PRESTIGE PRESS BASHING
I was damn lucky I didn't have a car accident driving home from the Cape the night before Labor Day. Not that I was driving any more like a manic than I usually do. (Hey, for a Bostonian, I'm pretty good. I am almost never the last person to run a red light.) I was furious about what I was hearing on the radio.
WBZ, a Boston area news station, broadcasts the 60 Minutes audio feed. And what were the issues of the day according to the elders of Black Rock? Well the two segments I caught were about the [alleged] spousal/girlfriend abuse epidemic in the armed services (reported by Ed Bradley) and a warm and fuzzy piece on the Al Noor School, an Islamic school in Brooklyn as parroted by Morley Safer.
This was what the doddering wrinklies chose to air this ten days before the anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities, demonstrating why they remain among the leading lights among reactionary liberalism in America. Certainly the Department of Defense understood, pointedly refusing to co-operate. So the usual parade of 'activists' and other axe grinders did not have anyone to riff off of for the solicitous talking heads- all designed to make the armed forces . (Don't get me wrong- spousal abuse is always serious and perhaps the DoD isn't doing enough. However, there were questions that Ed Bradley could have asked that would have actually challenged the critics. And that would have required some empathy with the servicemen, or at least the ability to think outside the proverbial box- something unthinkable from the pressiods.)
Ann Coulter the Madame Defarge of the conservative movement, vivisected the second piece including how CBS let the school soft-pedal the student's (especially the female students) adoration for homicide bombers.
| The students instantly and enthusiastically agreed with the proposition that a "Muslim who becomes a suicide bomber goes to Paradise for that action." "Definitely," one student said, calling a female suicide bomber "very brave." "Do you believe they are martyrs? Holy martyrs?" Again, without hesitation, the students affirmed: "Yes" and "of course." As to whether suicide bombers would go to Paradise, the students said they earnestly hoped so. "I mean, they're doing it for a good cause," one boy explained. "I pray that they go to Paradise," another said. Not only that, but one student said, "I think we'd all probably do the same." Weeks later, at the urging of the principal, the students modified their answers slightly. But according to CBS, "None of them changed their view that suicide bombers in Israel would go to Paradise." The Islamic studies teacher at Al Noor claimed the students misunderstood true Islam: "If you go to chapter 4, verse 29, it says so clear, 'Do not kill yourself.'" |
Emphasis mine.
What's really pathetic is that the Morely could have burst the jihadettes' fantasy pointing out the homicide bombers tend to target civilians. But emphasizing their glorious warrior went into a service full of elderly people would have soiled their precious young minds.
Maybe Morely should have done some research... But I guess he didn't want to be confrontational.
However, as loathsome as the saurian newsmagazine reporters are, they positively outshine the boobs at the Beeb. Anti-Idiotarians have long reviled the Limey louses... OK Limey lice and Brit nits... for their anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-common sense reporting. But it's not only in the foreign policy field we see their perennial perfidy.
Theodore Dalrymple noticed firsthand after writing about a trip to Blackpool; formerly the Cape Cod of the British working class that has fallen victim to a Spring break atmosphere.
| On the day after the publication of my article, I appeared briefly on the BBC's main breakfast-time radio program, which has an audience of several million. The interviewer was an intelligent and cultivated woman, and having briefly and accurately summarized for the readers my account of what I saw in Blackpool, she then asked me, "Aren't you being a toff?"-that is to say, a social and cultural snob. The question was, of course, a loaded one, with many layers of deeply derogatory implication. I in turn asked her whether she would herself bare her buttocks to passing strangers, and if she wouldn't, why not? She declined to answer this question, as if it were not serious-just as a future government minister with whom I once appeared on the radio, after asserting that one of the tragedies of some recent urban riots was that they had taken place in the rioters' poor inner-city neighborhood, refused to answer when I asked her if she would rather the riots had taken place in her own rich neighborhood. Not long after the interview about my experiences in Blackpool, the BBC broadcast letters from a few listeners, who charged that I had failed to understand the nature of working-class culture... The liberal assumption, in this as in most things, is that to understand is to approve (or at least to pardon), and therefore my disapproval indicated a lack of understanding. But strangely enough, the letters that the BBC and the newspaper that published the original article forwarded to me-those they hadn't broadcast or published-wholly endorsed my comments. |
Not so strangely, for Dr. Dalrymple points out...
| The deliberate exclusion of these voices from public expression provided a fine example of how the British intelligentsia goes about its self-appointed task of cultural destruction.
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Emphasis mine.
By excluding dissent or differing opinions, the intelligentsia can deny they exist, or if press, are anything but the fringe. So, how does the denial work? Back to the good Doctor...
| A BBC television producer recently outlined the phases of liberal denial for me. His colleagues, he told me, regarded him as a maverick, a tilter at windmills, almost a madman. And what was his madness? He wanted the BBC to make unvarnished documentaries about life in the lower third of society: about the mass (and increasing) illiteracy, the mass (and increasing) illegitimacy and single parenthood, the mass (and increasing) hooliganism, violence, lawlessness, drug taking, welfare dependency, and hopelessness, so that the rest of the population might begin to take stock of what was happening on their very doorstep. And he wanted, in particular, to concentrate on the devastating effects of the fragmentation-no, the atomization-of the family that liberal legislation, social engineering, and cultural attitudes since the late 1950s have so powerfully promoted. His BBC superiors greeted his proposals with condescension. First, they denied the facts. When he produced irrefutable evidence of their existence, they accused him of moral panic. When he proved that the phenomena to which the facts pointed were both serious and spreading rapidly up the social scale, they said that there was nothing that could be done about them, because they were an inevitable part of modern existence. When he said that they were the result of deliberate policy, they asked him whether he wanted to return to the bad old days when spouses who hated each other were forced to live together. And when he said that what had been done could be undone, at least in part, they produced their ace of trumps: the subject was not interesting, so there was no point in making programs about it. The British public would be left to sleepwalk its way undisturbed through the social disaster from which a fragile economic prosperity will certainly not protect it. |
The BBC do not limit their one-sidedness to foreign policy or social engineering. The gun issue is so important that the censorship is extended to sports and entertainment. (Thanks to Libertarian Samizdata).
| You can watch firearms being misused in soap operas and on television news, but you will rarely see an image of a happy, healthy sportsman bagging a pheasant, powdering a clay or punching a hole in a paper target. Shooting men and women, denied any positive role, have long since been tele-morphed into ‘gun owners’: beer-bellied pervs in camouflage or heartless toffs blasting fluffy bunnies and Bambi’s mum... |
Not that the journalists let the propaganda to others. They upheld their perfidious traditions.
| Pilloried in the press and on television, shooters had no proper chance to explain why they were guiltless. Acting as a spokesman for the sport, I can remember being given a 16-second prerecorded slot on the Nine O’Clock News to ‘balance’ more than two minutes’ live hysteria from the opposition.
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And if you can't spin reality to fit your views, hide it!
| The BBC policy was to barely mention the sport (the third biggest at the Games) in their national coverage. They have tried to excuse this appalling record by saying that Bisley was on 'the periphery' of the Games and that there were 'logistical problems'. Such tosh bears no scrutiny. There were 70 BBC accredited people at Bisley. Some of them were so frustrated that their material was not being used that they openly criticised the policy-makers in Manchester. Logistics had nothing to do with it, of course: viewers in Australia and India managed to see their shooting athletes winning gold. We did not, because some priest of political correctness had decided it was bad for us.
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"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common; they don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views" (2 point ref).
Of course the lumpen of the scepter'd isle are not entirely fooled and more than a few age getting tired of it. See here and here (via grand daddy Glen, please, oh please link to me Reynolds) for the real opinion peeking up among the cracks in the asphalt of noxious official thought.
A brief digression: the way I see the UK's current situation is that they are at where America was during the 70s. The elites are driving the car of state off the road and into the sidewalk, smashing everything in its path. (You think that's a tortured analogy, wait until I compare certain commentators to great NFL offensive linemen...) The leftist intelligentsia has complete control of the major avenues of debate and policy and the intellectual counter movement has yet to begin. Yes, there was a political conservative renaissance in the 80s (Thatcher and Reagan), but what is called for is for one in the infotainment sphere, such as the one that preceded Gingrich's rise. Because they do not encounter any opposition, the intelligentsia assume they are completely successful and never question the results. Even when the opposition can no longer be ignored, they are never debated on the merits. And that is why the current state of the intellectual left has given rise to the term 'idiotarian.'
Speaking of which, here's some antipodean groupthink among the nattering nitwits of negativism, thanks to Tim Blair.
Speaking of over-rated lefties, Norman Mailer, arising like a somnolent sauropod raising its wrinkly neck out of the Jurassic slime, blearily blinked and made these fatuous pronouncements. (Check out Scott Ott's take).
| "Clinton made a point of surrounding himself with people who might be 90% as intelligent as himself, but never his equal. Bush is smart enough to know that he couldn't possibly do the same, or the country would be run by morons."
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How shallow is Mailer? His x-ray vision could not penetrate Saran Wrap! He swallowed the JFK marketing campaign and regurgitated it as 'Superman in the Supermarket' and now he rehashes the media cliches and shorthand of the smug schmucks of the Upper West Side Salons that have clearly been out of date for the past year. Of course I would love to see Mailer try to pass the entrance exam for the Harvard Business School. I don't think calculus is his forte. Civics sure the hack ain't. Mailer further in confirmed his utter cluelessness by adding this vapidity.
| "The notion that we have an active democracy that controls our fate is not true. Was I ever able to vote on how high buildings could or should be? No. Was I ever able to say I don't want food frozen? No. Was I ever able to say I want aeroplanes to have half as many seats? Nobody's ever been able to vote on anything that really counts in terms of how our lives are led."
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Did I get to vote whether or not to put this broken down nag out to pasture or to the literary glue factory? Did I ever get a chance to vote to replace overblown 'Naked and the Dead' with James Salter's 'The Hunters?'
Not only does the emperor go around stank naked, waving his shriveled genitals to the nausea of all, but he expects us to pay homage to his literary empire, gone the way of Ozymandias' mighty works. Ron Martinetti targets Mailer in an essay appropriately titled 'Advertisements For Himself'
| When it became known that Mailer's book on capital punishment (The Executioner's Song) had been based upon another's research, Truman Capote commented that Norman "...was just a rewrite man like you have over at the Daily News."
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I should check out his ex-wife's book.
| Norman Mailer was insecure, sadistic, twisted, a spoiled mama's boy who was troubled by his background and wanted to have been born a rich WASP...
Adele writes with total frankness of her storybook romance and marriage to Mailer, then at the height of his early fame, and the descent through hell their marriage became--with bouts of drunkenness, orgies, and emotional and physical abuse that ended in Mailer's attacking her with a knife that was front page news in 1960. The tragic and bizarre stabbing incident took place after Adele had allegedly called Norman "you little faggot" at a party celebrating his abortive campaign for mayor of New York City. |
Speaking of violence and Norman Mailer, has he ever apologized to this man's family?
Well, I could go on. I mean if I wanted to include the New York Times I'd have a Robert Jordan sized book. All these institutions and men were formerly prestigeous and now they are squandering thier reputations to advance their ill thought out partisan agenda. They have occupied the limelight too long. Other vices will be heard. Their day is ending soon.
The blogsphere is kniting the names...
