Pravda, the Volkische Beobachter, and Us

Last week as the investigation into possible crimes and cover ups by members of the Obama administration in the Fast and Furious  fiasco reached the point of a likely contempt of congress citation against the attorney general of the United States and claims of executive privilege by the president, various organizations in the traditional media found it necessary to mention  the issue for the first or almost the first time.  A few days before, they had virtually dropped coverage of various leaks from the administration on issues of national security , despite  these leaks dwarfing in importance the Valerie Plame story that they obsessed over for months during the Bush administration. Other examples of bias are readily available. It has almost reached the point with these organizations that  people who lived under the Soviets mention with regard to Pravda: one had to guess what was really happening not only by what was printed but by what was oddly never mentioned. Nor does their idolatry and cult of personality for  their chosen leader fall very much short of what was presented as news in the Beobachter of the 1930’s.  

None of these observations is news, of course. That most  members of the major traditional media in the United States are both very biased and often quite  dishonest about it seems to me to be sufficiently clear that any  claims they make of a lack of bias can be viewed fairly as further  evidence of a lack of honesty. They favor the  left  as to  politics, the bureaucratic as to social organization, the Northeast coast as to region,  post modern Europe as to ideal, and almost any thought or action of Barack Obama’s as to divinity.  They are contemptuous of limited government in politics, individualism and spontaneity  in social organization,  every region of the country between the Hudson River and the San Andreas Fault (except for Chicago and sometimes  the Ninth Ward in New Orleans),  and any notion of American exceptionalism.  They tend to be very charitably disposed toward  anti-American foreign dictators and wary and suspicious of America’s armed forces.   Christian conservatives claim they  are also hostile to religion, and many probably are. However  given their swooning  over Islam and  fawning embracing of any left wing clergyman they can find anywhere on the planet, anti-religious sentiment seems less consistent than their other prejudices and  perhaps mainly only  part of a general hostility to anything viewable as traditionally American.  

There has always been bias in the American press. Before World War II there were known Democratic newspapers and known Republican newspapers, and they  placed their straightforwardly partisan slant on their reporting.  (It is said that to get an accurate version of what was  said in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, one would have to go to a Democratic paper for Lincoln’s statements and a Republican paper for Douglas’s, because papers  on each side cleaned up their guy’s diction and syntax to make him sound better.)  A difference  that makes the bias of America’s present traditional media so unpleasant is the way it is coupled with pervasive dishonesty . They pretend to be objective and seem to expect people to be foolish enough to take them at their word. That insults people’s intelligence and should make them angry.