Thursday, April 10, 2014

Complaisant (Complicit) Media

com·plai·sant
Obama Gets to Take it Easy
With the Complaisant Media
kəmˈplāsənt/
adjective
adjective: complaisant
  1. 1.
    willing to please others; obliging; agreeable.
    "when unharnessed, Northern dogs are peaceful and complaisant"


The Mainstream Media has been described as accommodating or fawning of President Obama.

Complaisant would be a good word, too. The media is complaisant, and complicit, seeking to make Obama look good, to give in and give out the feel-good narrative that the first biracial President has been nothing but a good for this country.

President Obama's administration induced so much cheer-leading from the press, that responding affiliates are not backing away from exposing the faults, failures, corruptions of this President and His Democratic, liberal, Big Government attending staff, acolytes, and entourage.

Every time Bush slipped a word in his speeches or tripped, the media would pounce on those mistakes. President Obama has greeted supporters in the wrong state, has claimed that there were fifty-seven states in the union (maybe there will be if the secession movements in Maryland and California succeed). He also misspelled "Respect" at a musical event celebrating Aretha Franklin. And who can forget the "Get bitter, cling to their guns and Bibles" arrogant elitism he casually shared in San Francisco?

Instead of investigating his background, liberal pundits like Chris Matthews got all kinds of excited about this candidate. Donna Brazile crowed "We have an African!" for President (I thought that the Unite States was a post-racial society?). Reporters spent more time asking the President's feelings about becoming the first black President in US History. What kind of President was he going to be? Shouldn't the Mainstream Media have judged Obama by the content of his character as opposed to the color of his skin.

By the way, then doesn't the media's over-attention to Obama's race make them. . .racist?

The left-leaning bias of the press cannot be ignored. Even ordinary people on the street recognize that the press has turned into a propaganda machine for President Obama.

When the Department of Justice was implicated in seizing the phone records of AP reporters, even then MSNBC and other news affiliates slapped the President on the wrist. Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, and Ed Schultz continue to carry water for this President, as if everything he does is righteousness or easily absolved because he means well.

The second part, means well, means a lot to the press and liberal elites, whose commitment to a Big Government world view is too entrenched for them to shake or even question.

Conservative Jewish columnist Dennis Prager lamented the new false religion of environmentalism, where the belief system is more important than the facts. Prager listed two pages worth of dire warnings debunked in the last few years, but like the ancient mariners convinced that the world is round, the ideology of the left, whether in the environment, or unions, or statist interventions in the economy, will not be questioned.

The media overwhelm has contributed to this all too much, removing credible dissent and silencing debate on the issues of the day.

So, not just the content, but the context of most arguments in the press have created a complaisant veneer around President Obama. As long as the spokesmen for the day's events offers no suitable counterargument, no one should be surprised to see a complacent electorate, one which buys the "mainstream" line.

At least alternative websites such as Breitbart, Daily Caller, and even Townhall burst through the one-sided agenda.

But shouldn't the news be objective?

That standard hardly existed during the American Revolution and shortly afterwards. Newspapers were blatantly partisan, advocating one political party vs. another. With the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps, the notion that news could be completely objective emerged.

That argument does not justify that news can be fully objective, however, nor should we resign ourselves to believing that all news, all evidence, all reporting is so hopelessly biased that we can never know the truth about anything which has occurred.

AS long as alternative media sources continue to report the stories which corporate affiliates insist  on ignoring, downplaying, or distorting, then the American public can expect a healthier discourse to return, one which does not permit a final, printed media authority to dictate what is happening, what we should think about it, or how to reflect on it.

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