The bold and the biased
News and entertainment figures drop masks in Trump warfare

Entrenched political and cultural establishments are more than willing to engineer any dirty business necessary to frustrate average Americans' approaching election of Donald Trump. 

Failed 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney and House Majority Speaker Paul Ryan have both made public efforts aimed to hack at Trump's appeal. 

Jeb Bush, of the elitist Bush Family Dynasty, has in his own stop-start fumbling manner hectored the Trump-led populist movement. (Said hale movement would result in the toppling of both the Bush and Clinton dynasties; a splendid rallying ambition, considering that this country is not even supposed to have what amount to royal families.)

And it has today been reported (by the routinely and breathlessly anti-Trump Politico) that on the evening of Thursday, 9/29, the United Nations issued an hysterical appeal to some 8 million expatriate Americans to vote in absentia. "At a time when Trump is trying to divide us," the UN urged. "We could all defeat him if we shared this page with EVERYONE!" 

Once that body's improper official interference in a member country's democratic election became public knowledge, the UN took down its offending message -- though, of course, its meddling had already been effected. 

"That tweet did not originate from the UN's News Centre," was the meaninglessness issued mechanically by that center's chief. "We're looking into its provenance," he muttered toward the backs of reporters already drifting away in committed search of an outrageous Trump half sentence uttered sometime in decades past.

Not too many months ago, reports abounded telling of not-so-secret convocations of the wealthy and power-connected. (Not unlike summit meetings of Godfather ruling crime families.)

From those meetings, it was hoped, might arise an effective scheme to strangle the peoples' democratic persuasions. 

(Billionaire Mark Cuban, surely among those jetted-in upper-plateau elitists, still turns up in campaign-related headlines. He seems to have too much time on his hands.) 

Spotlighted news media careerists who in other circumstances would probably pretend at professional ethics cannot jettison propriety quickly enough as they pursue with slathering maws the citizenry's and Trump's voting booth downfalls.

Their cheeks flushed with strange fervor, many mainstream journalists in the ideologically rigid employ of status quo-shielding corporate interests have abandoned ideals of honesty and reportorial rectitude. They demonstrate instead great capacity for audaciously reinventing contrary objective realities to best suit pre-fabricated agendas.

Univision's Jorge Ramos, writing in the 8/23 Time, lectured that for "journalists, politicians, voters...neutrality is not an option." His words are those of a partisan activist, and hardly reflective of ideals once assumed particular to his wordy vocation.

Jim Rutenberg, New York Times media writer, asked, "If you're a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation's worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?...you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the last half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you've never approached anything in your career...You would move closer than you've ever been to oppositional...Do normal standards apply?"

Of course, traditionally enunciated standards of impartiality and honesty should indeed yet apply to journalism. If Rutenberg seriously questions that, well, he need not ever fear finding a pink slip in his New York Times pay envelope. 


And MSNBC's Joe Scarborough recently posed a press performance question predicated on just such subjective derogating: "How balanced do you have to be when one side is just irrational?"

Political bias, per Ramos, Rutenberg, Scarborough, and their yellowed fellows, is not to be criticized as disserving journalistic enterprise - and the public - but instead championed as both serving some higher calling and protecting dumb citizens from independently exercising democratic self-governance.

One last illustration, from a not-at-all unlikely intersection between biased, agenda journalism and biased, agenda television entertainment:

David Weigel's 9/30 Washington Post article, "Can SNL take down Donald Trump? Is it going to try?" assumes Humor In the Service of Progressive Ideology is a moral imperative. 

"For some, Donald Trump isn't funny anymore,"Weigel writes.
"And that has prompted some actors, writers, and producers behind SNL to ask this question: What if he wins? And what if we are blamed?"

To be fair, I acknowledge that it may be unreasonable of me to expect genuine comicalness from Saturday Night Live, a program not consistently funny or of recommendable quality for many years. 

But to enter the creative process yoked by agenda commitment and a vainglorious delusion of outsized significance results in nothing of real worth to anyone. 

And while entertainment efforts advancing social and political sensibilities are numerous and rightly celebrated, their authors have always found optimum effectiveness by including lessons as adjuncts to the main business of amusing, not as those works' primary reasons for existence. 

Regrettably, though, the wise practical counsel of superior creators and journalists who've gone before is lost on current-day, agenda-foisting buffoons. 

They are too busy boasting to one another of their bias to be terribly concerned about improving their craft, or respecting their audiences.



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