“One begins to distrust very clever persons when they become embarrassed.”
“The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, ‘This procession has got to go on.’ So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn't there at all.”
—from the “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Hans Christian Andersen
If you want to know who is in charge, simply look for who benefits the most from prevailing double standards – especially those beneficiaries who reap their reward without a hint of embarrassment, guilt or shame – even after being found out.
All men are hypocrites to one degree or another, but few are afforded the privilege and prestige to celebrate their naked hypocrisy as part of some clever scheme on the right side of history. The American ruling class (especially the corporate press!) have long been proud of their affordance to brand all other Americans’ cleverness a sin while remaining shamelessly clever themselves.
Indeed, Donald Trump’s original political “sin” wasn’t merely that he won the White House in a clever way – but that he embarrassed the American elite in the process. Trump’s cheeky, impudent victory in 2016 was something akin to saying the emperor has no clothes – and much of the American crowd has followed suit in seeing the naked truth of a corrupt system. The media has particularly been singled out for shame and embarrassment.
“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN @NBCNews) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People.” Trump tweeted all the way back in February 2017.
Years later, polling research suggests the corporate press still hasn’t recovered.
According to Gallup, only 32% of Americans trust the media:
Americans’ confidence in the mass media to report the news fully, fairly and accurately is at its lowest point since 2016, when Republicans’ trust fell sharply. This low confidence reading for the fourth estate comes at a time when trust in each of the three branches of the federal government is also low.
In addition, Gallup in June found confidence readings in both TV news and newspapers that were near their historical lows and last December found a record-low-tying rating of the honesty and ethics of journalists.
Although partisans remain sharply divided in their views of the media, Democrats’ trust fell significantly this year. Still, a majority of Democrats but few Republicans continue to have confidence in the mass media. Republicans’ low confidence in the media has little room to worsen, but Democrats’ could still deteriorate and bring the overall national confidence reading down further.
Yet, despite these trends, the corporate press remains unrepentant and seemingly incapable of change. They’re being laughed at by their own audience, yet rather than apologize and change course, the prestige media is more shamelessly desperate than ever to keep deeming all other Americans’ cleverness a sin.
Why? They have no choice. This procession must go on. They must embrace the lie, deny the truth, and somehow prevent the people from believing their own eyes!
Emperors walk proudest when everyone knows they have no clothes, else they further let slip their embarrassment and betray the people’s trust. Alas, the further an emperor’s party walks proud – naked as the day pretending to hold high a train that isn’t there – the greater their embarrassment and the people’s distrust increases all the same, encouraging new voices to join a growing chorus of dissent.
The American elite’s worst fears now seem manifest, most of all the fear that Trump was just the spark igniting a wider populist revolt against the Washington uniparty. The disbelief is bigger than Trump. Driven by the tumultuous media revolution and a distended distrust in America’s ruling institutions, new challengers to the status quo continue emerging.
"Over the course of more than a year in a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times in the high twenties, the DNC-allied mainstream media networks maintained a near-perfect embargo on interviews with me,” RFK Jr. recently said in an address to the nation, continuing:
During his ten-month presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave 34 interviews on mainstream networks. In contrast, during the sixteen months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN, combined, gave only two live interviews from me. Those networks instead, they ran a continuous deluge, hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile pejoratives and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage.
Kennedy, who announced something of a populist unity party with Trump during his speech, continued laying out why the corporate press has no clothes:
Representatives of those networks are in this room right now, and I’ll just take a moment to ask you to consider the many ways that your institutions have abdicated this really sacred responsibility. It’s the duty of a free press to safeguard democracy and to challenge always the party in power. Instead of maintaining that posture, of fierce skepticism toward authority, your institutions and media made themselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power. You didn’t alone cause the devolution of American democracy, but you could have prevented it.
…
“The mainstream media was once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles, but has since joined this systemic attack on democracy. Also, the media justifies their censorship on the grounds of combating misinformation, but governments and oppressors don’t censor lies, they don’t fear lies. They fear the truth, and that’s what they censor.
Joey Clark is a native Alabamian and is currently the host of the radio program News and Views on News Talk 93.1 FM WACV out of Montgomery, AL M-F 12 p.m. - 3 p.m. His column appears every Tuesday in 1819 News. To contact Joey for media or speaking appearances as well as any feedback, please email joeyclarklive@gmail.com. Follow him on X @TheJoeyClark or watch the radio show livestream.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to Commentary@1819news.com.
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