The peasants are revolting. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:
It’s election time in the US, and people are talking about subjects generally ignored in the woof and warp of everyday life. The role of government, trade policy, immigration, foreign policy – but none of these subjects dominated the stage in the latest installment of the seemingly endless GOP debates. Instead, the assembled candidates were pilloried by the moderators with a series of condescending and openly hostile “questions.” As Ted Cruz put it: “Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?”
Cruz received a roar of approval from the crowd, which by that time was sick unto death of the CNBC panel’s arrogant hectoring – and that’s really the story of this election in a nutshell: what we’re witnessing is a populist rebellion against the political class, of which the media is an essential part.
Insulated from the public, smugly ensconced in their own certitude, the “mainstream” media has routinely set the narrative of every election in modern times – but not anymore. Their reign effectively ended with the rise of the Internet and the explosion of independent outlets, like the Drudge Report – and, yes, Antiwar.com – which have left them in the dust.
Yet the “legacy media” has stubbornly clung to their privileged position, mostly by their dominance of television – their last redoubt. But the time has passed when they could set the agenda, as Fox News and now CNBC have discovered. The rise of the GOP outsiders – Trump and Carson, who together have nearly half of the GOP electorate’s support in the polls – is in large part a revolt against the media, as well as the Republican Establishment. As in the last days of the old Soviet Union, people are tired of being lied to and told what to think. As many Russians said of the two principal Soviet mouthpieces, Pravda and Izvestia – in English, “the truth” and “the news” – “v Pravde net izvestiy, v Izvestiyakh net pravdy” (“In the Truth there is no news, and in the News there is no truth”). Today the same goes for NBC and Fox News.
I seem to recall a time when the news media was respected, and seen as the people’s shield against government abuse and corruption. Those days are long gone, as the revolving door between official Washington and the press corps keeps swinging and the two sectors meet and merge socially and ideologically.
The Iraq war was the final nail in the legacy media’s coffin, as the New York Times and other major outlets played a key role in ginning up that disaster, acting as a transmission belt for the Bush administration’s lies about Saddam’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction. When the public becomes convinced that the “news” is simply propaganda, then trust goes out the window and all bets are off.
To continue reading: The Revolt Against ‘Democracy’
