more substantial complaints about bias and dishonesty in the influential AP Stylebook.”
Again, the outcome is uncertain for now, but a win for common sense and good journalism is still possible depending on the hearing on March 20. But the AP’s hubris––demanding special consideration as though it is entitled to ignore the Constitution’s separation of powers, and colonize the executive power’s proprietary space––needs some comeuppance, especially since the media’s endemic arrogance and self-regard are contributors to its excessive partisanship and haughty pretensions to superior intelligence and righteousness.
Indeed, for decades the media have grown more and more imperious about its functions, pretensions, and value to citizens other than their fellow partisans. This unseemly amour propre began more than a century ago with the progressive movement and its spurious claims to a technocratic bona fides. The progressive assault on the philosophy and structure of the Constitution hinged on this claims that pseudoscientific “experts” could rule more efficiently and justly than a free people with their virtues and common sense.
Progressive Walter Lippmann, for example, in his 1919 book Liberty and the News, was dismissive of the journalists of his day, whose work had “become confused with the work of preachers, revivalists, prophets and agitators,” a slur against their doltish readers as well. His influential solution was to make journalism a “profession” conducted according to the canons of science, and for society to provide “genuine training schools for the men upon whose sagacity [the citizens] were dependent.” Such schools would have “to wait upon the development of psychology and political science,” but once armed with such technical knowledge, they could become objective journalists, above all the political passions of less “sagacious” citizens.
Then journalists, Lippmann prophesizes, like scientists would practice a “unity of method, rather than of aim; the unity of the disciplined experiment.” In other words, objective “experts” seeking facts and truth. Hence today most journalists are products of the progressive university cocoon, unlike in the past, when reporters typically came from the gritty streets of the working class. Now reporters’ interests, ideologies, and politics are those of their fellow affluent cognitive elites. No wonder Donald Trump and the MAGA canaille have driven them crazy.
Moreover, the bloated Leviathan of federal agencies staffed by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who actually run the country, are defined by the same pseudo-scientific, technocratic assumptions that government “experts,” not We the People, should rule and control the state.
So, Dems are losing their minds because Trump and DOGE have exposed this paradigm as a racket rife with fraud, waste, and corruption costing trillions of taxpayer dollars. That Trump’s 77 million “lowbrow” voters scorn and mock these credentialed “educated idiots,” as my old man called them, is yet another grievous wound to these treasonous clerks’ inflated egos.
But such treatment is just, for the progressives’ claims to superior intelligence and knowledge are founded on a huge, begged question rather than science or even facts. Left unchallenged by the media and university faculties is the idea that politics––an activity driven in the main not by rational, objective policy discussions, but by the conflicting passions and interests of flawed human beings––can be understood and managed scientifically.
Equally delusional is the progressive notion that “professional” journalists trained in a rational “method” and Olympian objectivity will not be influenced by their own ideological passions and interests. But, of course, they have been influenced, as we’ve seen over the last month as the Trump administration exposes the venality, political prejudices, corruption, and sheer incompetence of the regulatory behemoth and their media showrunners.
And don’t forget our own recent experience with the disasters wrought by so-called “experts,” from the feckless, unscientific Covid mitigation policies that destroyed millions of businesses, schools, and lives; to the “green energy” grift that has attacked our cheap, plentiful fossil-fuels with net zero carbon “green” magical thinking, and has put our economy and well-being at risk––all publicized, championed, and promoted by the spaniel media who think they are “following the science,” while smearing those scientists who honor the scientific method by challenging and exposing a dubious hypothesis.
Finally, the regime media’s arrogance and hypocrisy have been particularly unseemly given, their collusion with the Dems’ corruption of federal agencies such as the Department of Justice, FBI, and other national security agencies and offices. The agencies enlisted a media eager to serve partisan political interests and illiberal, unconstitutional “woke” programs like DEI, “systemic racism,” and “trans rights” that have violated the rights of citizens protected by the Bill of Rights, common sense, and science. The media’s current panic and cater-wauling, or recognition that their blatant bias and patent mendacity are damaging their credibility and costing them readers and viewers, are both signs that the Trump administration is over the target.
Donald Trump’s victory so far has taken great strides in correcting the progressives’ damage to our Constitutional order of limited federal powers, unalienable rights, and separated powers. But these changes are not secure from future rollbacks that restore the tyrannical excesses of the last few decades. There’s a midterm election coming very soon, and typically a president’s first midterm election favors the challengers, who can leverage some economic crisis or foreign policy misstep abroad into electoral disaster.
In the end, We the People have to do our part in defending and strengthening the Constitution that protects our freedoms. Each of us has to take responsibility for keeping ourselves informed, and exercising our own critical judgment, and trusting our own experience, and common sense about what we hear, see, and read from the media. We also need to remember that they are necessarily biased, dishonest, and hypocritical despite their protestations of fealty to objectivity and truth.
Millions of citizens fail to do so, of course, in every election, but the responsibility for the consequences of that failure lies with them. And so it must be in a free society in which the people regulate political power, for there is no genuine political freedom without responsibility and accountability for the decisions freely made or not made. The continuing viability of democratic freedom depends on us using that judgement and proving, contrary to the technocratic progressive elites, that the people are indeed capable of self-rule, and worthy of our rights and freedoms.
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