A number of smart people, among them Peter Wehner, Mark Halperin and John Hinderaker, have been pointing out the unfortunately predictable silence of the mainstream media regarding the IRS scandal — not to mention the myriad other Obama scandals that we will soon be counting on three, or is it four, hands.
The front page of Tuesday’s New York Times made no mention of the congressional hearings on the missing Lois Lerner emails and putative computer crash; the networks were a virtual silence of the not-so-lambs. (Remember how they obsessed on the Christie/GW Bridge contretemps as if it were the beginning of nuclear war?)
On his Wednesday Talking Points Memo, Bill O’Reilly went so far as to say the media silence, censorship, whatever you want to call it was subverting democracy. That’s an understatement. It was trampling on it.
The conventional explanation for this willful blindness cited by the above mentioned gentlemen is that the media is in the tank for the Democratic Party and, by extension, for Obama. Well, sure. But it is far more than that. Political parties and politicians come and go. The media doesn’t. They may be in the tank for Obama, but much more than that they are in the tank for themselves — a whole lifestyle and world view that has been going on for decades, moral narcissism distilled to its purest essence.
It is that world view and lifestyle that is under threat in the debacle that is the Obama administration. This world view, promulgating supposedly altruistic values, but actually stemming from a profound need to be thought of as good for their beliefs irrespective of results of those beliefs, is in a precarious position as never before. The disintegration of a politician or a political party is bad enough. Far worse is the disintegration of a personality, the disintegration of the self. That is intolerable.
The real reason these media folks cannot face reality is that to do so would mean to see their very persons, everything they have ever stood for, or thought they stood for, or pretended to themselves they stood for, dissolving in a puddle like the Wicked Witch of the West.
Obama is beside the point. They don’t even like Obama anymore. Nothing could be more obvious. Almost nobody does. But they won’t say so in public because that would mean that they would be revealed as fools who believed the most banal tripe imaginable. It would also mean admitting Barack Obama never really existed, that they invented him. He was their projection. Barack Obama is the creation of the New York Times, et al. Without them he would never have happened and they know it.
So the media are left in an untenable position. If you say Barack Obama is a mistake, then you yourself are a mistake. Who wants that?
No wonder they won’t investigate the scandals. No wonder they won’t report any of this. They are too ashamed of themselves to speak.
The heroes of Watergate are no more, if they ever were. (That was always basically a chimera.) The myth of the crusading investigative reporter is not only dead, it’s decomposed. In the disintegration of the Obama administration, the end of the mainstream media is not collateral damage, it is the core damage.
That is already evident in the response to the IRS scandal. It is metastasizing rapidly despite the near blackout by the MSM. In one recent poll 63 percent of Democrats think the IRS intentionally destroyed the emails. Democrats. How’d they find that out? Not from the New York Times.
Get ready for endless tantrums of many sorts. When moral narcissism of the level we have been experiencing breaks down, anything can happen. The media will do almost anything to preserve their fragile selves. Evasion, distraction and outright lies will be continuous and may reach unprecedented levels.
The mainstream media has been in trouble for years, but their silence about the ills of the Obama administration has finished them off as never before. They will stumble on, but from here on in they will be, as was said of the U.S. during the Vietnam era, a “pitiful, helpless giant.”
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