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A Leftist Media For Obama
The national media likes to present the left, even the radical left, as more or less mainstream, even as it depicts the Tea Party as a fringe movement. Politicians who espouse Marxist ideas, like Barack Obama, are treated as if they are centrists, well-suited to solve the crises that their own policies have created. As the liberal media see it, the debate is over. America has become a European-style social welfare state, and there is no going back. There is only going forward, or what Obama calls "forward," toward the hardcore communism of the past.
From this perspective, socialism is the normal and expected condition of mankind, and communism — the thuggish assault on liberty of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez or Bolivia's Juan Evo Morales — is simply a less genteel means toward the same end.
In every case, the media ignore the inevitable executions and gulags of the communist state and report instead on the purported advancements of health care and literacy. Early fellow-travelers like Theodore Dreiser, Andre Gide, John Maynard Keynes, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, among many others, visited the Soviet Union and returned with glowing reports of giant strides forward in industrial development. When it was pointed out that tens of millions had been murdered and that the purported developed was largely staged, these facts were ignored or dismissed. Nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of transformation from capitalism to a supposedly utopian communist state.
As Michael David-Fox writes in Showcasing the Great Experiment, one of the great ironies of modern intellectual history is the fact that "the height of Western admiration … coincided with the most repressive phrase of Soviet communism" (p. 2). Edgar Snow did the same with his glowing reports of Chinese development under Mao, even as the Great Leap Forward claimed an estimated 30 million lives. American media did the same with the emergence of Fidel Castro, who was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow in 1959 at a time when Americans were not yet certain if Castro was friend or foe, and later by Barbara Walters, among others. More recently, a regular stream of network journalists have filed reports from Cuba suggesting that the American trade embargo is harming ordinary Cubans or that conditions on the island are not as politically repressive as once thought. These useful idiots are just following in the footsteps of Dreiser, Snow, and the Webbs, and of a host of American and British journalists who have found Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hugo Chávez, and every other communist tyrant acceptable because they, the journalists, shared the same ideology.
Left-leaning journalists like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather were memorable names because, despite their leftism, they did not entirely compromise their professional journalistic standards. But who will remember the hordes of little Marxists who now dominate the mainstream media? What they share is the conviction that the journalistic profession is the handmaiden of social transformation, and Obama is the transformer. Thus, any sort of bias, omission, or speculative reporting is an acceptable means to the end of revolution.
