Friends, today I recommend this article to you, which is a truly excellent case study in the sheer incompetence and willful blindness of the mainstream media. When it comes to President Trump, the press is more than willing to report innuendo as if it was fact. I would imagine there are a great many sagacious journalism professors spinning in their graves right about now...
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/john-brennan-trump-spreads-smear-media-covers-fact/
Dr. Waddy: I remember CBS being the most influential of the three major broadcast networks we had in the '60's and certainly, as I understand it, before. I really can't imagine Murrow urging support of Lord Halifax for PM because Britain was undoubtedly defeated and needed to make a deal. But Cronkite, who we had theretofore and for some time after, revered, lied to us about the Tet Offensive, a decisive American victory which decimated the Viet Cong. He disingenuously portrayed it as a defeat, with catastrophic effect on our war effort. And as for Dan Rather, I know Vietnam combat veterans who say he was lucky he wasn't fragged; they all knew he was backstabbing them. That's where it started, I think, though I don't know why. Perhaps they thought that after all the satisfaction generated by the WWII victory, the enemies of America deserved "equal time" yes? Inspired by such as Woodward and Bernstein,who brought down the despised everyman Nixon, the multitudinous leftist baby boom faction (our generation was so big that any appreciable faction of it was huge) turned American journalism to partisanship. Rush and Fox provided a fortuitous and unexpectedly able opposition which had of necessity to be partisan itself. Until Trump rose, I thought Limbaugh, along with (gag) the Clintons, to be the most influential politicians of the last 30 years. The left's hijacking of the MSM, and its complete embrace of far left bias is manifest now and the existential conflict between it and the real America continues apace.
ReplyDeleteHi Jack. We've discussed before just how far back one can trace the cancer of leftism, and I vote for the (18th century) Enlightenment, at a minimum. I agree that it appears that Western Civilization took a spiritual/intellectual nosedive circa the 1960s, but then one has to ask: where did the parents of the Boomers go wrong???
ReplyDeleteWill the post-Boomers get us back on track? Frankly, I see few reasons for optimism!
Tobin's analysis is faulty. This is not a media story. Brennan made the comment on a morning interview show. It was not one of the hosts who made the statement -- it was the former head of the CIA. Plus, Brennan was asked multiple times from various media if he had evidence to back up his speculation. Tobin wants to make a case against the media, but his analysis does not come close to doing so.
ReplyDeleteBTW, Cronkite did not portray the Tet Offensive as a loss, but as resulting in a stalemate. Things may have been different had Westmoreland not so clearly underestimated the numbers of the North Vietnamese. You want to blame someone, blame the idiots who were running the military campaign in Vietnam.
Personally, I think Tobin is right to point to the problematic journalistic habit of reporting unfounded charges as "news". "Reports indicate" or "Trump reportedly said" is a red flag to me -- what it means is that there is no confirmation that the claims are accurate, so why publicize them? The question answers itself: because the story hurts Trump. I mean, couldn't Democratic opposition to Trump's tariffs against China be motivated by collusion between China and the Democrats? Why don't we see wild speculation about such collusion on cable news? Because it's bogus? No, because it doesn't support the desired narrative.
ReplyDeleteYou may well be right that the war in Vietnam was mismanaged, and the reports coming from HQ were overly optimistic, but the popular notion that the Vietnam War was "unwinnable" is pure bunkum, if you ask me. A little patience would have gone a long way, and in my view we DID win the Vietnam War in 1972-73. We then took our eyes off the ball.
Dr. Waddy: My wording should have been better. I was referring mostly to the advent of leftist partisanship in the press. That the Enlightenment was the progenitor of the modern left makes very much sense to me. I don't think the parents of the early boomers made any big mistakes. They just wanted to settle down after all the drama. Their parenting was by traditional standards.I was born in'47; we were never allowed in the master bedroom, we always sat down to supper and had to ask to be excused from table. By the end of the boom (1964) radical social change was at hand. We early boomers did the big damage and we are still at it. We were naive as are all youth but we went to college in unprecedented numbers ( maybe making that possible was a mistake on the part of the Greatest Generation, God bless 'em). There we met radical leftists for the first time. The GI Bill students and the goldfish swallowers and phone booth packers of the post war years had no use for these misfits but we boomers thought they were ok. "Why, these 'commies' are human just like everyone else." The radical left saw a potentially decisive "revolutionary class" in this multitude and acted accordingly. They almost sealed the deal in 2016. Rod: Cronkite portrayed Tet as an astounding and perhaps decisive setback. Actually The Americans crushed the VC and fought the NVA straight up. Saying that the Viet Cong breach of the Embassy in Saigon strongly suggested that we could not win was like saying that Pickett's Charge showed that the Union could not win.
ReplyDeleteI've heard it said that civilization is all about "standards". Maintain them, and all is well -- relax them, and the slide into the abyss has surely begun. My guess is that, for the Boomers to go off the rails as decisively as they did, standards must have slipped considerably before then. That's no aspersion on your parents, Jack, but you can see in the permissiveness of the Jazz Age, for instance, or the inanities of the Beatniks, the seeds of much worse to come. Anyway, now my head is spinning, so let's just agree to blame Obama and be done with it. :)
ReplyDeleteDr.Waddy: Your view of the possible provenance of '60's nihilism makes alot of sense but yeah I can go along with blaming Obama ( and Al Franken).
ReplyDeleteHa! Poor Al. I imagine he's back in Minnesota, taking grinning photos of himself groping store-bought melons... Oh, the horrors that liberalism has wrought!
ReplyDelete