Media bias, moral relativity, cultural rot, and living an illusion

It takes a bit of oomph to resist being inured by the current revelations of bias on the part of television networks and prominent print organs. The problem has been long recognized. Accuracy in Media was founded in 1969. The Media Research Center was founded in 1987. Poll data has abounded for years showing that most journalists, certainly along the Acela Corridor, but really, nationwide, vote Democrat. The exposure of the Dan Rather - Mary Mapes slander of President Bush occurred in 2004.

Add to that the threads that must be untangled from the Gordian knot that is our current sociocultural juncture. There is the unfortunate linguistic habit of the current president, by which any opponent, perceived or real, acquires a nickname, usually juvenile, and by which terms are coined, such as "fake news." That fake news is a real thing gets obscured by the rush to derision on the part of the legions of hate-him-so-much-we'll-take-any-opportunity-to-hobble-him crowd. Then there is the fact that the Acela Corridor media bubble is part of the larger bicoastal celebrity milieu, the moral rot of which was fully and disgustingly exposed by the recent bringing to light of the 2005 Friars' Roast of Matt Lauer. The culture's arbiters of not only taste but what ought to concern the everyday citizen were shown to be the modern equivalent of the Roman sybarites who writhed in orgies as invading hordes from the north were descending.

As with so much else these days - from North Korean missile and nuclear-bomb tests to revelations of sexual predation in a variety of societal sectors - the momentum of revelations about the journalism world's ethical compromise is gathering.

 CNN has given us a couple of doozies.

There's the Jeff Sessions matter that cast a taint over his appointment as Attorney General last spring which the network has been forced to walk back:

The original report back in May blared that Sessions hadn’t listed those two meetings with Russia’s ambassador on his FBI disclosure forms prior to his Senate confirmation hearings. Now CNN admits that the FBI told Sessions not to list any of his dozens of meetings with other countries’ diplomats as part of his senatorial duties.

To be fair, the May story did note the Sessions camp’s claims about the FBI’s guidelines. But it also quoted a Beltway “expert” as saying that Sessions should’ve listed every meeting anyway.

What forced CNN to “clarify”? A right-wing group’s Freedom of Information request produced an FBI e-mail from March that proved Sessions right.

There's the matter of the date on which Donald Trump Jr. was offered encrypted Wikileaks information. It was actually September 14, 2016, after Wikileaks had made the files public, not September 4.

Speaking of getting dates wrong, that kind of blunder has caused a great deal of career damage for ABC's Brian Ross, who had told viewers that the Flynn meeting with Russians occurred while Trump was a candidate. Wrong. It occurred after the election. He's been suspended by the network.

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough tried to make his viewers think that Senator Orrin Hatch, who helped author the Children's Health Insurance Program, was talking about that very program when he remarked that he's irked by people who, having had trillions of government dollars lavished on them, "won't . . . lift a finger for themselves."

He was not saying that about CHIP. He was saying it about other programs that he was claiming take money away from CHIP, which is a point with which journalists are welcome to take issue, but is different than what they reported. 

Victor Davis Hanson makes a point that really ought to chill our spines. What all this boils down to is that journalists - those whose profession is ostensibly about giving the public the unvarnished, meticulously detailed truth about any given development - are driven by fealty to a "larger truth":

On the one hand, larger “truths” exist of cosmic social justice; on the other, bothersome so-called “facts” are largely predicated on the prejudices and resistance of the powerful who unduly give them authenticity. In such a postmodern environment, the “truth” that Donald Trump is purportedly a reactionary sexist and bigot is what mostly matters, not the bothersome details of counter-progressive narratives or stories that in one-dimensional fashion claim to follow rules of evidence, but instead serve an illiberal reality over a liberal one. What do a few dates on the calendar matter, concerning when Michael Flynn consulted with the Russians—given the larger truth that they surely once sought to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency?

These people know that for all the polarization between left and right - well, since 2015, make that among (rather than between) left, right and populist - most post-Americans have a superficial grasp at best on the daily workings of government and  politics and will rely on what they consume at a glance to provide them with an accurate take on reality.

And therein lies the ultimate dissonance. This is a swath of people completely sure of its moral superiority, its "noble" vision of a collectivist and secular future for the world, yet upon examination of, say, any of the above recent examples, or, for a full gaze at the essence of the matter, that 2005 Matt Lauer roast, we see that its core is nothing but relativism. Lies in service of the "grand vision" are perfectly acceptable. There is no absolute standard that demands adherence in this formulation. It's a bit like nailing Jell-O to the wall. The metaphor of the moving goal post also applies. You can't demand anything fixed from this crowd.

Yet trust in their product is still above zero.

Living a lie gets harder for defenders of this vision, but they haven't given up trying.