Masks A-Slipping: "People's Climate Rally" Just Happens to Feature a Lot of Communists and Socialists

Zombie does another undercover photo expose at PJ Media.

Media Matters complained -- they always try to claim the media is conservatively biased -- that the media hadn't given much coverage to this event.

I agree. I join their complaint.

But for different reasons.

The media does not pass over coverage of the most over-the-moon leftist gatherings in order to suppress the left. They pass over them to protect the center-left Democrat-Media consensus political position.

It does have the effect of not giving play to communists, anarchists, and so on.

But their intent is to boost another element of the Coalition of the Left, not to boost the right.

As I wrote before:

Manufacturing Consent: I think Noam Chomskey hit upon this idea, and there's something to it.

Suppose there are five possible plausible public reactions to an event or initiative. A, B, C, D, and E, ranging from rightist to leftist, and A and E representing the extremes.

Media debate tends to package C and D -- C, a centrist reaction, and D, a left-center but still mainstream-ish reaction -- as the only two possible reactions, and debates the issue without reference to A, B, and E, as if they don't exist, or, if they do mention them, they are dismissed peremptorily as extremist and wack-a-doo and "not serious."

Thus, at the end of the day, the public does get to "choose"... but only from the two options the media has pre-screened as permissible, C and D. Thus, consent of the governed has been "manufactured" -- sure, the public chooses between C and D, but their choice was forced -- as a magician forces a card on you -- by a media that carefully insulated them from genuine consideration of A, B, and E.

(Now-- Chomsky certainly did not use this idea to argue for media bias from the left! Quite the opposite-- he claimed we were always discussing only two possibilities, like "full support for corporate power" and "90% support for corporate power;" he claimed the media biased the discussion towards two possibilities, one on the right, and one on the further right.

In other words -- he was annoyed that "E" wasn't under active discussion, which is to say, full-blown communism.

Of course it is abject nonsense that the media censors ideas on the left*-- but his theory makes perfect sense when you adjust it to say the two allowable modes of thought are center-left and a little-farther-left-than-center-left.)

So, that's what we have going on. We are allowed two permissible storylines -- Obama's not emoting enough, or Obama's emoting just enough -- and the MFM won't entertain other storylines, like, "This has nothing at all to do with emoting, but rather to do with reality and real-world achievements."

* To some extent, he is right: The media doesn't like talking about communists, and will swear on a stack of Bibles that, for example, Obama is not socialist at all, not even a little bit.

But they do that not to thwart communism, but because they, unlike true-believer Chomsky, understand that communism will not sell in America and if the liberal Democrats are seen to be in basic agreement with communists, or at least count them as allies, it will badly damage the center-left's ability to get its agenda into operation.

Politco noted in its humanizing piece on Lois Lerner that she had been the victim of uncivil language from a Random Anonymous Internet Troll, who'd called her a "dirty Jew." This tends, of course, to discredit her critics. Such language always discredits the speaker (and anyone who can be associated with it).

So it's interesting that Politico didn't give any coverage to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, as a scion of Kennedy political dynasty and major player on the organizing/institution left, is certainly a more important figure than Random Anonymous Internet Troll #64,327,891.

Charles C.W. Cooke discussed his curiously vigorously pro-jail-all-dissenters position.

Blissfully unaware of how hot the irony burned, Robert Kennedy Jr. yesterday took to a public protest to rail avidly in favor of censorship. The United States government, Kennedy lamented in an interview with Climate Depot, is not permitted by law to "punish" or to imprison those who disagree with him -- and this, he proposed, is a problem of existential proportions. Were he to have his way, Kennedy admitted, he would cheer the prosecution of a host of "treasonous" figures -- among them a number of unspecified "politicians"; those betes noires of the global Left, Kansas's own Koch Brothers; "the oil industry and the Republican echo chamber"; and, for good measure, anybody else whose estimation of the threat posed by fossil fuels has provoked them into "selling out the public trust." Those who contend that global warming "does not exist," Kennedy claimed, are guilty of "a criminal offense -- and they ought to be serving time for it."

These quotes certainly are interesting, novel, pungent, and uttered by an important political figure.

They are also grossly illiberal, palpably authoritarian, darkly populist (the populism of vengeance, resentment, force, and persecution), and scarifying.

They are, in short, newsworthy as hell.

So why aren't they being reported?

They're not being reported because the media understands that these remarks are toxic, and they do not want the Left associated with such speech.

So they simply embargo them.

Remember, when Sarah Palin uttered a fairly conventional cliche -- that certain political attacks constituted a "blood libel" -- the media was fairly frantic in reporting this and attacking her for, per their claim, attempting to use the Holocaust for her own political benefit. (I cannot express how stupid and tendentious this claim is.)

So the media doesn't have a general aversion to reporting what they see as out-of-bounds, politically-harmful remarks.

But they do seem to have one as regards their precious Democrat Party.

But they strive their earnest best to be objective and to treat both sides the same way.

Just ask them. They'll tell you.

Hypothetical: From Malamutt:

Now, imagine if Rush Limbaugh had said what RFK Jr. had said except about gun rights?

posted by Ace at 12:12 PM

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