What Motivates Morning Sedition?

Note: This post was originally written for Gates of Vienna; I intended to post it late last night. Now there’s no telling when (if ever) it can be published there, so I’m posting here instead. Fortunately, the earlier posts at GoV are still available and open to comments.

The funny thing is that our Google ranking is still very high. Blogger is an arm of Google, so the left hand must not know what the far left hand is doing…

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Dymphna and I live in the back of beyond. As a matter of fact, we have to drive about fifteen miles to get to the back of beyond. From there it’s still quite a hike to actual civilization.

So, back before the internet, our primary source of information was beamed into our home by the powerful state-supported transmitters of public radio. That is, we had to get most of our news from — ugh! — NPR.

We developed an amusing family terminology to help us bear up under the load of what we listened to. “Morning Edition” became “Morning Sedition”, and the Saturday version was “Weakened Condition.” We awaited with a special frisson of distaste the commentary dished out by people like Daniel Schorr.

Dymphna had a greater tolerance for this dreck than I, and from time to time I’d have to leave the room in disgust, muttering, “I can’t take any more of this s**t.”

NPR is the perfect distillation of Essence of MSM. All of the bias, prejudice, sanctimony, and preening self-righteousness, plus an extra dose of hauteur, an additional soupçon of élitism, but none of those vulgar commercials! Not a hint of capitalism sullies the pristine perfection of their progressive stance.

These thoughts were brought to mind by a comment left on Monday’s post by whiskey_199:

The reason Jihadist propaganda spreads so easily on the Media is because the Media and the interconnected/intermarried elites are profoundly threatened by actually fighting back against an enemy. Any enemy. Invaders from Mars would probably provoke the same reaction.

Consider Time’s Matt Cooper. One of the reporters in the Plame-Libby affair. Married to Hillary Clinton’s Chief of Staff. Now envision a world where America and the West fights back against jihad and terror designed to make non-Muslims submit to Islam.

Where would Matt Cooper and his wife fit in? What important positions of power would they occupy? The answer is none at all, power would shift from hereditary families to 20 year old Lance Corporals, 22 year old Sergeants, and of course generals and the like. Plus a lot of pocket-protector wearing engineers who went to Carnegie Mellon, not Yale.

This is why jihad has been so effective in controlling media organizations. They want to be controlled because jihad, terror, and submitting to Islam is in their terms “the cost of doing business in the global economy.” A mere bagatelle to lose a few skyscrapers. Commuters. And so on.

Therefore the necessary part of counter-jihad must be to expose the elites for their anti-populist, anti-average person sentiment and make them known for their hatred/fear of the average person.

Whiskey’s got a good point there. He’s right, but it’s only a part of the story.

First of all, if we ever really fight back, it will not be primarily using our military power.

Our armed forces are unparalleled. They are the greatest in history. But if they were all that were required, the war would already be over and done with. Iran, Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula would be a smoking wasteland, and no ragtag band of insurgents anywhere in the world would ever consider trifling with America again.

Obviously, military power is not the issue. Political will is the issue, and in that crucial theatre we are outgunned and outmanned by a crew of medieval thugs armed with bomb belts and AK-47s.

According to a famous legend, the Duke of Wellington said, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” The Long War, by contrast, will be won or lost in the sound bites from CNN, on the crawl ribbon at Fox News, and within the intricate lattice of internet sites.

We’re not ahead in this war, but some of us at least are waking up to the true nature of the conflict.

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Just for the sake of argument, let’s look at what motivates Matt Cooper and Nina Totenberg and Bob Siegel. Have they really decided that submitting to Islam is “the cost of doing business in the global economy”? Are they focused enough, intelligent enough, and well enough educated to reach such conclusions?

My personal experience with the media has been limited mainly to personalities from local radio, TV, and newspapers. These encounters have made me conclude that media people are too shallow of thinking, too poorly-educated, and too narrow in their experience to reach conclusions as sophisticated as those whiskey_199 proposes.

Instead, I’ll go out on a limb and offer some guesses on what might motivate the knee-jerk cannon fodder of the MSM:

1.		The herd mentality. Members of the MSM, like those of any other religious orthodoxy, are bound very tightly by groupthink. Being put outside the pale is what one fears most. Therefore, no one strays from the “Bush-lied-people-died-and-Iraq-is-Vietnam” meme no matter how much evidence intrudes. The stakes are simply too high.
2.		The penalties for apostasy. As has been noted here previously, straying from orthodoxy in the media and literary world brings the awful risk of “You’ll never work in this town again.” If you depend on MSM checks to pay the rent and feed your kids, this tends to concentrate the mind.
3.		Simple snobbery. The desire not to be a member of the great unwashed can outweigh everything else. No one, after all, wants to be confused with the slack-jawed slope-browed bigoted yokels who actually think conservative thoughts.
4.		Knee-jerk pacifism. Leftover and simple-minded Christian thinking, but without any vestige of remaining Christian belief, can lead well-meaning people to the sincere belief that no violence is ever justified, anywhere, anytime. When the wild-eyed zealot finally reaches their doorways, ready to inflict bodily harm, the same well-meaning folk will dial 911 in hopes of summoning rough men ready to do violence on their behalf, not realizing that such men no longer exist, but have been banished by a combination of gun control, birth control, and emasculating thought control dispensed by schools and other public institutions. By then it will be too late.
5.		Irresistible schadenfreude. Bringing down a Republican administration (and conservatives in general) is just too good an opportunity to pass up, no matter the consequences. Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!

These are some of the more plausible motives that I can think of. If readers can come up with additional ones, please list them in the comments.

The treason of the mainstream media is a complex and subtle process. Trying to fit it into a simple pattern does not help our analysis, and can lead to later miscalculations as we wage this 4GW against them.

Let’s not underestimate the enemy.