Killing Their Own Relevance
I used to take pride in actively seeking out information that went against my preconceived notions. I hadn’t made a thorough sweep of the headlines unless that sweep included outlets from the far-left to the far-right via the center. While I still think that going outside your own echo chamber is both important and noble, doing so is increasingly losing its value. While you would always expect a political tilted slant in their coverage, at least they made an appearance of understanding their political foes and valuing neutrality. That has now become so rare as to almost be extinct.
A fantastic example of this is Colbert. On a recent episode together with Jon Stewart, Colbert criticised Trump for claiming that the news media should give “equal time” to pro-Trump coverage and/or alternate viewpoints. While thinking that he was being funny, Colbert proceeded to confirm the relevance and truth of what Trump said. The sketch started out with Colbert being himself and saying negative things about Trump. Stewart had the role of providing “equality” by saying things pro-Trump. The positive statements were things like “at least he is not a cannibal”. You get the idea. After a while they reversed roles and to the laughter of the audience, Colbert utterly failed to utter a positive statement about Trump.
A more apt, accurate and telling metaphor for the situation in late night “comedy” and the news media in general you’ll have to look long and deep in order to find. Both I and others have previously pointed out that both have been slanted for a long time, now they have really crossed the Rubicon. Only the thinnest veneer of an appearance of neutrality remains. Thus, they can no longer claim to be purveyors of either news or comedic material. The utter inherent partisan nature of their content is now so central to their deeds that it can’t be said to be relevant to the wider political conversation. Only the most dyed in the wool leftists still find enjoyment in their works and people like myself are teetering on the edge of never watching them again as their relevance is irredeemably gone. They no longer have any value to satisfy my quest for opposite viewpoints.
This not only applies to American news outlets, much of the same point can be laid at the feet of foreign news institutions. As a Norwegian I’m most familiar with our domestic newspapers. Apart from being overly partisan towards Hillary during election season, they take the utterings of leftist opinion pieces as objective gospel. If this were their only crime they could perhaps in a sense be forgiven their ignorance, after all we can’t expect foreigners to have an in-depth understanding of American politics, but alas that is only one of their failings. They also only provide the most basic bitch, scratch the surface commentary and analysis imaginable. They are standing in the middle of the outraged and frightened mob reacting to Trump’s every move.
The ability to look at and analyse the goings on on other planes is completely absent. They take everything at face value, concepts like psychological warfare, manipulation, persuasion and so on completely escapes them. Like many of their American counterparts, they are bland and undifferentiated. They aren’t unique nodes to fill in your personal information network. Look at one of them and you’ve seen all their opinions. Much to my delight all of this represents the coming death of the legacy media and the ascendancy of new alternative outlets. Increasingly, you have to follow people like Scott Adams, Cernovich, PJW, Molyneux and others to really grasp what is going on and how to view current events. This transformation can’t come soon enough.
