Ghazala Khan

Ignorance and nescience will kill us. Be not mistaken. It won’t be an extraneous force, nothing outside or foreign or beyond. Not Russia, China, imaginary terrorsists or intel-crafted bogeymen who hate our freedom and wish us ill. No, it will be through the concentrated and orchestrated mis- and disinformation efforts that occlude and obfuscate our worldview, that reduce elections to mindless popularity contests and voter initiatives on the irrelevant and inapposite. And who fuels this? Our Ted Baxter sockpuppet echo chamber cookie cutter bumper sticker media.

It’s by design. Edward R. Murrow warned, “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.” And while it might be at first a tad difficult to imagine that that delightful anchor or reporter is a cog in the misinformation wheel. Media propel war and justify murder and destruction. They ask no questions and repeat rather than report.

A massive computer hack of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations suggests most poignantly that his various nonprofit organizations are effectively involved in the purging and silencing of independent and (perhaps) radical thinkers as well as those increasingly rare iconoclasts in the patent goal of stripping the liberal class of its once glorious and necessary vitality. And why has this flown below the collective radar?

It’s hard to quantify the contamination of free thought that your mainstream media have exacted on this grand republic. But I’ll give it a hearty shot. The primary culprit is the cold-blooded impuissance and intellectual surrender. Perfidy meets mindless fecklessness. Sheeple plain and brutally simple.

Can you spot the difference? One of these is part of a trained circus act doubling as entertainment that some observers have even considered to be inhumane and exploitative in fact. The other is a seal. But be not mistaken, Jon Stewart is the king of timing. Had he attempted the Stewart bit now, it wouldn’t have taken off. And success is in great part due to his 300+ writers who gave us such gems as, “The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.” Wow. Move over Mort Sahl. Leibowitz is in the room.

How I see mainstream media news.
Believing ≠ Hoping. Look at what you believe you believe and what you know you know. You don’t. You wish and hope and trust. There’s a big difference, Sparky.
The lies your being handed are by design. “When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.” Thus spake Walter Lippmann.

“News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.” Evelyn Waugh

This approximates the problem. It’s much worse. It fails to take into account the role that the media play in softening up our collective psyche. Our beloved republic is witnessing a disintegration of the Left. The necessary counterbalance. A viable vision of direction. We’re unable to appreciate neoliberalism and statist perversions camouflaging as platform. No clue as to class warfare. We’re prisoners of an autocratic oligarchy. But don’t hurt our feelings or abrade our think skin. The SJWs will find you and you’ll taste their wrath.