Columnist.
Back in the 1980s, Bruce Springsteen and other rock stars formed Artists United Against Apartheid and performed a song proclaiming "Sun City" that referenced an entertainment resort in a region of South Africa. The song mocked the Reagan administration's constructive engagement policy to end apartheid. And rock stars also routinely performed in the totalitarian Soviet Union, believing that was incredibly constructive.
Now that it looks like the GOP nomination won't be decided until a contested convention in Cleveland, Donald Trump and his supporters assert that the whole system is undemocratic. But if democracy was organized to give everyone a fair and equal shot to impress voters with their knowledge and experience, then our system has been rigged for Trump for the last nine months. The media — not just the liberal media, but some "conservative" media, too — have been the gale-force wind beneath Trump's wings.
HBO shocked the world on April 4 by unveiling a 100-minute documentary honoring the legacy and legislative career of Sen. Jesse Helms. Kidding — delayed April fool. It did, though, feature Senator Helms as a villain in a 100-minute documentary honoring the life and art of Robert Mapplethorpe, the infamous anti-Christian, penis-obsessed purveyor of sadomasochistic black-and-white photography.
Less than a year ago, ABC's George Stephanopoulos admitted that he had made $75,000 of undisclosed contributions to the charitable foundation/campaign operation of his former employers, Bill and Hillary Clinton. He then personally pledged he wouldn't moderate a Republican primary debate this year. But ABC News later issued a statement of support for Stephanopoulos, insisting it wouldn't take punitive action against him.
Actress Susan Sarandon embodies the definitive caricature of the raving socialist who brims with "compassion" and with an estimated net worth of $50 million. She infuriated many liberals by telling MSNBC host Chris Hayes on March 28 that she can only envision Sen. Bernie Sanders for president: "I really want to be on the right side of history, and this is a shot that we're not going to have again in my lifetime, to have a candidate that is so morally consistent," while Hillary Clinton is "inauthentic" and a stalking horse for Wall Street, fracking or Monsanto.
The National Enquirer's name in journalism is synonymous with factually unsupported drivel of the lowest kind. It is a sacred truth that no responsible journalist would reference the kind of garbage found in this tabloid. But somehow it's perfectly appropriate for the same responsible journalists to report the sleaze over and over, emphasizing, of course, that the source is the awful National Enquirer. This is what the networks have done to Sen. Ted Cruz, who the Enquirer recently claimed had affairs with five secret mistresses, including Trump's spokeswoman Katrina Pierson. The unsubstantiated smear should have never seen the light of day.
To Catholics, the week before Easter is Holy Week, a time to prepare for the most special feast day of the year: celebrating the resurrection of Christ. To Hollywood, it is a time to flog the Catholic Church with vicious portrayals of corruption and hypocrisy. Hollywood insists that its products reflect a market demand. But there is no market demand for this. It is Hollywood, and only Hollywood, that wishes to vocalize its bigotry toward Catholics. This year, there are entire shows that mock God and Catholics on a weekly basis. On Tuesday, ABC's announcer actually told viewers, "It's Easter Week. Celebrate with Tuesday's new hit comedy, next," referencing "The Real O'Neal's."
The smoke hasn't even cleared from the airport in Brussels, and already the press is issuing its typical lament: This will only stoke Europe's right wing and spread rampant Islamophobia. NBC's Richard Engel complained on the "TODAY" program, "We're already seeing the rise of the right wing. We're already seeing rise of hate attacks, where people will use the kind of terrorist attacks, these kinds of incidents, to vilify all of the Muslim community. Which, of course, only makes the situation worse, because then people feel isolated, ostracized, ghettoized, and they retreat into their own communities." NBC's Andrea Mitchell, cited gains for right-wing parties in recent German regional elections.
No one doubts that the "fake news" shows on Comedy Central are propaganda organs for liberalism. NPR and MSNBC hosts have swooned over the soothing satirical nightcaps for the snarky liberal. Apparently, that genre isn't enough. Now, the channel's situation comedies are pushing the Democrats. In the March 16 episode of the millennial-female sitcom "Broad City," the buffoonish main character (played by Ilana Glazer) volunteers for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign — so enthusiastically she put "Rodham" in her name, as in "Ilana Rodham Wexler." Since she's not very bright, she assumes that she is being paid for the volunteer position.
In the liberal lexicon, "backlash" is a word that only describes conservatives getting what's coming to them. But as MSNBC reduces its number of shows and time slots for race-obsessed black hosts, this was bound to happen. The hashtag that appeared as the left began to devour itself was #MSNBCSoWhite. After MSNBC hired leftist, race-fixated hosts, it was only natural that the news station would be trashed as "going white" when the reality of it's terrible ratings — for shows hosted by academics preaching about how badly America stinks — cost Comcast some serious cash.
On the libertine left, one of the most revered "social justice warriors" is the abortionist. "Abortion providers" are revered as living statues of liberty, granting the freedom from being "punished with a baby," to quote our current president. Entire documentaries celebrate them. The latest is "Trapped," named after the pro-abortion lingo for any law that regulates the abortion industry, or as they spin it, "targeted regulation of abortion providers." In the Los Angeles Times, Katie Walsh provided the propagandistic ooze: "These providers embody a remarkable mix of tenacity and tenderness as they comfort patients and attempt to discern and comply with labyrinthine regulations."
It's part a lack of resources overseas and part simple disinterest at home, but the American news media seemingly are out of the business of covering international news. For example, one of the most neglected international stories is the attempt by ISIS to exterminate and persecute Christians. Instead, our media obsess over the faintest hint of domestic "Islamophobia." A few weeks ago, The New York Times filed a national story from Arizona with this incident: "Rania Kanawati, a Syrian immigrant, was walking to her car after Friday Prayer last month at the Islamic Center of Tucson when a beer can landed right behind her, then another one fell by her side." The headline was "University of Arizona Students Hurl Insults, and Litter, at Mosque in Tucson." No one was hurt.
When Disney and ABC decided to make a sitcom based on the teenage years of hatemongering homosexual "Savage Love" advice columnist Dan Savage, anyone could guess this was going to be a religion-bashing extravaganza. Now the show is here. It's called "The Real O'Neals," which is an odd title, since they couldn't have manufactured a more wooden set of caricatured Catholics, who are both wildly dysfunctional and shallower than a thimble. The show's promotional video intones: "In the beginning, the perfect Irish-Catholic family was created. And then all hell broke loose." Which is to say, all Hollywood broke loose.
For many years now, the liberal media have lamented that our democracy is badly compromised by a rapacious band of billionaires manipulating government policy and elections and frustrating the will of the people. Just four years ago, the networks became a megaphone for the Occupy Wall Street argument that the "99 percent" were tired of being dominated by the "1 percent." So when Donald Trump, America's best-known brand name for rapacious billionaire, decided to run for president, one might have expected these Occupier sympathizers would clearly wonder if his entire campaign was a grand conspiracy by the so-called "ruling class." What we've seen is entirely the opposite.
Walter Annenberg was a billionaire publisher and philanthropist, and a pal to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, whose biggest enrichment came from selling TV Guide to one Rupert Murdoch. This week, a school bearing his name is ripping Hollywood to shreds from the hard left. The Associated Press breathlessly reported that in "one of the most exhaustive and damning reports on diversity in Hollywood," the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California put out a new report slashing at the "whitewashing" of our movies and TV shows. It's howling against an "epidemic of invisibility" for minorities (both racial and sexual) and declaring an "inclusion crisis."
President Obama may be a lame duck, but the press never tires of celebrating him as the first black president. They ran President Bush's poll ratings into the ground as his term ended, but here in Black History Month, they are promoting Obama like it's still 2009. On "NBC Nightly News," anchor Kate Snow played video posted on Facebook of a 4-year-old black girl crying and distraught that Obama's time in office will soon be up. "This is, of course, President Obama's last year in office, a fact that has at least one of his supporters quite upset," Snow told viewers. "Watch what happens when this 4-year-old girl's grandmother, Caprina Harris, explains that Mr. Obama will no longer be the president."
The left is still in mourning over the retirement of Jon Stewart from "The Daily Show." One poor fellow at The Atlantic just wrote a piece that suggests he needs a grief counselor. "Slowly, though, it began to sink in: the dimension of our loss. Jon Stewart was gone — our sanity, our balance," James Parker wrote. "In nuking the news-givers, petarding the pundit class, he became one of the — became, in fact, *the* pundit/news-giver for a generation of viewers." Say what you will about his politics, Stewart was a jester giant, a comedy Cronkite, next to his successor, Trevor Noah. Never heard of him? We rest our case.
Liberals who remember "Doonesbury" surely recall the joke about George H. W. Bush pledging to "put his manhood in a blind trust" so he could be Ronald Reagan's vice president. But when it comes to covering Hillary Clinton, reporters now have been exposed putting their own manhood in a blind trust. It turns out they submit to orders made by her longtime publicist, Philippe Reines. They have tossed aside all vestiges of objective journalism — in fact, journalism itself — to please the boss.
The pop music sensation simply known as Beyonce is the toast of the cultural left for a new video titled "Formation." Several scenes are racially charged, including the pop diva sinking into the water on top of a New Orleans police cruiser, a nod to Hurricane Katrina propaganda. In another, a young black boy in a hooded sweatshirt dances in front of a line of white police until they go "Hands up" to his dancing talent. Before we take another step, let's stipulate: This champion of racial injustice is worth $450 million, and with her husband, rap mogul Jay-Z, a cool billion.
At the start of the Democratic presidential race, the media viewed the contest as a cakewalk. The compassionate and gloriously wonky Hillary Clinton faced no one who could be viewed as her equal. Game over. When Sen. Bernie Sanders made noises about running against her, nobody thought he could be the actual Democratic nominee. He was old, he was cranky, and he wasn't even a Democrat. The conventional media wisdom had it that Sanders would be a healthy deterrent to the Clinton tendency to crawl toward the corporatist middle. On NPR, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne saw it as positive: "Let's list two names who we don't get to talk about, Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas. This is the most serious socialist candidacy for president since they ran. But Bernie Sanders has a long list of particulars that he wants to put on the table, and I think by shifting the campaigns to economics, he will generally help Democrats."
