Fifty Shades of Journalistic Grey

PGA Weblog ^

[ProgressingAmerica]

Do you think Obama is the first radical to give someone in the media a thrill up their leg? No, not really.

I recently uploaded an article lifted out of The Metropolitan, titled "Understanding Woodrow Wilson". I first referenced this article over a year ago, but I need it for a future article I am writing and I noticed that the article is not searchable via a search engine. Well, was. Now that problem is solved. Anyways, If you read the article you cannot help but notice how big of a puff piece it is.

Being as I am normally keeping an eye out for the ideological components of progressivism, I overlooked one of the paragraphs in the article. This:

NOW there are two sets of opinions regarding Governor Wilson. Some argue that he is a good mixer; others argue that he is not a good mixer, being a professorial, arm's-length, prune-eating sort of person for whom even heart-throbs are merely muscular reflexes to be measured and observed as scientific phenomena. Some will tell you that he has no intimates, - they make it even stronger - not a single intimate, with whom he shares the inner stirrings of his mind: that the only person who has ever stood with him in the conning tower while he steers the ship of his career is his wife. Others aver that he has quite a group of intimates: eminent lawyers, business men and university professors, who come regularly to see him, and that he spends hours with them in the frank disclosure of his political soul. The probability is that both judgments are correct; yes, life is at least as contrary as that, and individuals constitute the originating contrariness of life. From my own experience, I can only make this one venture: when you sit down with the Governor of New Jersey upon his broad piazza at Sea Girt with two of the many great rocking-chairs set closely vis-a-vis, and the conversation which starts at random begins to lead into the deep-lying purposes of the man's heart and his voice drops to a confidential note, while his long fingers steal up your wrist past the elbow to a gentle pulling grip upon your upper arm as if he would hold your very soul to him while he talks, you are going to feel as you leave that you have been close to a very great and simple man who has trusted you and whose confidences you would not betray and whose cause you would not injure for ten thousand worlds.

""the conversation which starts at random begins to lead into the deep-lying purposes of the man's heart and his voice drops to a confidential note""?

""while his long fingers steal up your wrist past the elbow to a gentle pulling grip upon your upper arm as if he would hold your very soul to him while he talks""?

Ok, so the thrill went up his arm and not up his leg. But you get the point. With respect to people in the media, they have not changed in well over 100 years. They are in love with radicals and miscreants.

It would require a fully corrupt media in order for progressives to have progressed America to the point that its in today. We are essentially defenseless. The people who are supposed to be standing with the citizenry against the elites, the journalists, and telling us when something is wrong or when we are in danger - have chosen the elites instead - and they made that choice a very long time ago.

[ProgressingAmerica]

If anybody wants on/off the revolutionary progressivism ping list, send me a message

Progressives do not want to discuss their own history. I want to discuss their history.

Summary: He had a thrill going up his arm.

[x]

It's hard to think of Wilson as an especially charming man, but I suppose he did have a certain dignity that could have attracted reporters who didn't know him well.

Wilson may have been our first media-made president. True, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and others had to maintain good relations with the press, and Theodore Roosevelt had actively sought headlines, but the publisher George Harvey had been promoting Wilson for years, first for Governor of New Jersey and then for President.

The two men eventually broke for personal reasons -- a rupture of the sort that runs like a thread through Wilson's life. Harvey was too "officious," too meddling, too eager to please, or too anxious to be in charge, I guess. Harvey became a bitter opponent of Wilson, as so many of Wilson's ex-friends did.