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The Media Wants Division, the People Want Peace
Cable news is in the business of division. For decades, they have sown discord whether Republican vs. Democrat, Black vs. White, Civilian vs. Cop. I stopped watching their nonsense years ago, saving me from endless hours of people screaming at each other over lurid B-roll.
When I interview a guest or meet someone new, I find areas of mutual agreement and build from there. I no longer try to score cheap points or emphasize flaws to judge. I have enough flaws of my own; once I correct all of those, perhaps I’ll have time to judge others. Don’t think I’ll get there for a while.
Apologies to my media betters, but I will not hate police officers and I will not hate victims of police brutality. I won’t hate the protestors or the security trying to keep the peace.
I will not hate people of any race, orientation, or gender. I will not hate my fellow Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, or Hindus. Don’t sweat it, atheists; I won’t hate you either.
Major media wants Democrats to hate Republicans, but I hate neither. I won’t hate the rich for having money or the poor for having none. If you live in city, suburb, or on the farm, I won’t hate you, whether in my country or any other.
I won’t hate Donald Trump. I won’t hate Joe Biden.
In two weeks, the cable networks transitioned from “we’re all in this together” to “let’s tear each other apart.” Many other media organs and cynical provocateurs gleefully pour gasoline on the anger and misery. Forgotten are the people over a week of unrest who have seen their businesses destroyed, their worship spaces vandalized, or have been assaulted and even killed. George Floyd, too, has been forgotten.
I know my media betters want me to hate my neighbor but, in my view, every one of you is an icon of Christ. I will continue to follow His command and love you instead.
Published in General
Dale Carnegie 101
It really is true, isn’t it? I posted a few years ago that cable news shows were no better than Jerry Springer. People being pitted against each other, screaming at each other. We are just one big Jerry Springer audience being egged on and egging on. Enough. I will not hate either.
Amen!
Haven’t watched it in YEARS…I cannot stand to watch it. The yelling, the goading, the stupidness. Yeah…it’s a “show” — it isn’t “news.” I like your characterization: The Business of Division.
Dammit! I wanted to be the first to say “Amen!”
The other thing is with the proliferation of cable channels, streaming services, on-demand video and other entertainment/information options, news outlets both broadcast and print are no longer basing their economic model on attracting large audiences of people from across the political spectrum.
Rob Long made the point a couple of years ago when the rebooted “Rosanne” (before Roseanne got booted) opened to huge ratings because the show tried to appeal to both liberals and conservatives that the 18 million viewers was a double-edged sword for ABC — great for that show’s ad rates, but bad because they had been telling advertisers you couldn’t get 18 million people to a sitcom or other prime-time show anymore. So just target the shows to the certain demographic and income levels and settle for 5-6 million viewers.
News is the same way. Most of the big media outlets are targeting a small demo of middle to upper-middle class urban viewers with disposable incomes, and that demo skews liberal, while on TV cable Fox’s demo is more rural/suburban. That creates situations where you’re trying to develop a core audience of loyal viewers, and since you’re trying to do it from only one side of the political spectrum, there’s no reason not to play to their biases and be divisive in order to increase brand loyalty (with Fox that’s truer in the early morning and the evening dayparts, while CNN and MSNBC are more across the board appealing to their base).
I don’t really know how you solve the problem, unless the channels start losing advertisers, and even then you have Twitter, which is viewed by fewer people, but make the cable channels look like William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line” by comparison, in terms of decorum. It’s probably going to have to get worse, before there’s any move within the public to make it get better.
Oh, I think we may be on the right track…
Healthy skepticism all around, according to the Knight Foundation. The people that do listen–those with the greatest fear and hate–are likely shouting about it the loudest on social media, and some are even paid to do so on various news programs. That these voices are highlighted only means there will be more turning away from “news sources” that feature them.
It’s not new, but my eyes were opened to just how bad it is by a recent member post describing his daughter’s fear of states opening up. The intensity he described…stoking that in someone is unconscionable.
For my part, my trust goes to people, including “the” people.
Shelton cartoon for 6/4/06
This cartoon is 14 years old. Hard to believe it’s even worse now then it was then.
A guy who is well known in this country called the media “the enemy of the people” recently. He bloviates and lies constantly, but it is hard to deny he is right about this. The media are actively pushing for more violence and destruction.
Oh, I think it’s much worse than “targeting” small, divided demos. The media has been shaping who we are as a people ever since Walter Cronkite. What we have now is agenda journalism, and the agenda is to move the country toward European (aka un-American) leftism. They’ve been quite successful.
If the media even recognizes the lies it tells (and I don’t believe self-awareness is a common human attribute), it excuses them as being in service to their great cause. These are Noble Lies, doncha know. The fruits of secularism and moral relativism. It will not end well for any of us.
If only liberals would adopt this conservative methodology . . .
For example:
Thanks, Jon. It’s difficult sometimes not to give in to hate, although my experience with actually hating is rare. Still, with the intensity growing and the divide deepening, we have to be conscious of the choices we make. And that also has to do with whether we choose to hate or love.
Critical Theory demands it’s all terrible
Until they’re in charge, and then as your ex-broadcast partner Stephen Miller says “time for a nap”
Is it only the media that divides?
This morning I was greeted by a large Black Lives Matter banner when I went to Amazon to just shop.
There seems now to be a significant segment of corporate America that thinks it can profit from division or is clueless about exactly what divides.
Crap. /my disgust at Amazon, not you.
As Bing Crosby told Rosemary Clooney in White Christmas, “everybody’s got an angle”.
Oh yeah, corporations big and small. I got into it on a Facebook page for a film that’s trying to get crowd funded. I’ve been following the page for while. But yesterday they decided they needed to “make a statement.” It was something rather bland, but immediately the page’s followers criticized the company for politicizing their project. The company replied that This Was Important, and while trying to reassure everyone that they were a company for everyone of all political beliefs, they were so clumsy about it, it was clear their social media director hated the President and believed that anyone who voted for him was a racist.
As you can imagine that didn’t make matters better.
I came in late to the conversation and tried to patiently explain that as a company attempting to crowdfund their project, it might not be a good idea to alienate potential sources of funding.
The response was typical of what I’ve seen from all sorts of businesses: Essentially “Yeah, well we don’t want your kind anyway!”
To which I responded, “Well, I just went from ‘mildly interested in your project’ to ‘aggressively hoping you fail.’ Good luck with the crowdfunding.”
I don’t understand businesses that think nothing of cutting off large portions of their customer base. I think it’s a generational thing.
There’s also this weird thing among lefties and left-leaners that they just assume everyone around them is a lefty, too. We’ve commented on that here before. So they just spew out divisive talking points on the assumption that all their friends will nod along in agreement. Until they don’t. At which point their impulse is to just cut off those friends.
But what’s starting to alarm me over the last week is seeing left-wing talking points coming from people who I know ought to know better. The media’s brainwashing is really, really good.
One of the Grand Poohbahs of the Lincoln Project has assured us that this is all an illusion:
I don’t even understand what he’s getting at. Can you enlighten me?
I think he’s saying that Antifa is made up, just as the Benghazi incident was made up … even though Mitt Romney brought the Benghazi incident up at the second debate in 2012, that led to Candy Crowley stepping in to defend Obama. So Wilson’s basically calling Romney a lying dog-faced pony soldier for thinking it was a real scandal.
(As for Antifa, Rick probably needs to talk to the lead prosecutor in the George Floyd case. He thinks it’s real and it’s spectacular….)
Don’t you know? THE Rick believes that you’re stupid. You voted for Donald Trump for all the wrong reasons. Hillary’s incompetence wasn’t as bad the Donald’s! Benghazi was no big deal. Her emails were no big deal. Her policies were no big deal. So what that she would have appointed even more judges that believed the Constitution is no big deal? THE Rick has latched on to the left and sucks that teat like a piglet. Every Trump supporter must be mocked with the following: “But Gorsuch!” “But her emails!” “But judges!”
Thank you, Jon. Very well put, as usual.
I can’t decide if the Media’s motive is promoting the leftist agenda or simply a “marketing” strategy for producing more views and clicks. In either case, they may be overplaying their hands and destroying their credibility.
I’d say marketing, but with ideology thrown in, especially among the outlets trying to appeal to a national audience. If it was pure marketing, you’d assume the media outlets would roughly split 50-50 on which audience they were targeting, because the U.S. is roughly a 50-50 country. But the outlets are lopsidedly going for the same demo of urban progressives with disposable income, which is why Fox wins the ratings wars (newspapers lurching far left are slightly more justified if they’re primarily serving a local, progressive market — the Washington Post is the official paper of the Beltway insiders since D.C. is a one-company town).
On the TV side, logic would say that ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC wouldn’t all be chasing the same small demo for their news viewership, but they do, with the two news channels chasing it to absurd levels (though it was interesting this week to hear that NBC is considering using their low-need primetime hours on CNBC to start trying to compete with Fox’s conservative prime-time lineup of pundit shows. Economically it makes sense to go where the biggest ratings are, but if the employees at NBC are anything like the angry, woke staff at The New York Times this week after the Tom Cotton op-ed, odds are they’ll have an open revolt on their hands if they try to make money by creating ‘Fox v2.0’, and will end up either abandoning the idea entirely, or filling the prime-time lineup with conservative fare like “The Rick Wilson Show”).
Useful idiots….still idiots
Even Fox News isn’t Fox News anymore, although it’s still the left’s whipping boy. But as a conservative, I neither watch it nor feel compelled to defend it. I enjoy the occasional Tucker Carlson rant, but that’s it, really.
The Fox bashers never really got the fact that there was a contrast between the news shows and the opinion shows in the evening. This of course is proof that they never actually watched the network, but just said what they were told to think.
As an aside, I think Carlson’s openers have been very good during our recent travails.
Lachlan Murdoch is sort of embarrassed by his network’s prime-time lineup and their morning show, but likes the money and knows why it’s coming in to News Corp. In contrast, Rupert tried to peddle Lachlan’s brother James off to Disney when they sold them 20th Century Fox and the other cable channels, because James is so far left he would have remade Fox News in the image of CNN or MSNBC, and then wondered a year later why all the profits were gone, or told angry shareholders profits are unimportant compared to promoting the proper narrative. Disney’s Bob Iger was too smart to fall for taking the Murdoch family’s Fredo as part of the deal, and James is off trying to make his fortune in eco-friendly packaging (timed perfectly for the demise of reusable packaging due to the COVID-19 fears).
Saw it. Who isn’t virtue signalling these days?