Friday, September 23, 2016

They Do it for the Love They Dare Not Blame

The Saddam-era Iraqi press at least had the excuse of being threatened with their death or the death of their families for being sycophantic supporters of his regime. What's our media's excuse?

This complaint about Trump's dislike of the media is rich, coming from CNN (quoting Breitbart):

Sporting a look of concern, [Ashleigh] Banfield gazed into the camera and asked plaintively, “Why so much cheering?” She then said of the excited Trump supporters heard on the video clip, “Do people not realize, or are they forgetting the other critical element of it, either you have a media, or you have what I witnessed in Saddam’s era, and the Libyan’s era, where you never got to actually call yourself press or you’d go to jail for it.”

Banfield essentially insisted that if you criticize a biased press you are necessarily imposing a Saddam-like tyranny on America.

That's a shocking lack of nuance between questioning the even-handedness of our media and imposing a dictatorial regime with controlled media, isn't it? Sheesh, I thought I was bad at nuance!

But at least the Iraqi media under Saddam was both paid by the regime and under threat from the government's security apparatus.

What the excuse of our "independent" media that loves and excuses Democratic-run government (or those who want to run the government) with a devotion that no compliant Iraqi journalist could match:



Granted, now our media usually doesn't face the threat of going to jail if they get out of line from the left-leaning narrative. They just don't get to go to the right cocktail parties and other social events if they dissent.

Oh, and Ed Driscoll comments about that resisting government tyranny:

Gee, you mean the Saddam Hussein that former CNN president Eason Jordan admitted in April of 2003 that CNN was in bed with so that it could have “Live from Baghdad” appear on its Chyrons? The Saddam Hussein who when asked in 2000 if he could be described as evil, CNN founder Ted Turner replied, “I’m not sure that I know enough to be able to answer that question,” as quoted by Ken Auletta of the New Yorker?

And since when did CNN ever worry about fighting tyranny in the world, let alone America? From Saddam to Castro to Kim Jong Il, there aren’t many dictators whom CNN hasn’t gushed over.

Well, not many anti-American dictators, to be more precise.

So, do we have a media under the Banfield standard?