A day before the national elections, Newsweek magazine released its cover. "Madam President" – the nation soon will get used to hearing
the title.
One week before Election Day, when people were due to march
to the polls to cast their ballots for -- or, as the pollsters tell us, AGAINST
Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump for President -- Dan Haar, business editor and
columnist for the Hartford Courant, found himself in the lion’s den and, like
Samson in Holy Scripture, began to layabout with his jawbone.
The Talk of Connecticut Election Luncheon audience was
prepared to accept Donald Trump as a flawed candidate. It’s a safe bet that the
majority in the audience felt Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton
had not received her due share of the lumps.
Mr. Haar, his chest expanding to the ball, came to read Mr. Trump out of
the human race. Here is a partial transcript of some questions put to Mr. Harr
and his answers:
Woman from audience: What is going on with the overt bias?
And, it didn’t used to be in the press. But it’s so flagrant today. So, what is
going on? And what is your opinion about
what is going on?
Dan Haar: The facts
are that the other person running for president [Donald Trump] is an admitted
sexual assaulter. He has ripped off virtually every person… (groans of disapproval from the audience)… the facts are, the
facts are that he has ripped off virtually every person [more groans] …
virtually every person who has ever passed his way [more groans] …
Panel moderator 1: He was asked the question. Let him
answer, please.
Haar: The facts are that the other person running for
president has declared bankruptcy four or six times, depending upon whether you
consider a sub-bankruptcy… Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say it
was six times (Did Mr. Harr mean to say
four times?) In each case, he left his creditors holding the bag…
Audience member 2: My question is: What are you going to do,
personally, to try to bring truth back to the press, so that we can sit there
and read the papers and believe the facts?
Haar: I feel badly for Republicans in this country, because
you got a candidate who’s just… his character is just not at the point where
he’s capable of leading any people. This is a man who is incapable of waking up
in the morning and being a human, as a person who tells the truth. And if the
press is guilty of taking sides against a person whose character is so faulty
as that he simply cannot be trusted on a day to day, minute to minute basis,
never mind that we get to the big issues of the country, then I’m proud to be
part of that press.” (groans from the
audience)
Moderator 2: Before you start shouting… I’m the one that
asked the question in the first place. And the question was asked not to bring
it up so you would think it was legitimate. It was to dispel the notion that
the media… no… I asked the question that began all this… that the media is
biased. Because the belief permeates the listenership in this room. And the
question was asked to put a nail in it once and for all. When somebody said
that he gets 91 percent that’s biased against Trump, at some point there’s a
level of personal that somebody accepts for that coverage, and if anybody
deserves bad press, it is Donald Trump, through his behavior. (loud groans) Bring it on…
Media bias is not news. Studies can be cited from the left
and the right to show a bias in favor of the left or right. Like love, one
knows bias when one sees it. The problem is that the viewer or news consumer also
may be biased. Bias is often in the eye of the beholder. We tolerate biases and
prejudices when they are supported by legitimate conclusions drawn from real-world premises. In
the case cited above, bias is glaringly obvious. Most media organizations admit
bias and then attempt to balance it in their news coverage. The modern idea is
to equalize bias by creating a staff that is evenly biased on both sides of the
ideological battlefield. The quaint notion of “fairness” has long been
discredited. A report written by a left of center journalist attempting
mightily to be fair will be much different than a report written by a right of
center journalist striving with equal passion to be fair.
Here in Connecticut, both the left and the right have
voices. But the voices are far from equal. As in George Orwell’s barnyard –
everyone is equal, but the pigs are MORE equal. The groans that met some of Mr.
Haar’s proudly strutted, flimsily supported biases – it simply is not true that Mr. Trump is
sub-human or that bankruptcy is the mark of Satan -- are understandable,
coming as they do from a right of center audience that is highly suspicious of
Connecticut’s left of center media.
The Hartford Courant’s editorial board has been pumping out
endorsements in favor of left of center Democratic politicians for decades. And
here we are, decades down the line -- another day older and deeper in debt. The endorsements are wearingly the same, election year after electionyear.
Reacting to the Courant’s current all-Democratic roster, one reader justly lamented, “Wouldn't
it have been less typing to simply say: The DNCourant [DNC = Democrat National
Committee] endorsed a straight D ticket.” Perhaps the reader, motivated no doubt by blinding anger, was in attendance
at the The Talk of Connecticut Election Luncheon.
In its combative mode, the left of center media in
Connecticut simply is not listening to roiling murmurs outside its cubicles.
That is why the legacy media has not properly understood the two populist
upheavals – Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders – that have now retired behind the
veil. The hideous strength of both is a measure of the weakness of traditional
political forms: the family (read Aristotle’s “Politics,” in which the family
is treated as the central political unit), the extended family
(your uncle’s politics matter), the neighborhood, civic organizations
(including churches), the municipality, the state, political parties and the
country, which under the administration of progressive regimes shall be
border-less, i.e. meaningless because undefined. Frames contain pictures, words are framed by definitions and nations are defined by borders. Walls not only make good
neighbors; they make meaning. All this and more lies beyond the ken of
journalists in boxes. A breath of it ruffled but did not challenge Mr. Haar’s
prefabricated notions as he put behind him The Talk of Connecticut Election Luncheon and returned
to the comfort of settled opinion at his job site.
The settled opinion at the Courant, which Mr. Haar shares,
is that anger on the right has overruled right reason. The left is reasonable,
the right intemperate.
But be of good cheer: The sun has risen on the gloom and anger of the right. The
catastrophe of Mr. Trump has been narrowly averted, and now that Madam
President will occupy the White House -- along with her consort, who has been plausibly accused of rape -- “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds" (Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles),” as Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss used to say.
Comments