During a recent appearance on CNN, senior reporter for media and politics Dylan Byers publicly spoke aloud something that the rest of us already knew (video via MRC):
“There’s this conversation that’s happening among people following the news industry, which is how can we bridge that sort of gap between all of those conservatives who don’t trust the media, and get them to start knowing that, you know, we’re acting in good faith, with good intentions? Maybe you can’t, because they’re not even listening. From the second, it’s not as if they’re reading the article and considering it, or listening the audio and considering it. They’re just not paying attention to it, because they don’t trust us.
And this, by the way, you look at the tapes of Trump there. Two things have happened: One, over the course of several decades, the conservatives have done a masterful job at capitalizing the waning trust in media and using it to their advantage. But a second thing has happened, too, which is that, on occasion, more than the media would probably like to admit, we have not told the story of conservative Americans, disenfranchised Americans, who believe that they are losing their country.
The story we have largely been telling is a story that is more or less in step with the arc of history as defined by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. That does not mean we favor them to win. It just means that sort of vision of a progressive future, a global future, and that is not one that resonates with so many conservative American voters.
And so there is this chasm, and no one exploited it as well as Donald Trump did, and no one made it as violent and aggressive and sinister as Donald Trump did, and that laid the foundation for the sorts of incidents that happened saw last night.”
Byers gets it – he’s tiptoeing around the main crux of the issue without getting right to its heart, but he’s almost right there. The problem with the disconnect – the “chasm” as he describes it – between the Right & the MSM is that the Right has rejected the premise of the Left’s argument – thus, any news “story” or “analysis” done on almost any issue will be rejected by the Right.
The MSM approaches these issues holding the Leftist worldview as not only factual, but logical and normative – it frames everything they do. Of course a story on Planned Parenthood is going to be framed as an “attack on women’s reproductive rights”. They don’t view the pro-life perspective as legitimate, or at the very best, they view it as merely a misguided, emotional response formed by misunderstanding of science, skewed patriarchal concepts, and outdated, narrow-minded fundamentalist beliefs.
The Left assumes that the long, almost uninterrupted, slow but steady march toward secularism, multiculturalism, socialism and globalism not only proves its inevitability but its rightness. If it’s happening, and it doesn’t seem to be stopping, and most people accept it, and all the right people say they like it – it must be good.
This is the mindset from which they begin, the paradigm from which they emerge – the prism through which they view the world, and it shapes everything they see, hear and experience, and thus everything they say.
This is one reason the Left rejects those who were once hailed as heroes and statesmen. The issue is not whether or not the person in question contributed something of value to society and civilization, but rather, does the person in question help to advance the already established agenda, or do they present a hindrance to advancing the agenda?
This is why someone like Fredrick Douglass, long hailed almost universally by generations of Americans can be set aside so casually and without much fanfare: he doesn’t advance the agenda – he doesn’t maintain the paradigm.
Regardless of his race, regardless of his background, regardless of his place in history, his story does not serve the narrative; rather, he is problematic – a Republican who upheld beliefs in self-reliance, entrepreneurialism, and a disdain for victimhood – thus he must be set aside, minimized and supplanted.
Taking these factors into account, it becomes unsurprising that a majority of Americans not only distrust the media, but consider them to be “fake news.” Americans hear their fellow pro-life advocates referred to as “anti-abortion activists”, and their efforts to bring abortion to an end as “extreme”, or infringing upon a “woman’s rights.” They see President Trump withdraw from the disastrous Paris Climate Accord and the Left goes ballistic, claiming that it’s the “biggest foreign policy error since the Iraq War”, or even a “traitorous act of war” and more.
These unhinged reactions demonstrate to the vast majority of Americans the disconnect between committed, Leftist activism and the mainstream of rational thought. Opposition to the Left’s pet projects – abortion, climate change, secularization, globalization – is so intolerable it not only must be crushed immediately, but the opposite must be extolled, backed up by authorities and promulgated in the schools. This in turn strengthens the wall of resistance to their message – which is why they’ve become so frantic and panicked recently.
That the Left has begun to recognize that their message no longer resonates and no longer penetrates the conscience of most Americans will not likely result in a change of heart, leading them to abandon failed, harmful policies – that would be a wonderful outcome. Instead, the left and their acolytes in the media will continue working to support their agenda by relabeling, repackaging and regurgitating the same old garbage they’ve been peddling for ages.
But now, we’re onto them.
