Scott Walker and the Other Dummies

On the day Scott Walker would announce in Wisconsin that he was running for president, The New York Times offered a typical takedown on the front page. "Admiring voters" found him to be authentic and approachable, but there were two words these fans apparently did not use: "Smart" and "sophisticated."

That might be because liberal snobs at the Times think that those words are defined by how liberal you are. Those are qualities you get from reading the Times. Their own ads have touted them for giving the customer "depth" and "breadth" and "insights." Conservatives are dumb, but they have hope if they put enough of The New York Times into their brain every day.

Times reporter Patrick Healy focused on how Walker needed "several months of policy tutorials" to be ready to run for president, which reminded the Times of the crash course in foreign policy the McCain campaign forced on Sarah Palin. They suggested Walker may not be "big enough to be president."

This is a very old line of attack from the liberal media. Look at the way they treated Reagan and George W. Bush and Palin and now Trump. To be conservative is to lack intelligence, to need tutoring.

So in 2007, when Sen. Barack Obama was running for president, did he need "tutorials" on policy? When you search the Times to see how they used the words "Obama" and "tutorial" together, it produces one story: Jodi Kantor oozing through the pages of Obama's memoir "Dreams From My Father" on how the game of basketball helped Obama find "a tutorial on race, a way for a kid with a white mother, a Kenyan father and a peripatetic childhood to establish the African-American identity that he longed for."

So Obama was such a "sophisticated" deep thinker that he had to play basketball to discover he was a black man?

Eight years ago, liberal journalists were so infatuated with the narrative of Obama's memoir and candidacy -- biracial and struggling with identity, citizen of the world with an immersion in Islamic culture, Harvard Law Review editor with a Saul Alinsky education in community organizing the Chicago slums -- that they never questioned the memoir, like it was biblical. But it was full of lies. These "sophisticates" were easily bamboozled.

In 2012, Washington Post editor David Maraniss -- no conservative he -- investigated the memoir's claims and discovered it collapsed like a house of cards. It was a fiction book. Even then, the Post never put a word of that in the paper. The newspaper only excerpted Maraniss recounting ... Obama's childhood love of basketball.

If the Republicans are truly smart, what they will do is run against the Times. Newt Gingrich energized voters and won the South Carolina primary by pushing back the major media, especially the liberal-journalist "moderators" that the Republican Party allowed in the primaries last time around.

When the Old Media try to delegitimize conservatives, the answer is to delegitimize the Old Media. Nobody should believe that today's "news" media are in the slightest way objective. Seventy percent of Americans now tell pollsters they're not referees interested in fairness. It should be 100 percent. The press is not just biased; it is intentionally biased. The evidence of a tilt toward liberalism is not just never-ending; it is also accelerating in intensity.

Nobody should believe that today's "news" media are in the slightest way objective. The press is not just biased; it is intentionally biased. The evidence of a tilt toward liberalism is not just never-ending; it is also accelerating in intensity. Seventy percent of Americans now tell pollsters they're not referees interested in fairness. It should be 100 percent.

When the Old Media try to delegitimize conservatives, the answer is to delegitimize the Old Media.

Note: I have (essentially) inverted the order of the sentences in the above quotation.
For “Old Media” read, wire service journalism, since - IMHO - the wire services homogenized journalism into the monolith which we have known all our lives.
Prior to the 1844 Morse demo of the Baltimore-Washington telegraph line, newspapers received their information at the speed of physical travel - sailing ships, railroads, and horse-drawn carriages. Newspapers tended to be even more locally oriented than today, and - because newspapers didn’t have privileged access to news in the way that they later got from the newswire - were more about the opinions of the publisher than about breaking news. That began to change with the 1848 founding of the New York Associated Press - soon renamed simply the Associated Press.
Long before the turn of the 20th Century, people began to raise the alarm about the concentration of propaganda power which the AP already represented. The response to those concerns was that the AP got news from all the newspapers in its membership, and everyone knew that no two newspapers agreed on anything much - so the Associated Press was objective. In the long run, of course, the AP has proven to be a Borg which assimilates and homogenizes.
So the wire services - the AP yes, but all of its competitors as well - constitute virtual meetings of journalists generally which - as Adam Smith could have told you -
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
unite journalists to the detriment of the public.

When the Old Media try to delegitimize conservatives, the answer is to delegitimize the Old Media.

True. And yet, you cannot delegitimate “Old Media” if you cannot even say its name. Granted that fictional movies and TV shows can exert a dolorous leftist influence, there is actually no profit to even trying to counterattack it with vague “Old Media” allusions. But “wire service journalism” is vulnerable to being named and - yes, with no small difficulty - shamed. Shamed? How? By reference to the fact that the mission of the wire service - the conservation of scarce, expensive bandwidth in the transmission of the news - is obsolete. Modern technology has made communication bandwidth, on the scale of the conservation effects of wire services, dirt cheap.
The Internet is “the poor man’s soap box” with global reach.
But why is journalism’s leftism contrary to the public interest?
“The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests.” ― Alexander Hamilton

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