Does The Media Have a Domestic Violence Problem?

Well played.

It's actually a good question. This isn't about domestic abuse, actually -- no one actually defends domestic abuse -- but the media's interest in connecting individual misdeeds to a "culture of corruption" for some industries, but not others.

And never their own, certainly.

This isn't my bag -- I don't agree with many conservatives that the media has been in a feeding frenzy over the NFL (but that could just be because I stopped watching the media long ago, so I wouldn't know!) -- but it's a good point.

Pushback against the media on this point is not over whether domestic violence is bad -- it is said to be bad, without reservation, by everyone -- nor whether the NFL did the right thing here -- virtually everyone agrees that the NFL behaved shabbily.

The complaint lodged is the one I heard Rush Limbaugh making last week -- whether or not the media sees itself as having a priority of creating disruption in other institutions which compete for the public's affection, specifically, those which are not themselves left-leaning.*

The media never suggests that one man's failings are the fault of a left-leaning institution in general -- for example, the media all but refused to report that Bob Filner's, the grabby-handed mayor of San Diego, was in fact a Nancy Pelosi wingman and high-seniority Congressman in DC for 20 years before becoming Mayor of SD.

Filthy Filner's various gropings were Just One Man's failings -- and definitely no fault of the Congressional Democrats or the Progressive Caucus for failing to investigate the whispers about Filner.

However, when an institution is right-leaning -- or simply not left-leaning -- the media goes into attack mode to degrade it (as Obama might say), to humble it, to disrupt it, to bring it down a peg, to bring it to heel -- to show it who's boss, in terms of institutional power.

So Jeffery Lord at the American Spectator had a question -- Have there been any recent domestic-violence charges involving people working for the US legacy media?

The answer may surprise you.

Just kidding, the answer won't surprise you at all.

But of course we have not seen these cases trumpeted out to the world, nor have we seen a flood of ink and a storm of pixels questioning whether or not these people's employers are complicit in their misdeeds.

The Guild protects its own. The Guild has its own interests. The Guild has its own agenda.

The Guild claims it doesn't -- but The Guild claims that because getting as many dupes to trust them implicitly is one of The Guild's highest corporate missions.

* I don't know that I agree with Rush Limbaugh's claim that the media is unnecessarily disrupting a competing institution in this particular case, but the point is generally true, doubtless.

posted by Ace at 03:11 PM

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