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The
old mass media has no pants
(Note: David does a superb job of explaining language deception and Hegelian dialectic. Please consider sharing this with many others.)
November 12, 2004
By David Morgan Editor-at-Large, the Tribune Papers
Asheville / Hendersonville, North Carolina
http://www.AshevilleTribune.com
http://www.HendersonvilleTribune.com "Many
years ago lived an emperor, who thought so much of new clothes that he
spent all his money in order to obtain them; his only ambition was to
be always well dressed. One day, two swindlers came to his city; they
made people believe that they were weavers, and declared they could
manufacture the finest cloth to be imagined. Their colors and
patterns, they said, were not only exceptionally beautiful, but the
clothes made of their material possessed the wonderful quality of
being invisible to any man who was unfit for his office or
unpardonably stupid. "That
must be wonderful cloth," thought the emperor. "If I were to
be dressed in a suit made of this cloth I should be able to find out
which men in my empire were unfit for their places. I must have this
cloth woven for me without delay." And he gave a large sum of
money to the swindlers, in advance, that they should set to work
without any loss of time. They set up two looms, and pretended to be
very hard at work, but they did nothing whatever on the looms." Later
on the emperor sent in one of his ministers to see how things were
going. Naturally the minister could see nothing, but didn't want to
say so for fear he would be seen as being unfit for his office.
Finally, the emperor himself went in to look at the wonderful clothes,
but also could see nothing. "What is this?" thought the
emperor, "I do not see anything at all. Am I stupid? Am I unfit
to be emperor? That would indeed be the most dreadful thing that could
happen to me." "Really,"
he said, turning to the weavers, "your cloth has our most
gracious approval;" and nodding contentedly he looked at the
empty loom, for he did not like to say that he saw nothing. All his
attendants, who were with him, looked and looked, and although they
could not see anything more than the others, they said, like the
emperor, "It is very beautiful." And all advised him to wear
the new magnificent clothes at a great procession, which was soon to
take place. So
the swindlers asked the emperor to undress so that he might try on his
new clothes, which he readily did. "How well they look! How well
they fit!" said all. "What a beautiful pattern! What fine
colors! That is a magnificent suit of clothes!" And then the procession through the streets began. "The chamberlains, who were to carry the train, stretched their hands to the ground as if they lifted up a train, and pretended to hold something in their hands; they did not like people to know that they could not see anything." All who saw him in the street and out of the windows exclaimed: "Indeed, the emperor's new suit is incomparable! What a long train he has! How well it fits him!" Nobody wished to let others know he saw nothing, for then he would have been unfit for his office or too stupid. Never emperor's clothes were more admired. "But
he has nothing on at all," said a little child at last.
"Good heavens! Listen to the voice of an innocent child,"
said the father, and one whispered to the other what the child had
said. "But he has nothing on at all," cried at last the
whole people. That made a deep impression upon the emperor, for it
seemed to him that they were right; but he thought to himself,
"Now I must bear up to the end."
And
now the increasingly irrelevant mass media is determined to "bear
up to the end." After
the results of this recent election became final, it became obvious to
many that the real loser in the election was the old mass media. The
mass media threw everything it could to twist, spin and pontificate
against George Bush to try to insure his defeat. Never has any
presidential candidate gotten more favorable coverage than John Kerry
received. But it didn't work. The media were running around without
any pants on, puffed up with their own self-importance, thinking that
no one would notice. They became sharply visible while their agendized
messages became more and more invisible. And in the process, the
Weapons of Mass Media fizzled. But
they are determined to continue on their same course. Maureen
Dowd lashed out in The New York Times on November 4 that
"W. ran a jihad in America...drawing a devoted flock of
evangelicals, or 'values voters,' as they call themselves, to the
polls by opposing abortion, suffocating stem cell research and
supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage."
In the same edition Thomas Friedman spews out, "Is it
(America) a country that does not intrude into the marriage unions
people want to make? Is it a country that allows a woman to have
control over their bodies? Is it a country where religion doesn't
trump science?" And
again in the same paper, Garry Wills writes," Can a people that
believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be
called an Enlightened nation?" Joy
Franklin in The Asheville Citizen Times declared that what
determined the outcome of this election was, "none of the things
that are so incredibly important to our future as a nation -- things
it seems to me government ought to be focused on..." Chris
Matthews of Hardball fame said that the media needs to send
"foreign correspondents" out into the red states to see what
is going on. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN don't have a clue. They just don't get
it. They are all wearing no pants. They
have been PC'd [politically corrected] to the point that they are
no longer relevant. PC-ness removed their pants. Political correctness
is not interested in the truth, only in feelings and in controlling
the thoughts of people. The mass media has become a great source of
'lifestyle' information -- how to peel an apple so that you don't cut
your hand, how to make a prison more comfortable for terrorists -- but
it can no longer deal honestly with the truth. And that is because it
is unable to recognize that truth exists at all. This insidious
thought process has slowly evolved over the last century. What
is now clear is that there is a great cultural war going on in the
world today. It is a war between the Judeo-Christian culture, the left
wing secular Hegelian humanists, and the hard right Islamic
terrorists. The left wing secularists now control the old mass media,
which is completely submerged in post-modernist thought. As
opposed to modernists who believed that the rational pursuit of truth
could reveal new facts that could provide roads to new horizons, post
modernists do not believe in truths, certainly not in absolute truths.
Everything is relative. Nothing is absolute. In order for harmony to
exist, truth needs to be 'generated' by consensus, which is usually
helped along by some sort of 'facilitator.' It was the communist
communes who developed the techniques that made this thought process
effective, and if it didn't work you got shipped off to a 'gulag' for
those who disagreed. Consequently,
the very idea of God and Christianity with its beliefs in the
Scriptures and the Ten Commandments is pure anathema to the old-style
mass media. Humankind is answerable only to humankind and humankind is
omnipotent. Men and women are the same, gay marriage is the same as
heterosexual marriage, good and evil don't really exist -- they are
simply relative -- the American military is the same as the
terrorists, etc. There is no truth to the connection between the fact
that the Supreme Court once was in agreement that a slave was only
3/5th of a person and was a piece of property, and the fact that the
Supreme Court now holds that a fetus is not a person at all and is
also only a piece of property. A cell is a cell is a cell. And we can
do with them as we decide. Morality is what they say it is. [They say that] anyone who thinks anything else is just stupid. The old mass media's hostility to the idea of God, Scriptures or any sort of absolute values, dominates their thoughts and actions. [F]or a long time, "Nobody wished to let others know he saw nothing, for then he would have been unfit for his office or too stupid. Never emperor's clothes were more admired." But thanks to the new media -- the Internet, a few weekly newspapers, Fox News, some AM talk show hosts, and the bloggers -- the whole people was able to cry out, "But he has nothing on at all!"
Copyright 2004, the Tribune Papers.
http://www.AshevilleTribune.com
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