The Left Says That Fox News and the Right Wing Media Have Destroyed America As We Know It
So Naturally, They Want of Their Own
Every time the left goes through its rants about the long concentrated efforts of the conservative movement to destroy America and the lengths and widths to which they went to do so, I sometimes wonder if I’m detecting a hint of…jealousy.
I’ve always felt that the extremists on both sides of the spectrum have more in common than they think. And in the left’s case you get the feeling no matter how many times they rant about Fox News or Newsmax or Rush Limbaugh or any of the conservative people who have such a huge audience, there’s a part of them wondering: why don’t we have one of them? I’ve always suspected, no matter how much they will bemoan the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, that many of them were secretly glad it happened: I can see in so many of their postings about the media — not just conservative but even outlets like CNN or The Washington Post — that they resent the idea of anyone they disagree with having to share space with them or be listened to at all. The contempt is obvious in progressive newsletters in particular: they don’t want these people to have a voice, much less share the same forum as them. And what better way to assure that then by having their own equivalent of it?
An online article I read recently more or less confirmed this. In the midst of the usual berating of Fox News and the right wing media leading to the ‘Trumpification of the GOP’, the writer stated that the only thing ‘we’ could have done to prevent was to establish the leftist equivalent of Fox News and broadcast it throughout every outlet throughout the country roughly twenty years ago. To be clear they have not changed their opinion of what Fox News — in this same article they equate Rupert Murdoch with Victor Orban — but the writer also points out that whatever leftist outlets that exist have always been too small.
To put it plainly, this writer is saying the only way to stop a bad guy with a network spouting political propaganda is a good guy with a network spouting political propaganda. It says that in order to defeat evil, we must engage with the dark side. The ends justify the means; we have to do this to defeat the insidious conservative threat in America — really, it shows the same lack of awareness all leftists do when they want to get their message across.
There are many reason why this is a horrible idea but the most obvious one to me — at least based on all the leftist propaganda I’ve read over the past twenty years — is that even if they had this magical network twenty years ago, it would never have worked. And the main reason is when you consider what is basically ‘Extremist Politics for Dummies’ , which sadly is, how the majority of the extremists on each side think.
Let’s start with the fact that, for most of the true leftists, the idea of participating in the mainstream media as punditry is as beneath as participation in the electoral process is. They have spent decades arguing how cable news has shrunk the American intellect to the point that the average American can’t comprehend complicated political issues any more. Left unsaid is this: “like Real Americans like ourselves do.”
The idea of a Noam Chomsky or Eric Foner appearing on CNN might strike some as ludicrous but conservatives such as George Will and Victor Davis Hanson are more than willing to do so on conservative and mainstream media for decades. There is no difference in their intellects or what they represent to their respective ideologies. The major difference is those on the left don’t treat people like Will or Hanson as true intellectuals despite their education or authority because they don’t agree with what they have to say.
There’s also the fact that for more than a century the leftist has refused to simplify its idea to the level of discussing them in the media, never using ten simple words when a hundred more complicated ones would do. I have seen this in the most prominent leftists publications such as Harper’s and The Nation all of which have been excessive intellectual and dismissive of the entire political system and all of which have no trouble dismissing both political parties as two sides of the same coin.
The idea of the left being able to form a 24 hour cable news network is ludicrous because that would involve simplifying their ideas to a point that the average American could comprehend, something they are notoriously insulted of having to do with every bit of their writing. Say what you will about the far right commentators: at least their message is simple and basic. This gets me to the bigger problem.
Let’s operate on the concept that the right-wing media bias is the Monty Python version of the world: “They’re not just prejudiced based on race, sexuality identity or gender, but also — you guessed it- where people live!” And its been clear based on the amount of these networks I’ve seen (admittedly little) that Fox News and its other network concentrate almost all their wrath on blue states and the urban scene. I don’t recall ever seeing a segment as to how states like Kansas and Utah are all that’s wrong with America. It is always on the segments of the country that the lion’s share of their base isn’t in. They may be headquartered in New York but they don’t give a damn how many people there watch it.
Now I have seen just as many examples of leftist articles over the last decade and its always based on attacking the red states. States like Wyoming and Montana should not have as many Senators as California, Mississippi and Idaho have the most restricted rights of freedom in America, people in red states die earlier then people in blue states. Do they really think that even if they put up a network that had the same power as Fox News it could reach as many people in the same states they’ve spent decades looking down on? When David Brooks points out that 2500 regions of the country voted for Trump in 2020 and the counterargument from Slate is that ‘nobody lives in those regions’, does that sound like the kind of argument that will win them over?
Of course not. Because the left is not the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has to build coalitions, reach across the aisle and compromise in order to get things done. The Democratic Party knows that as a national party they have to be competitive to all of the country, not just the parts that will always vote for them.
As you know if you’ve read enough articles by leftists that the other reason this would fail: the pure leftist vision is that both parties has always been are equally horrible. The Republican Party is trying to destroy America every day and every way, but the Democratic Party is just as horrible because…well, basically it won’t do everything the left tells it to do. Hell, now they’re writing whole books arguing that to even push back against the left is wrong. Can you imagine what would happen if they had a 24 hour propaganda machine pushing this idea?
I’ve seen in far too many articles over the years, justifying intolerance by saying it’s okay to hate people because they believe different things then you do. I imagine the ideal leftist network would devote at least half its programming urging people not to vote because it’s a waste of time and the rest of it complaining that all the Democrats in Congress are DINOS.
I’ll admit its pretty hard to imagine the political landscape being worse than its been the last twenty years, but I am certain the leftist equivalent of Fox News would make that possible. I can see the left-wing equivalents of Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck using their time telling Democrats not to bother to compromise with the Republicans when they were in power. (Not much imagination is necessary; many of them think Clinton and Obama failed because they did just that or even tried too.) This network would argue for its viewers to turn against any supposed program like universal health care unless it included everything possible and when it couldn’t, they would be denouncing Obama as early as 2010 and demanding a primary challenger — if they didn’t do so earlier because he did not completely withdraw all forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and close Guantanamo in his first 100 days. They might very well have turned on him faster than the right did, though it’s hard to imagine. (Not impossible.)
Then they would begin berating any major political candidate who ran for national or Congressional office as being too ‘moderate’. Red State Democrats like Claire McCaskill and Mark Begich would be berated for not being progressive enough and end up facing primaries to opponents further on the left who, even if they won, would just push their agenda to the Senate and make compromise even harder. (Not much of a leap; we’ve seen how little they thought of Joe Manchin the last four years.) Perhaps they might be able to win some minds over in the rural areas but that’s unlikely given the leftist position on so many of the values that are held in red states as well as the fact that they’ve never understood that what plays in California and Massachusetts doesn’t necessarily play in Nebraska or Louisiana. And given that they have always held disdain for not merely the people in red states but the institutions that they all hold dear too, it’s hard to imagine they would win friends that way either. I can’t imagine their interpretation of Hilary’s ‘basket of deplorables’ going over better with people in those states even if there had been a leftist news network to explain to their viewers in those states: “She didn’t mean you!” (Which to be clear would have been hard to sell considering that they now argue that not only was Hilary right all along but the mainstream media was wrong to spend so much time covering that remark in 2016.)
But of course Hilary would never make the cut with the left anyway because she didn’t the first time around. The leftist network would put all of his time and energy making Sanders the cause, arguing that every time he lost a primary the system was ‘rigged’. They wouldn’t cover Trump at all, of course, but they’d barely cover Hilary and only when she screwed up. It would be Bernie all the way to the convention and even after he conceded and urged his supporters to endorse Clinton — there would be someone on the network urged them to vote for Jill Stein. Probably they’d have Ralph Nader as a full-time correspondent. And when Trump won, there might be some dismay but their correspondents would all shrug and say: “America got the white supremacist President it deserved.”
Then they’d start running programs to their viewers about countries that had better place to live in and their correspondents would start moving to Canada or Europe — where I have little doubt they’d establish foreign offices and start running segments called: “America Under A Dictatorship” and then have ‘foreign correspondents show those who were suffering the most — the people in New York and California or ‘Real Americans’ as they’d no doubt put it.
Which is also why they’d never be able to build up much steam for their ‘platform’ among the rural voters: when you’ve spend decades calling them ignorant at best and Nazis in all but name at worst, getting them to watch your network would be a hard sell particularly considering that it would probably be a requirement they be mentioned at least once an hour.
And this is all before you get to the fact that, at the end of the day, the true leftist has never had any more use for democracy then the conservative does. They’ve made a lot of hay and money over the last twenty years arguing with every fiber of their being that the Republican Party and the conservative base has been driving the world either backwards or holding it in place — both of which are anathema to a movement that believes in full speed ahead.
They have a point. But what they haven’t been able to accept in more than two centuries is that being morally right is meaningless in a democracy if you don’t take into account either the political or economic realities of the entire country, not just your segment of it or your followers.
I can’t see them realizing their idealistic state with the help of a twenty-four hour news network for a very simple reason: in all my years of listening to them or reading their articles, the left can tell you in great detail what is broken in our society and whose broken it. When it comes to realizing their goals — which are noble ones — they have been historically silent as to the how.
And for all the things you can say about conservative media, they’ve always had a simple message as to why things are bad and who’s to blame for it. Where they differ from the left is that their solution has always been simple: vote Republican. The left won’t even go so far as to say to vote, much less vote Democrat. The far right in America have no use for democracy and have increasingly embraced dictatorship. The far left have no use for democracy…and as far as they’re concerned all other forms of government are part of the same rancid package. Setting everything else aside, the fact that the left has decided that the only representative democracy in the Middle East is, for all intents and purposes, as bad or worse than all the fundamentalism regimes in that region of the world speaks volumes as to what they really think of democracy for anybody else.
The leftists has never liked that has been as small a part of the Democratic Party as compared to how the conservatives have taken over the GOP. I imagine this desire for a leftist — not a Democratic — run cable network is why these lines were written. That this network would serve as the ideological utopia they crave throughout the world — and the inverse equivalent of everything they loathe — is the point. It is not a desire for their principles as to increase their own echo chamber.
And that’s the biggest problem with the whole idea. The left’s argument as to why so many voters end up embracing the Republican agenda is not they actually believe this but because they have been brainwashed by the right. This mythical leftist network argues not only that these same potential viewer could just as easily be brainwashed by the left, insulting them twice over. They’re both dumb enough to fall for the ‘wrong’ argument but somehow smart enough to understand the ‘right’ one.
At the end of the day the left’s desire for their own cable network is not so much because they believe it would have made a difference between the partisan divide today but so it could provide their own echo chamber. Their own messaging makes it clear in articles not related to the media that’s what they truly want. They believe it is the mainstream medias job to spend every single moment of every single day spouting the leftist message (not necessarily that of the Democratic Party, but theirs) calling the Republican Party evil incarnate and doing everything in their power to make their agenda the only one presented. They don’t pretend that this would win over the Republican base, who they consider brainwashed because of their exposure to right wing media and Republican politicians. And just to be clear even when CNN or other publications do exactly those things they receive no credit from the left because in their minds it’s the bare minimum and they should receive credit for doing what they know is right.
At their core, this shows that the extreme left is no different then the extreme right because they want the exact same thing: their own separate bubble where nothing can penetrate their reality and they don’t have to listen to a single alternative message or opposing viewpoint. A mythical cable network spouting the agenda of the left would do nothing to solve the problems we face in this election. All it might have done was make them come to a head far sooner than they have. And given the attitude so many on the left have, that might be the whole point.