The War, The Times, and Sinking Democrat Prospects

Commentary by Greg Lewis / NewMediaJournal.US
March 30, 2006

Reading The New York Times is a lot like buying a watch on the corner of 42nd Street: That's not a real Rolex, and that's not real journalism.

The New York Times, throwing journalistic integrity to the winds, can no longer lay claim to producing and distributing real journalism; rather, what issues forth from the pages of the Times is a commodity that closely resembles journalism, a product that juggles the positions of a large number of hard-left interest groups and political power brokers in the ongoing refinement of its highly focused anti-American message.

Of course, the Times is but one of many left-leaning newspapers and other media outlets that continue to insist that their product is unbiased, but it is certainly the flagship of leftist "reportage." To get down to cases: During the past two weeks, the paper has committed several egregious errors and omissions, all patently the result of its leftist-agenda-driven editorial proclivities. Among others, the Times failed to report on the complaint of Gayle Taylor, the wife of a soldier who recently returned from Iraq, that "It seems that our major media networks don't want to portray the good." The question, posed during President Bush's recent Wheeling, West Virginia, appearance, was interrupted by spontaneous applause, which rose to a standing ovation, by the crowd attending the President's speech.

While there are any number of similar incidents you can discover — just google "Bush negative" — the bottom line is in fact somewhat more complex than simply pointing out that left-leaning information sources such as The New York Times and the Washington Post and the big-three network news programs, among many others, are arguably corrupt, that they perceive the world through such skewed political filters that nothing they touch remains clean for long. It's not as simple as cautioning Americans to discount what they hear, see, and read from these media so as to counter a leftist bias that beggars the term "inbreeding."

There are also consequences for the Left in this trend. First, so much of the information that issues from the polling that takes place nowadays is inherently and uncorrectably skewed toward the Left. That's because these polls are but one component of an electronic feedback loop that automatically contains a leftist bias. When pollsters ask a sampling of Americans a question, the answers they receive do not necessarily reflect what the respondents feel or believe in their hearts; rather, poll respondents' answers almost always reflect the left-biased information they receive from the mainstream media.

This phenomenon is so deeply ingrained in the very polling process itself that there results a kind of automatic left skew. The polls in general reflect not what Americans believe, but rather what they have been convinced is the case by the incessant bombardment of left-biased information to which they've been subjected compliments of the "mainstream" media.

Democrats, being poll-driven lemmings at their core, are more than ready to believe what the polls are saying. They love to hear that Bush's numbers are down, that Americans disapprove of the way the war in Iraq is going, that the American public thinks the economy is tanking. Another way to say this is: The only way Democrats stand a snowball's chance in Haiti of making significant gains in the upcoming mid-term election is if they can convince all of us Americans that we need to make handbasket reservations post haste.

While Bush's numbers are indeed down, this reflects more the relentless assault on his Presidency that has been waged by Democrats in cahoots with mainstream media outlets over the past several months than it does any genuine trend among the American public at large. Since the only thing you hear via mainstream media venues is that Bush is "incompetent" (the Democrat message du jour for the fortnight or so ending about ten days ago), that's what you may well be convinced is the case and what you might well feed back to a pollster should you be called on to respond.

Ditto the economy, which, in case you hadn't heard (that is to say, in case the only news outlets you've been exposed to lately are left-leaning mainstream ones) is perking along at a wonderful pace, with annual economic growth in the 3.4% range and joblessness under 5% nationally. Since it's very, very difficult to find any so-called mainstream media who are willing to get within miles of this good news, you've likely not heard it, and if you're called on to say how the economy is doing, you're probably going to regurgitate the party line.

I'm referring, of course, to the communist party line. Given that leftist Democrats won't be happy until they've toppled capitalism and installed in its place a managed economy along the lines of that in, say, Cuba, and given that The New York Times and its leftist cohorts are complicit in this political charade, and given that the only way they stand a chance of gaining seats in the upcoming mid-term elections is if they're able to deliver a message projecting a bleak future for America, Democrats are more than happy if you receive only tainted and inaccurate news about the economy.

All of this is another way of saying that Democrats, who take poll results on faith, are in for a rude awakening this November. Dems are suspiciously willing to buy into the current polling data; they're more than ready to take Bush's negative numbers as a sign that their agenda (I should say "their non-agenda") is connecting with the American people. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The end result will be, as it has been in the past, that Democrats, living as they do in what amounts to a self-fulfilling information cocoon, and relying as they do on managed electronic feedback loops that reflect back to them the very interpretations of events they have managed to present to the world through media venues sympathetic to their ideology...the end result will be — in down-to-earth terms — that the Democrats will once again fall victim to their own guile, their own willingness to buy into what the polls, erroneously in this case, seem to be telling them.

Which is to say that the Democrats will once again be misled into thinking that they're on the right track. Their willingness to interpret President Bush's tanking poll numbers as indicators that they themselves are on the rise will be their undoing. They're believing their own polls, and they're not discounting the results of those polls to take into account the ineluctable skew inherent in the numbers.

The bottom line is that Democrats, and leftists at large, are going to be left shaking their heads and wringing their hands over the 2006 mid-term election results. Republicans will retain their majorities in both the House and Senate, and Dems will emerge from the rubble of their debacle of a campaign based on attacking their Republican counterparts on such issues as the Iraq War and national security with that what-the-hell-just-happened look on their faces, no more capable of comprehending that the American people don't countenance defeatism and withdrawal and pessimism than they were in the run-up to the election.

Democrats, once again evincing an uncanny inability to look beyond their blinding leftist ideology, will once again misread the American public, with the result that they'll continue to be on the outside looking in. And perhaps that's not such a bad thing. Given that they're unable to propose a positive program of their own to supplant what Republicans have implemented, perhaps it's just as well that we, the American majority, continue to regard them as a necessary evil, as a political party which, while we no longer need to take their ideas seriously, nonetheless serves to remind us of what we need to focus on. At the very least, this outcome gives Democrats a reason to continue to exist.