The madness! The madness!

The Madness! The Madness!

I promised only “occasional” posting, thought my raging about torture would do for a while, but the rot of mediaspeak is so endemic, so epidemic, that its expressions, when one has the misfortune of encountering them, just can’t be allowed to pass unnoticed. So, yesterday, on Time-Warner’s New York City Channel 1, the only even half-way decent source of local and state news in New York, a reporter described Nancy Pelosi as “having 5 children,” being “from San Francisco,” attending “a prayer session with the Black Caucus,” and then concluded: “Pelosi is known for her Far-Left politics.”

What can we say about a society in which the biggest lie of the late 20th Century, what I’ve called “the lie about liberalism,” has become the common sense of some sincere fourth-rate reporter who probably thinks she’s really being “objective” and “descriptive.” Al Sharpton is “Far Left”–sort of. Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn are “Far Left.” I’m “Far Left.” (Full disclosure). Nancy Pelosi is an ordinary, moderately liberal Democrat, taking over leadership of a House that has been in the hands of actual thieves, gangsters, and American-style totalitarians. This seems like a revolutionary transition only because the degeneration of the polity has gone so incredibly far. Will any reporter in the mainstream media say this? Of course not. How does one speak to mainstream American reporters today, who are almost without exception (there are a few exceptions, not many) the talentless purveyors of endless official lies, without saying to them“You are worthless nothings; the equivalent of a band of terrorists dumping anthrax into our reservoirs, or worse; you dump lie after poisonous lie into the common realm of public speech and call it “journalism”?

If all television network news were abolished, immediately, without exception–sort of like exiting from Iraq–then the realm of public speech would be an infinitely better place for all. I will have more to say on that later. If you can’t wait, please see my book,
Primetime Politics.

P.S. At Dorothy’s initiative, we called up Channel 1 and I spoke, without screaming!, to someone named “Jessica,” who promised to “pass it on.” Pass what on, I wonder? The depth of their ignorance, their slumbrous complicity in mass deception? Still, we should all do that all the time, for what it’s worth. They do.