The Masquerade is over by Charlie Martin

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

The Masquerade is Over by Charlie Martin

 

I’ve wanted to revive the term “yellow journalism” for a while. It originally came from the “newspaper wars” between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, and was named for the comic strip The Yellow Kid, which eventually ran in both papers. Both papers were known for outrageous and inflammatory headlines and a certain respect for facts, although the story of Hearst’s promise to Frederic Remington — “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war” — is itself apparently a myth and a bit of yellow journalism.

But the distinction between “respectable journalism” and “yellow journalism” has always been less than its reputation would suggest — going back to Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize for his heavily propagandized coverage of the Soviet Union and the Holodomor famine that killed 10 million Ukrainians. The Pulitzer, considered the non plus ultra of journalistic honors, is actually named for one of the originators of yellow journalism.

Still, legacy media like the New York Times and the “respectable” major news networks tried to maintain the the fiction that they strove for fair and objective reporting, and that anyone who claimed otherwise was trying to “work the refs” and revealing their own bias.

Then along came Fox News. Fox did two unheard of things: first, it drew a careful distinction between its daytime news coverage, and its nighttime opinion; second, taking a markedly more politically conservative tack in that opinion coverage.

Arguably, there was a third distinction, because by trying to actually cover the news fairly in the daytime hours, they looked politically conservative compared to the news coverage on the other networks.

And then along came Trump.

Trump was a massive shock to the system. he had billions of dollars of his own. There had been other unconventional candidates, like John Anderson, and more notably H. Ross Perot. Perot also had plenty of his own money, but he tried running as a third party candidate. Trump correctly recognized that the US election system was heavily oriented to the two major parties, and had been since before the Civil War. Rather than swim upstream like Perot, he decided to run for a major party’s nomination.

Besides the third-party handicap, Perot had a gratingly whiny nasal voice and the stage presence of a tobacco auctioneer or carnival huckster.

Trump, by contrast, had more than a decade as a reality-show fixture in The Apprentice, and numerous cameos in film and making fun of himself in appearances in places like Saturday Night Live. He was engagingly willing to be the butt of their jokes and even make fun of himself. Unlike Perot, his presence in the media was not immediately painful.

Then he ran for president, and what’s worse, ran for the Republican nomination, even though his policies were more like a Truman Democrat or an early FDR.

At first, the legacy media saw him as a bit of a buffoon, a sideshow but interesting. And besides, what chance did he have against the Obama machine and against Hillary Clinton, when it was clearly her turn?

So Trump got an immense amount of “earned media” — publicity gained through something other than paid advertising. It’s publicity you don’t have to pay for.

Then.

He won.

The nomination.

… and the legacy media turned on a dime. He wasn’t an amusing buffoon any longer, he was a dangerous demagogue. At the same time (we now know) the full power of the Obama Administration and much of the Intelligence Community turned to undermining his campaign and preventing his election.

And the son of a bitch won anyway.

This was simply and obviously unacceptable. Something must be done.

At this point, the traditional categories started to break down. No matter their political inclinations, the embedded bureaucracy and a good part of the political commentariat turned out to be utterly conservative in the old-fashioned sense of a desire to preserve and maintain the status quo ante — change as change was bad, and particularly change from outside the hallowed Ivy League idea of acceptable thought. And never mind that Trump, as a graduate of Penn, was an Ivy Leaguer himself — Penn was only a sort of junior varsity of the Ivy League. Besides, Trump was brash, had a Queens accent, and while okay, he was rich, he had made that money by building things, instead of something respectable like financing corporate takeovers or international currency manipulation.

He was a threat to the world view of the embedded and conservative — in the old sense — power structure. He was, simply, “not our kind.”

At that point, the masks must come off, and they did. The New York Times was calling for resistance in the first weeks of Trump’s first term. In the meantime, we now know, highly-placed FBI agents were reassuring one another that they would stop Trump somehow, while the Obama Administration and the Clinton Campaign were doing everything, legally or otherwise, to attack Trump.

Some examples — Jorge Ramos said in 2015 that “neutrality is not an option.” Christian Amanpour argued that journalists couldn’t remain objective in November 2016, just days after the election. The Washington Post changed their slogan to “Democracy Dies In Darkness” in February of 2017, and columnists like Charles Blow in the New York Times was urging a fight, not just reporting.

To those of us of a conservative bent — although I maintain I’m not a conservative, just an 18th century liberal — this wasn’t a surprise, going back to the coverage of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. The difference was that Trump, with his combination of in-your-face advocacy and refusal to follow the Acela Corridor line, finally forced the legacy media to remove its masks. It is, and has always been, advocacy media and not objective at all.

80 thoughts on “The Masquerade is over by Charlie Martin”

  2. If you ask them, the masquerade is over when they say it’s over. Currently they are just trying to change masks. The real question is who is going to stay at the ball and who is going to leave?

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      1. If you’ve had anything to do with performing arts stagecraft, you will have absorbed this primary rule: Thou shalt not walk upstage of a backdrop curtain. You’ll cause it to ripple, distracting from that which the punters are paying to see.

        Liked by 2 people

        2. Sometimes you have to (I’m thinking of a venue which was converted from a school and essentially has *no* backstage and above five feet between the scrim and the back wall, which is the only way to get to the far side of the stage for an entrance.)

          The trick is to be slow and careful, and watch your costume.

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          1. I’m remembering one incident. I worked for Otto, the backstage pass makers. So I got to spend a LOT of time around big-time rock shows. One fine summer day, the company played host to Night Ranger (who were my client). We played a game of softball with them and their crew. Had a pizza party, and, of course, went to their show. So a bunch of us were on the stage (albeit upstage of the back drape) just after sound check. Of course, we all went across the stage house by going through the dressing room corridor. But one of my colleagues, got blocked by traffic (somebody moving a big road case) and decided to duck into the Stage Right door. At that exact moment, the band went onstage. And old Bob scuttled across the stage, making the back drape ripple like in a wind. He never lived that down.

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    2. No doubt they believe that.

      But they are the only ones there. The orchestra has packed up and gone home. The staff has cleared away the buffet and tables, and the janitors have arrived to mop the floor, but still they pretend it isn’t over.

      They may some day gain a privileged glimpse of the bleeding obvious, but today is not that day. Tomorrow doesn’t look good either …

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  3. Concur.

    University side is also an aspect that has been on my mind.

    For good or for ill, the universities have long had a bunch of people who were often crazy, and who were often theory obsessive.

    Lots of people whose draw to the university involves social status, or a sense of magic for what can be obtained from the books.

    (There are at least three different things I use the term magic for, in this area, and can be very different ideas. One, your sociological or anthropological understanding of magic, like your sociological or anthropological understanding of religion. Two, magical thinking as found in or as applied to, say, the theory of physics or the theory of mathematics. Three, the inner psychological sense, the psychological power or psychological high that we can learn to have for specific experiences. Much of my adult life has arguably been a result of optimizing for, or seeking, mental experiences.)

    Universities still have a mix of people. Good, evil, crazy, sane, humanities, engineering, and so forth. Wide wide range of people. (Distribution could be argued, but I don’t know. Have impressions, but do not know anything.)

    Accounting, Engineering, Law and Medicine have worn the mask of professions, of being bodies of trained experts who make decisions within their competence based on professional knowledge and data.

    There is some conflicting information.

    Obvious remedy is let the truth be known, let justice be done, and let an occupation’s place within society be adjusted to match their real deliverables.

    I’m just not sure what I care about, not just what it means to me, and not sure what I should do.

    I’m maybe a little bit physically sick, my guts do not seem to be working well. Maybe self-inflicted, psychologically, from stress.

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    1. Universities are proof of the concept of those who can, do, those who can’t teach; at least as far as tenured professors are concerned, and especially in non-STEM classes. You want facts, practicality, and lower progressive exposure, look at the instructors hired for STEM classes. You’ll find a lot of them are engineers and businesspeople who actually work for a living and teach as a sideline for financing hobbies or pin money. And they’re only teaching one or two courses per semester, usually at night.

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        1. Back in the early 1970’s, I was one (of two) in a differential geometry class (a synthesis of differential equations and Euclidian geometry [fascinating]). The instructor (also a hippie) gave a take home final to do any 10 of 12 questions (each taking a couple or more days to do and with the assurance that no one else on God’s Earth would be able to help you with them). A couple class periods later he came in and said we didn’t have to do Question 2 because he couldn’t do it either. I knew then that I had arrived at a higher plane.

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      2. The MSEE program at Santa Clara U was partly staffed by engineers/mathematicians doing teaching as a side gig. They ran it early-bird, 7AM to 9AM, focussing on working engineers. They also did a law school version in the evenings, based on the same concept.

        (Results valid in the late 1980s. Mileage may vary.)

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        1. Late ’80s. Undergrad CS classes. Professors had their *own books (publish or perish) for coarse work. But at least back then those actually in the trenches working professionally could trigger innocent (honestly!) questions that spanned discussions in a whole different direction. One was “how to rein in project creep, at various stages?” Didn’t come up with a solution then either.

          (*) So did the FM profs but at least those were university published and “put in your own notebook lab type” books. A lot less expensive. Was also interesting to see those same books on the desk of other foresters who graduated from other programs across the US. When I saw the books the foresters asked if I’d used them too. Well yes, also had the authors as professors.

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          1. I had a couple of textbooks written by the professor who taught the class. One undergrad class, though the book was quite good, and it seems to have had good impact through the semiconductor industry (Ben Streetman, Solid State Electronic Devices).

            The other was a text on grad-level Linear Algebra (where I discovered that soft-voiced instructor and major hearing problems ==> unhappy RCPete) written by the then-head of the college’s department (along with his brothers). The book was officially out of print, but Dr. S got copies printed off each year and sold through the Santa Clara U bookstore. I didn’t get the “good” doctor’s sessions; though he was Chinese, he would have made a good Prussian officer. Word was, one did not show up late to his lectures. (Might have learned more if his voice matched his personality; his minion did the spring quarter, and was the only one doing the summer session, and I really wanted to get it out of the way.)

            Got the hearing fixed (for values) after graduation. Sigh.

            The best grad instructor (did 4 classes with him) didn’t use a textbook at all, but he distributed packets of notes. He’d also use old exams as problem sets, which worked fairly well. Anybody who was surprised in his exams was a damnfool.

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      3. When the Reader got his MBA at night (then medium sized defense contractor paid for it) roughly half the instructors were executives with local companies. They imparted a lot of useful knowledge beyond the course material. Now unfortunately, business schools are full of academics pumping DEI. They wouldn’t dream of letting an actual executive sully their campus.

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  4. Supposedly, the media is a self-policing group with integrity as their most important task. Instead, it’s filled with self-important buffoons pontificating on matters they wouldn’t understand if they bit them on the butt. The legacy of the media is you can’t really trust them, have to dig through mountains of horse manure to find the kernels of truth, and wonder if you’ll ever really be informed.

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    1. The media are a corollary to Brandolini’s Law. It requires orders of magnitude of time and effort to sift through their bullshit for facts than it is worth.

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    2. They are that…if “integrity” is understood to mean leftist ideology; or, maybe even more accurate than that, anything that will get them invited to the rich kid’s parties.

      Every once in a while they get the facts right and tell the truth, but they are NEVER to be trusted. With them, Reagan’s “trust but verify” needs to be “distrust and ignore…except when you need to know what your mortal enemies think.”

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Nah. Excavators are limited in movement. What you need is a 37mm or 40mm drum magazine grenade launcher firing wooden or hard rubber batons. At about 5′ distance. Mobility, ease of carry, fun sound and just fun to shoot.

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        1. Ah, but a skilled operator with a well-tuned machine can do quite interesting things with an excavator. “Back slapping” with the excavator claw without causing internal hemorrhage is quite possible, technically speaking, even if technically difficult.

          Might I volunteer a few fools for the job? Say, some masked individuals at “peaceful protests” or the like? Surely for only scientific experimentation, of course. I’m sure such lovers of “the science” would be happy to jump at the opportunity!

          Liked by 1 person

  6. As an adult, I pretty much knew that the National Establishment Media had a liberalish bent – and I could work around that: it was just the way it was, right up until the period after 9-11. Then the liberal slant of reporters and reporting couldn’t be overlooked, and by the time of Obama’s election and the Tea Party, our N-E-M became downright partisan … and continued to be ever more so, and shrill with it. The final straw breaking the back of credibility is how they deliberately contrived to cover for Biden’s obvious mental decline over the last four years.

    They kept on denying what we could see right in front of us: “Who are you going to believe, us, or your lying eyes?”

    Liked by 1 person

    1. It’s part of why Rush was so popular. I remember hearing him and thinking, “He’s saying just what I’ve been thinking!”

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  7. It wasn’t so much yellow, it was GOLD!

    Lots of gold in them there lies!

    But now that people can check sources and use other means to find out what’s going on, the goldmine is drying up.

    Sad.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Yeah, they’re knocking down the “tofu” buildings that no one has ever lived in, built with literal sand instead of concrete and plastic “reinforcing bar”. There’s a popular video of a guy tying a knot in a 1″ thick rebar with his bare hands. That’s why the “earthquake proof” Chinese building in Thailand collapsed in the recent earthquake when nothing else in town did. Plastic rebar, concrete with no cement in it. So lucky that the earthquake didn’t come a year later, when the building was occupied.

      But people who bought all those tofu condos in China in good faith are still paying the mortgages, even as the buildings fall down. So I’d say the Chinese Communist Party is sitting on a really -big- pile of gunpowder these days. I know they do not give a f- about the lives (and deaths!) of Chinese citizens, but sooner or later something’s going to happen that they can’t cover up.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. Most of the Chinese who bought condominiums in buildings like those did so as speculation, and not as their primary residence. And the reason why there’s so much real estate speculation is because it was the only practical investment option for people in China who wanted to do something productive with their extra cash.

        Liked by 2 people

      3. Home Desperate was selling plastic rebar a few years ago during Covidiocy. Might have been easier to get Chinesium plastic rather than Indian steel at the time. I couldn’t figure out what it would be useful for, so got steel.

        Looked up tofu-dreg construction. Yikes! Using reeds instead of rebar, that’s impressive, not in a favorable way…

        Liked by 1 person

      1. They’re so bad that many have fallen over on their own. There’s a video from a couple years ago of a whole row of them that toppled over like dominoes. No foundations. They settled a bit and frigging well tipped over.

        But I do agree, the workmen seem as bad at demolition as they were at construction.

        That’s because this is all Maskirovka. Millions of new buildings, roads, bridges, make the Chinese Communist Party look wealthy, strong, industrious, all the good things. They were built so fast, it was like a miracle.

        Built for SHOW. Built to fool the West -and- the Chinese population into investing their money. Like a movie set, the whole thing is concrete sprayed on Styrofoam and chicken wire with nothing inside.

        New excuse, blame local corruption and knock the worst examples down before they fall down in a stiff breeze. All done because if they fall down it will LOOK bad.

        It’s hard for Westerners to understand exactly how much Communists do not care -at-all- about the people in their countries. A building falls down because of corrupt practices? Kills a thousand people? They will put up tarps around the rubble so no one can take video and shoot anyone who climbs out of the wreckage. The whole thing will be shoveled up and carted off under cover of darkness. Next day there will nothing but an empty lot, and records will be altered to show there was never a building there.

        That’s who they are. Their influence in Canada is plain to see.

        Example from today: https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2025/04/11/great-success-69/

        General Motors plant in Ingersol Ont. to close, because no market for electric vans the Proving of Ontario and the feds mandated them to build. All for show. All of it.

        Liked by 1 person

  9. “… and the legacy media turned on a dime.”

    Yes they did, and we all saw them do it. They did the one thing that I read in 1984 that I never really believed.

    Orwell wrote that scene where the “Two Minute Hate” started with a guy being the hero, and halfway through they switched it and the guy became the villain. When I read it, I said to myself “Self, maybe they could whip up a crowd that way, but wouldn’t all those people -remember- last week when the new Bad Guy was a good guy?”

    Well yeah, they would. And we do. The thing is, they just keep right on lying. I guess they think it’s working or something.

    I came to my deep distrust of the legacy media the hard way, by evidence. Once upon a time in the 1980s I liked to go shooting (in Canada, right? Incredible that such a thing was allowed!) and I -never- understood why “Take A Reporter To The Range Day” never resulted in any change to the “GUNS ARE BAD!!!” narrative on TV and in the papers.

    I also liked motorcycles (rebel, to the bone, that’s me) and I saw the same thing in the media. Bikers were scum, it didn’t matter how many reporters got invited to ride along on family day with the local touring club, or invited to poker runs, motocross, trials events, whatever. Nothing made any difference.

    It wasn’t until I left Canada entirely and lived in the USA for a few years that I realized that they were just lying. That’s all. The outreach, the community events, the barrels of ink and millions of dollars spent on marketing, all wasted. Nothing was going to make them change, because they were deliberately lying.

    Now, not completely wasted because EVERYBODY ELSE remembered the fun poker run and the fun day of plinking cans at the range, and so there built this vague feeling of discomfort that something was wrong.

    Fast forward to February this year, and we find out what’s been going on behind our backs all this time. US-AID. Established in the 1960s, it was the decision making organ behind The Narrative. It provided the raw money that allowed the Lamestream Media to consistently lie about a whole host of things. And made them all turn on a dime when #OrangeManBad won the Republican nomination fair and square.

    If there was a true Free Market in ideas and news, media outlets that consistently (and obviously) lied would go out of business. It used to happen with newspapers regularly. There’d be a scandal, some paper would be caught lying, and their competitors would pound them into receivership.

    Which all stopped in the 1960s/70s, because all the papers and TV were all saying the same things. Because some of them were paid to say it, and the rest of them knew enough to go along with the gag. (And you can tell this is true because of the traffic liberal BS sites get vs. conservative non-BS sites. According to Hoyt vs. China Mike, there’s a good comparison I’d say. One has genuine hits, the other gets all its traffic from Chinese web bots.)

    But now there is the Internet, where curmudgeons like The Phantom can put up a little blog, for free, and that little blog can accumulate eyeballs on posts like the one I did about Brinelling in windmills. Anybody who wants to can wonder about all those dead windmills in hundred-billion-dollar power projects, look it up, and find out what happened. And then ask their Liberal Member of Parliament why they are forking out billions for windmills that break so easy.

    The mainstream media does not cover Brinelling. That is not an accident. But I do. Because I’m a cranky old biker b@stard with some time on my hands, and I’m tired of their BS.

    Multiply by news sites that have millions upon millions of views, and you’ve really got something. There’s a lot of people asking a lot of pointed questions lately, and you can see the Liberal Party of Canada -floundering- in this election campaign trying to lie deny and handwave away the truth about what they’ve been doing and what they plan to do.

    And that is the difference between now and the 1980s. Now we can all SEE them lie.

    And now Uncle Sugar’s cookie jar has been emptied too. That’s going to have some effects going forward, as the liars stop getting paid for lying. Strongly doubt those scum are going to keep doing it for free.

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    1. There is an incident (someone recounted it the other day, and I can’t remember whether it was here or elsewhere) during the reign of the second Qin emperor in ancient China. The Chief Eunuch in the Emperor’s Court (about as corrupt and vile a half-man as you can imagine) presented a deer to the Emperor one day in court, but claimed it was a horse. The majority of the advisors in the court agreed that it was a horse. Confronted with the majority, the emperor agreed.

      Afterwards, the Chief Eunuch had all of the advisors that didn’t openly call it a horse killed.

      Everyone present in that court knew it was a deer no matter what everyone else said. But the majority of the advisors went along with the deceit. The Chief Eunuch knew that they all knew it was a deer. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that the majority of the advisors lied just so that they could agree with the Chief Eunuch.

      And everyone who didn’t agree was killed just to drive home the point.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. Thanks.

          He mentioned that a Japanese word for idiot (“bakamono”) is literally the words “deer” and “horse”. And this incident is apparently where that comes from.

          Unfortunately far too many people see this incident as a goal, and not a warning.

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            1. “vaca” is “cow” in Spanish; the Spanish /b/ and /v/ are so similar that they often have to clarify: –¿v de vaca o b de burro?

              バカ is “baka” in Japanese; means “idiot”

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Wow, thanks for that link.

                https://xcancel.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1909987363100443066

                makes it more available for those who, like me, refuse to join twitter and miss its pre-Musk functionality.

                People who impose their Newspeak linguistic conventions on others (e.g. the ever-changing label for those whose skin color reflects their African ancestry; e.g. insisting that “Twitter” must now be called “X”; e.g. “call it a horse. Or else.”) is a tell for Cluster B types.

                Mock them at you peril, but mock them we must.

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            3. It’s not. But the claim about the parts of “bakamono” is incorrect. Google Translate reminded me that “horse” in Japanese is “uma”. That prompted me to remember that I’d first encountered the word while watching Kimagure Orange Road. That series has a background gag couple,who constantly confess their love for each other, and have names meaning cow and horse.

              According to Google Translate, baka and mono mean fool and thing respectively, while the compound word means foolish guy.

              After checking Google Translate on my phone, it appears that it’s the kana characters. And it’s “baka”, not “bakamono”. If baka is spelled in kana, it uses the characters of horse and deer, in that order.

              While kana comes from Chinese characters, and the source of the incident is China, apparently the same two characters in traditional Chinese mean red deer.

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            4. The kanji (word symbol derived from Chinese pictograms) for “baka” (as the insult) combines the kanji for “deer” and “horse”. OTOH, Japan’s relatively limited phoneme set leads to a lot of homonyms.

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        1. “Point deer, say ‘DEER, YOU MOTHER !@#% !!!’ and then sh00t that guy.”

          Phantom proverb.

          And then go burn down Omelas. >:( [muted swearing and kicking the grass]

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    2. is the Liberal party floundering though? Seems like Pierre blew it. Or is that also a lie? (Of course, I think Pierre is the Canadian Mitt Romney and him winning wouldn’t change much anyway, so what I do I know)

      Liked by 2 people

      1. It’s hard to say. IIRC, the Liberals disqualified two of their own candidates that were a threat to Carney. Additionally, between 2/3 – 3/4 of the people who attempted to register to vote for who Trudeau’s replacement would be found all sorts of odd snafus that kept them from being able to vote.

        At the very least, it certainly appears that the Liberals believe Carney is unpopular, and felt they had to grease the wheels even within his own party.

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      2. The polling would seem to indicate this is a “close race”. Similar to the polling that showed #HeelsUp was in a “close race” with #OrangeManBad.

        #CarkMarney was giving a speech in Hamilton last night. After being heckled (Hamilton is like that, believe me) #Carky promised to crack down on the Interwebz and clean up all that “hate speech” out there coming from evile America.

        So I wouldn’t want to speculate on the… veracity, shall we say, of the mainstream media polling being touted so proudly on mainstream media outlets.

        But I do believe my lyin’ eyes, and #PP had crowds for his speeches 10X what’s being bussed in for #CarkMarney.

        By the way, American people, what does it tell you that I’m putting hashtags and nicknames all over everything? They can’t really come after you for saying #CarkMarney is a carpetbagger. Not yet, anyway. When that changes you’ll see my comments change to “I love – insert name of politician here-“. Whenever I want everyone to know I’m still alive, I’ll post one of those.

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        1. my view is based not on polls, but the last I saw of the betting markets, which correctly predicted Trump’s win and also said Pierre blew it, giving “Cark” 80% favorability to Pierre’s 20%.

          Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather it was Pierre, for all his Mitt Romney odor.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Montreal debate last night, #Cark did not look good. #PP didn’t look that great either, but this election isn’t really about him. It’s about if we’re going to continue on down the hole into poverty the #Fiberals are digging in front of us, or turn around and climb our way back into the sunlight and prosperity.

            I’ve assumed since the election was called that every poll and indicator that could be rigged would be. So far I see nothing to indicate I was wrong, and plenty to suggest I was right. Including the #Fiberal dirty tricks squad planting buttons at a #CPC event, getting caught, the perpetrators not being fired, and the media pretty much blowing it off.

            English debate tonight, I guess we’ll see if #Cark-baby can keep it together.

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              1. The #Cark, in his brief stint as PM has so far caved in to every demand and trick #OrangeManBad has attempted.

                I think the gentleman being interviewed there is right. I also think he’s only gone about half-way, because Canada is currently being run by people who take suggestions if not actual orders from China, and also India. We’re flooded with Chinese money and Indian immigrants.

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                  1. The media understand that whoever wins this race is going to be their paymaster. Because media in Canada is 100% government owned and operated. Technically only the CBC is legally government owned, but the rest never step out of line because government money is all that stands between them and bankruptcy.

                    So now, this week after the debates, the media is finally admitting maybe #PP might do okay, you know? Maybe. He might have a little following there, he might get some seats.

                    The media guys see all the data. They know how much they’re lying. The media understands that if they just lie and lie and LIE all the way to April 28th, they’re done. But if they only lie a little bit, maybe the new paymaster will keep them around to lie for him.

                    Or so I suppose, anyway. Ten more days until we find out.

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                    1. First you lie in an attempt at influence, but eventually you have to conform to reality when reality will make itself known whatever you do. Explains a lot of last minute polls shifting.

                      Liked by 1 person

  10. The left screams they are against the ‘Old White Man Network’, when in reality they are just another network of old white men, albeit this one Communist, it’s still full of Old White Men running things. Which is why they keep Clyburn and Crocket on the porch screaming at everyone else to stay off the porch.

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    1. Funny how Clyburn could’ve endorsed Kamalamadingdong instead of the Old White Senile Biden in 2017, he didn’t, he went full pedophile.

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  11. I worked with one of the last generation of reporters that wasn’t an “activist,” but believed that his job was to get the truth and to prove it to people so they could make the best decisions.

    He left the SF Chronicle because, even in the 1980’s, there were more activists with journalist bylines than actual “journalists” of what he felt was correct.

    (He also subscribed to a number of “right wing” newsletters and tabloids that with that caveat sounded more sane than the news I was hearing. Read them regularly, which probably warped my mind out of shape.)

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      1. For the most part, until you hit the 1970s or so, reporting was a blue-collar job. Often you got hired on as a photographer or something else and worked your way up, at least for anything outside of the big cities. During the ’80s and beyond, it became a job you HAD to have a degree for. There were fewer entry-level positions in the newsroom. And you often had to have a rabbi of some kind.

        Liked by 2 people

    2. My news reporting professor was a refugee from the Detroit Free Press. He was not an activist.

      He told me later anyone who made a C in his class was competent to be a reporter. That was most of the class that didn’t drop out or flunk out. I was competent by that standard.

      Liked by 1 person

  12. Early FDR was a mask for socialism and Truman was only as moderate as he needed to be. The Democrats were poison long before them. Going back at least as far as Franklin Pierce.

    Perot was never a serious candidate, and admitted as much later on, which is why in his first campaign he sabotaged himself so obviously and deliberately because–even with the handicaps you correctly mention–he was still winning. And he didn’t want to win.

    All of that said, yeah. Trump ripped their masks off.

    Liked by 1 person

  13. I don’t believe Perot was ever a serious candidate. He was merely pursuing some petty revenge grudge against Bush the Elder. (His dropping out and then getting back in when the polls moved towards Bush sealed the deal for me). I blame him for the Clinton years.

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      1. It would not surprise me. And it must have been pretty nasty, given the stuff he and his employees dealt with before he “retired.” (Because he struck me as the type who just can’t retire-retire.)

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      2. He’s the guy that claimed the Viet Cong hired the Black Panthers to assassinate him, with nothing I’ve ever seen to substantiate the claim, so…

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  14. Just think of establishment media like the NY Times, etc., as Soviet era Pravda and Tass, except the people who worked for Pravda and Tass had to worry about literally being put up against a wall and shot if they didn’t adhere to the party line. The folks at establishment media on the other hand don’t need that “incentive” because they are true believers who actively work to force out all those who are not equally true believers. When they call their political opponents a cult, they are projecting.

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  15. I have to follow a lot of political web sites and the network news for Day Job. I detest it, but I do watch the propaganda lines unrolling across the various media. It has become predictable, to the point that I can almost recite the NBC anchors’ and journalists’ lines the moment I see the lede. Ditto Politico and other sites of a similar bent.

    What makes my whiskers twitch is when left and right both start to say similar things, and especially when the left starts to say aloud what the right has been muttering for some time. That tells me that the power brokers (or the ones who think they are power brokers) have made a move, and it needs to be noted for future reference.

    I still don’t enjoy it.

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  16. I am not alone in saying I saw all the truth about the media as far back as 1984, I just lost hope after RayGun until OrangeManBad appeared.

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    1. When Tet (which is Vietnamese for Chinese New Year just btw) happened, and being in a hard-core military family with lots of connections, I heard what really happened rather than what Cronkite said was the “rest of the story.” That caused my skepticism to go up rapidly.

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  17. I can’t find the name, but yesterday I saw a clip of some Congresscritter ranting about Trump making “tax cuts on the backs of the American people!!”

    No, you dipshit, taxes are imposed on the backs of the American people. Tax cuts reduce the load on our backs. Therefore, you should be in favor of tax cuts.

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    1. Alas, nothing new. Many years ago I saw someone claiming all tax cuts ought to have a built-in sunset, and require active renewal. Backwards. All taxes ought to have a sunset requirement and require active renewal – and if not renewed, cannot be immediately reinstated either. No “failing to vote for” right before an election and then vote for it when the pressure is off.

      When should taxes be voted on? How about the last Tuesday of October?

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      1. Not sure if it’s statewide, but Flyover County distributes property tax invoices the last few days of October. I suspect a lot of Good Idea Fairy-generated tax proposals have died due to that timing.

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        1. Mid-October for Lane county is when our snail mail property taxes gets delivered. City of Eugene (cough), and mostly Eugene 4j school district, do not have problem coming up with votes to pass tax levy’s. Lane county as a whole, and 4j, depends on the tax levy itself. Now Oregon in general (cough) with mail in votes, seems to be able to pass whatever the legislature was forced to put on the ballot rather than just pass it themselves, as you are well aware.

          Really hoping President Trump puts an end to mail in voting as part of the needs id to vote federal elections. Granted that is just federal elections, all of them – President, Senate, and House, but still.

          FYI. Besides the whole name change for women “problem” (which is BS, they have to do the same to fly, by alcohol, get a new passport, etc., there is a standard process for the entire thing now) the “the 18 year old service member won’t be able to vote” is also BS. They won’t go to boot camp before they are 18. If they are reporting, by some chance, on their 18th birthday, even that is covered. Over 50 years ago, I was away from home in college when I turned 18, just weeks before an election. Went to the court house at 17, before leaving for college, with my birth certificate, and driver’s license, registered and requested an absentee ballot for the November election, which was after my birthday. Heck given timing, I voted the day I turned 18, and mailed it in to insure county election office received it in time.

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  18. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » TURNS OUT THEY WERE NEVER IMPARTIAL: The Masquerade is over.

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