The Password is ‘Trolling’
Say, H.L. Mencken, what’s your take on the state of journalism?
I believed then, as I believe now, that it is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics, and I tried to show that the Sun, because of its geographical situation, had a superb opportunity to discharge that function effectively. Baltimore was but forty miles from Washington — and the Washington papers were all third-rate, and seemed doomed to remain so forever, for the overwhelming majority of their readers were petty Federal jobholders, which is to say, half-wits. In consequence of their badness all Washington officials in the higher brackets had to read out-of-town papers, and not a few of them, including Wilson, read the Sun, for that was in the days before airships, and the Sun could get to Washington with news nearly five hours earlier than the news in the New York morning papers…The rudiments of the New Deal were already visible in those days, and I did not neglect to sneer at the “utopian ideas, economical, political, and ethical” that were going about…
– Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work: A Memoir by H. L. Mencken, written in 1941-42; the above passage focuses on Mencken’s career during the early 1920s.
Flash-forward ninety years:
The Examiner, Washington Times, and Center for American Freedom’s teams were only fractions of the size of the CNN or New York Times teams in Charlotte. But they wrote the convention’s distracting stories.
JournoList member Dave Weigel, writing in the Washington Post-owned Slate, in a piece titled “The Age of Trolling — How a small band of conservatives generated half of the Democratic Convention’s headlines.”
Which our crack reporter government stenographer believes is a bad thing.
Ace of Spades responds:
95% of the convention was pre-scripted advertisement. It was a pageant, with a fixed outcome. Most conventions are.
The actual “news” is the stuff that happens that wasn’t scripted — that is, what the conservative “trolls” like YidWithLid reported on.
But Dave Wiegel considers the news a “distraction” from the pre-scripted Democratic Messaging Operation.
The Narrative
Any facts which “distract” from it are nonfacts and thus non-news.
Hey, just ask the JournoList’s boss.
Related: “In Which Dave Weigel Forgets He Was a Member of JournoList.”
Style guide suggestion… The enemy has handed us a weapon – USE IT! It’s their own invented self label “Journ-o-list”, which you use in passing – but attach it to his name. They couldn’t have done better had they handed over all the tar from Arabia and all the feathers plucked globally from all the KFC chickens… It is a smear now, a snarky pejorative, and there’s not a damn thing that scumball Weigel and every other frothing fascist on the Left can do about it.
Attach the term eternally to their shameful despicable names every time you post about them. Don’t relent. And it drives them crazy which is very gratifying.
RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”. There’s no defense.
RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy. They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more.”
(* I’d add: A good tactic is one that drives your enemy BONKERS!)
RULE 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.”
RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.”
It seems that the media has a bunch of public relations graduates who believe they are journalists.
David Weigel a member of the fascist journolist group
David Weigel a member of the fascist journolist group
David Weigel a member of the fascist journolist group
Beginning around 1968, and with increasing frequency, as well as growing self-righteousness, I heard journalists justify their then-new tone of aggressive nastiness with an appeal to Mencken’s* invocation of the press’s inherent duty as gadfly. By Watergate it was the media’s raison d’être to attack the administration (which, golly, was Republican! Who’d a thunk it?).
Now of course journalists were Democrats then as now, but they weren’t quite so craven, so open and so intellectually corrupt as today. Still, when a Dem took the White House, the attacks on him miraculously moderated, as, mirabile dictu!, the media changed their concentration to whatever part of Congress the GOP held. In 1992 when the Dems won the triple crown for the first time since the First Great Depression in the 1930′s, the media somehow convinced themselves it was vital to go after the opposition party. Luckily that only lasted 2 years before the media could go after the newly-Republican Senate. And so it has gone, with the media bothering to cover its tracks less and less over the years.
Since the annunciation of the Neo Administration the media has suddenly developed an epidemic of Alzheimers, and had never heard of the concept of the “loyal opposition” which had the solemn duty of attacking those in power. Now, for the first time in living memory, the media decided it was vital to the security of the country that they do their best to support the Administration. Yes, some of the old hands had talked it out, and they were ashamed of how badly they had mistreated some administrations in the past; and so as of 2008, wonder of wonders!, they were going to try being good media citizens, and help the President sell his policies. Because they were such patriots, don’t you know?
And so the media goes blithely along, doing their corrupt best as members of both the administration and the Obama Campaign to Help The Nation by supporting the president day in, day out. And they apparently really believe the middle class has quit paying for their product because of that boogeyman, the so-called “free news”. And middle America’s repugnance and disgust at how the media bosses, editors and reporters have for two generations kept their fingers on the scales of the news doesn’t enter into it at all. Because members of the media would rather die and hold on to a comforting but ridiculously false Death Myth than to face up to their own cravenness, deceit and failure and try to fix it.
Who thinks like that?
*The left used to absolutely love Mencken. That is until sometime around the early 90′s or so, when some of his personal journals or diaries or such came to light, and it became painfully apparent that Mencken was just Archie Bunker with a bad attitude toward authority figures. Yeah, turned out ol’ H.L. was pretty much a racist – a fan of the lynchings of his day. Now, because the left had always depended on Mencken as a reliable weapon against Southerners, evangelical Christians and the middle class in general, they tried mightily to except his racism and his anti-Semitism, too (in those days the left was still against hating Jews. Funny how things change, isn’t it?). But it was too difficult and humiliaitng, so they just gave up, and relegated Mencken to the ever-growing pile of personalities who were once heroes of the left until their racism or anti-Semitism became too rabid to be useful. So the Gospel According To Mencken is no more, and he is a Non-Person.
Don’t forget Mike Royko. Although not a “true” journalist, he has fallen from his pedestal too, now that the post 1968 Chicago Machine has been rehabilitated. Remember when Boss Daley, et al, used to be locked in the basement like embarrassing relatives, after “The Days of Rage”.
The left was never “against hating Jews”
They’re just more open about it now.
One wonders if the distractions coming now almost daily from the Obama Administration count as the same kind of distracting detritus. While there are those who would applaud Mr.Menckin I feel that he is simply the fore father of todays journoList’s hacks.
The job of a reporter, investigative, social or political should be to get the facts, as many as can be reported. The who, what, where, when how and why (although that should be couched as the opinion of whoever makes the claim) of the story. It is not the reporters job to interpret the news. This is why I never watch political speeches or debates on TV. I don’t need Dan Rather telling me “what the president meant”. I heard what he said. What he meant,if different from what he said, is immaterial to me. The president needs to mean what he says. If he can’t communicate effectively, “we need to let him go.”-Clint Eastwood
I subscribed to newspapers for most of my life. I grew up in a small town in NW Florida (Panama CIty) that had a reasonably conservative paper, The Panama City News Hearald. I moved to Tallahassee, the state capital and subscibed to what we called the Tallahassee Demoncrap (which is an accurate description of the paper’s agenda)…didn’t really like the spin the JournoListers put on things, but mostly they got their facts right.
When I got married in early 2002, and moved to Detroit and was exposed to a genuinely leftist paper, the Detroit “Free Press” I was shocked at the propaganda that was being foisted as news. I subscribed to the evening paper there, Detroit News, an old-fashioned evening news paper…which has gone under and memrged w/the Free Press.
When the economy in Michigan took a nose dive early in the last decade and my wife and I were out of work for an extended period of time (16 months for me, and 12 months for her) we moved to Baltimore in the “People’s Republic of Maryland.” (that’s not entirely tongue in cheek…). We for about 3 weeks subscribed to the Baltimore Sun…but ended up cancelling our subscription because the news that was being published was merely a recitation of DNC talking points…that’s how far the paper of Mr. Mencken has fallen.
The worst thing in the full-bore, bias of the modern media is that they have long since given up “speaking truth to power,” and have become a propaganda arm of one party or the other…much as many papers were for most of the first century of our nation’s existence. They have given up on the legacy of the “Muck-Rakers” of the 10′s, 20′s and 30′s of the last century, and since the 1980′s and 90′s merely repeated party talking points of the ever left-ward tilting Democratic Party.
For our society, and nation, that’s a calamity of the highest order. The men and women of “working journalism” have given up asking Liberals those hard questions that must be asked of a political class and bring to light corruption and hypocrisy…
One solution that I’ve heard bandied about is that wealthy investors take over a failing newspaper and eject the current staff and high an entirely new staff of moderate or conservatives who will then be in a position to “fight back.” I’m not sure that’s a viable solution, after all, look at the vitriol and hatred that is spewed by Liberals and “Progressives” at FoxNews for daring to take on that task.
Another is to do what what many others have done, Drugde, NewsAlert, Ed Driscoll and Instapundit (and I to a vaslty lesser extent)…that is to self publish, via the internet news and OUR counter opinions on news and current political events.
Thoughts? Comments?
I have noticed over the past few weeks that any time I engage in debate on a liberal post I am immediately called a troll and attacked. I am use to being attacked, but the troll bit is a new talking point.