It’s Harder To Distinguish Ideology From Truth In Modern Journalism

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – The ideological presentation of news is, in and of itself, in my personal opinion, a perversion of anything that you would call journalism.  I am perfectly comfortable with, fine with, and have no beef towards anyone that presents news in a partisan and blatantly ideological fashion so long as they acknowledge that that’s what they’re doing.  Where I have a problem and where I think people are being misled and lied to is people that present it as if it is objective truth.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Back to the Tea Party conversation held over from last hour, from the piece posted by Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic.  By the bye, I wrote to Conor Friedersdorf last night and complimented him on the piece.  Much like the compliments that I lavish on writers at The American Conservative Magazine and National Review from time to time, and anyone else out there, if they’re not in the employ of Winston Elliott, III, I will not get a response.  I just want you to know that I did reach out to Mr. Friedersdorf and compliment him on his work.  Maybe I’ll receive a response.  If I do, then I’ll turn it over to AG and see if he’d like to make an appearance on the program.  Back to the Tea Partiers need to “Be Less Gullible” piece.  This is where I find myself in most disagreement with Friedersdorf, by the bye.

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Disrespect for Tea Partiers is at its most extreme and unforgivable when conservative elites who know better at places like Hillsdale College and the Heritage Foundation lash their brands to Rush Limbaugh’s star, and afford him a credibility they deep down don’t believe he deserves in return. Blatant disrespect is Roger Ailes broadcasting Glenn Beck’s show month after month after month, knowing it was filled with the most ludicrous conspiracy theories. Disrespect is Newsmax sending advertising emails to elderly subscribers on fixed incomes, stating, “When we stumbled upon this weird trick that can add $1,000 to monthly Social Security checks, we knew we had to share it with you.”

When I tell Tea Partiers that these people don’t have their best interests at heart, that they’re perfectly willing to broadcast lies and to manipulate resentments if it makes them an extra buck, I am not trying to be condescending. Like Peggy Noonan, I make my living in the media, and while that doesn’t mean that I have any more expertise than the average Tea Partier when it comes to being a doctor or lawyer or plumber or construction worker or small businessperson (or whatever their profession happens to be), I do have more expertise in mass media, rhetoric, the facts that surround political controversies in the news, and when pundits are telling people things that aren’t true.

And I agree with Noonan.

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Mike:  From what I can read, because I cannot access the rest of the piece because it’s behind the Wall Street Journal pay wall, from what I can gather from what others have posted from Peggy Noonan’s post last Thursday, I think she’s onto something, but I don’t think it’s anything outside the realm of what we have been discussing here on this program for years.  I get the phone calls [mocking] “Mike, what we’ve got to do is we . . .,” who’s we?  We ultimately means — I know what you mean by we, we Republicans.  That’s what you mean.  As I always try to be faithful and consistent in the presentation of this, don’t be a party man.  They want you to be a party man.  Once you become a party hack, you are a reliable go-to vote.  You are a reliable go-to contribution.  You are reliable to show up at any ginned-up sort of public protest that’s going to lead to absolutely nothing other than you spending your money and your time and putting wear and tear on your automobile or truck to show up at these things.  They accomplish absolutely nothing, nothing.  Friedersdorf concludes:

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Many of the people who enjoy the trust of Tea Partiers don’t deserve it. It isn’t just talk-radio hosts either. Donald Trump. Newt Gingrich. Herman Cain. They too are playing Tea Partiers for fools, and the only way things are going to improve is if Tea Partiers themselves wise up and stop vesting trust in whoever tells them what they want to hear. The Tea Party professes to harbor a high degree of skepticism toward media elites and politicians. It need only apply that skepticism regardless of ideology.

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Mike:  Folks, again, that is well stated, well put, and I believe far out, solid, and right on.  The ideological presentation of news is, in and of itself, in my personal opinion, a perversion of anything that you would call journalism.  I am perfectly comfortable with, fine with, and have no beef towards anyone that presents news in a partisan and blatantly ideological fashion so long as they acknowledge that that’s what they’re doing.  Where I have a problem and where I think people are being misled and lied to is people that present it as if it is objective truth.  It’s not.  It is always calculated to elicit a certain response.  In that calculation there’s also an economic calculation.  Again, you can be relied on for a listener, relied on for a viewer, relied on for a website hit, whatever the case may be.

Far be it for me to say that electronic media and modern media doesn’t accomplish anything.  I think it has great potential.  What I think is the problem and what I think is the issue is, because our lives are so frenetic, so fast-paced, and because we are made to work that much harder just to keep our heads above water because the leviathans (the big one in Mordor, the one in your state capital, and probably the one down the street in your town hall) confiscate so much of what you earn that it becomes almost — I often talk about how we don’t have to survive nature any longer.

The sciences and modern mechanics and technology have allowed us a lifestyle that is free from many of the concerns and worries that our forefathers had.  In other words, they had to worry about, if they drank the water, were they going to drop dead two days later?  If they ate certain things, were they going to become violently sick or ill?  If they didn’t do certain things to prepare adequately, would they starve during a long winter?  Would they freeze to death during the same long winter?  Our survival mode or the things we have to do to survive now don’t have anything to do with firewood or clean water and what not.  What they have to do with now is surviving government.  This is what you’re trying to do, survive leviathan.  You’re trying to survive what it is that those that want to spend what you’ve earned want to take from you.  You’re still in survival mode, so to speak, but you’re not in the kind of existential survival mode that we were in.

Because of that, it is difficult to process what may be truth and what may be conjecture, or what I think is more damaging, what might be ideology.  The fact that we treat ideology as if it’s a good thing and there’s a good ideology, that is right-wing, Republican, conservative ideology, and then there’s bad ideology, which is left-wing, liberal, Democrat ideology says an awful lot about our concept or the concept of and the knowledge of what ideology is and what it does.  It was ideology that led to the Nazi holocaust.  That was an ideology.  It was ideology that led to the great terror in France in the 1790s with 14,000 people running around without their heads on their bodies any longer because they were cut off by this device called the guillotine. It was ideology, in large part, that led the abolitionists of the 1830s, ‘40s, ‘50s and then ‘60s into a war, into demanding a war from the radical Republican Party that resulted in the death of over 800,000 Americans.

Ideology is always presented there’s a good one and a bad one.  [mocking] “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”  This isn’t the wizard of freaking Oz!  This isn’t a Frank L. Baum story.  Ideology is dangerous because it removes the pursuit of the truth, and it certainly removes objectivity and replaces it with a self-imposed subjectivity.  In other words, whatever we think we need to do right now is what we need to do, and there is no other way about it.  There is no other way to think about it.  Anything that gets in our way must be removed.  Anything that helps promote it, we’ll promote that and accept that.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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